and I am inclined to think that there are varieties of glory in its phenomena which would make it worth even your metropolitan while to come to the west and ‘burn fallow.’ At this season of the year—after the autumn droughts, that is to say—the whole country here is covered with a thin smoke, stealing up from the fires on every hill, in the depths of the woods, and on the banks of the river; and what with the graceful smoke-wreaths by day, and the blazing heavens all around the horizon by night, it adds much to the variety, and I think, more to the beauty of our western October. It edifies the traveller who has bought wood by the pound in Paris, or stiffened for the want of it in the disforested Orient, to stand off a rifle-shot from a crackling wood, and toast himself by a thousand cords burnt for the riddance. What experience I have had of these holocausts on my own land, has not diminished the sense of waste and wealth with which I first watched them. Paddy’s dream of ‘rolling in a bin of gould guineas,’ could scarcely have seemed more luxurious. “Bartlett and I, and the rest of us, in our small way, burnt up enough, I dare say, to have made a comfortable drawing-room of Hyde Park in January, and the effects of the white light upon the trees above and around were glorious. But our fires were piles of logs and brush—small beer of course to the conflagration of a forest. I have seen one that was like the Thousand Columns of Constantinople, ignited to a red heat, and covered with carbuncles and tongues of flame. It was a temple of fire—the floor living coals—the roof a heaving drapery of crimson—the aisles held up by blazing and innumerable pillars, and sometimes swept by the wind till they stood in still and naked redness, while the eye could see far into their depths, and again covered and wreathed and laved in ever-changing billows of flame. We want an American Tempesta or ‘Savage Rosa’ to ‘wreak’ such pictures on canvass; and perhaps the first step to it would be the painting of the foliage of an American Autumn.” [Illustration] VIEW NEAR ANTHONY’S NOSE, HUDSON HIGHLANDS. * * * * * This mountain, “known to fame,” serves as a landmark to the industrious craft plying upon the Hudson, and thus fulfils a more useful destiny than is commonly awarded to spots bright in story. It stands amid a host of interesting localities, marked with the events of the Revolution, and has witnessed, with less damage than other noses, many a conflict by land and water.