When the author of “Winter Sunshine” comes to town, it is over the most perfectly graded track and through the finest scenery about New York. Returning he is carried past Weehawken and the Palisades, through the Jersey Meadows, in and out among the West Shore Highlands, under West Point, and past Newburg factories and Marlborough berry farms. He leaves the train at West Park, mounts a hill through a peach-orchard, crosses a grassy field, and the high-road when he reaches the top, opens a rustic gate, and is at home. From the road, you look down upon the roofs and dormers and chimneys of the house, about half covered with the red and purple foliage of the Virginia creeper. The ground slopes quite steeply, so that the house is two stories high on the side next the road and three on the side toward the river, which winds away between high, wooded banks to the Catskills, twenty miles to the north, and to the Highlands, thirty miles to the south. The slope, in the rear of the house, to the river, is laid out in a grapery and an orchard of apple and peach trees. Between the house and the road the steep hillside is tufted with evergreens and other ornamental trees. At the foot of the hill, the gray roofs of a big ice-house are seen. Squirrels, that have their nests in the sawdust packing, clamber around the walls. Near the house, to the left, there is a substantial store-house, and a carriage-shed and stable. There are two other dwellings on the farm. The country immediately about is all very much alike, nearly half of it in ornamental plantations surrounding neat country houses; the other half, where it is not occupied by rocks, being covered with fruit, or corn, or grass. The opposite shore of the Hudson is of the same character, varied with clumps of timber, villas and farm-houses of the style that was in vogue before the introduction of the so-called Queen Anne mode of building; a few cultivated fields and many wild meadows and out-cropping ridges of slate rock intervening. But the interior country, on the hither-side, back of the railroad which cuts through the slate hills like a hay-knife, is a perfect wilderness--rugged, barren, and uninhabited. A number of little lakes lie behind the first range of hills, the highest of which has been named by Mr. Burroughs Mount Hymettus, because it is a famous place for wild bees and sumac honey. From one of these ponds, an exemplary mountain stream--model of all that a mountain stream should be--makes its way by a series of cascades into the valley, where it forms deep pools, peopled by silvery chub and black bass, brawls over ledges, sparkles in the sun, and sleeps in the shadow, and performs all the recognized and traditional brook “business” to perfection. Its specialty is its bed of black stones and dark green moss, which has gained it its name of Black Creek. At one spot, where it passes under a high bank overhung by hemlocks, it has communicated its dark color to