I cannot understand, how those who reside in the city and who escape for a weeks in summer from the dust, and din, and heat, and ceaseless cares that assail them amid the scenes of their daily occupation, can from choice fly for recreation to other cities, or to fashionable watering places, where they are sure to encounter all the inconveniences they have left behind, with scarcely any of their home comforts. To me it would seem infinitely more desirable to seek "a lodge in some vast wilderness--some boundless contiguity of shade." Indeed I must say, I very much prefer a wholly rural district, to the most picturesque country village, in which to spend the few weeks during which I am to seek to recruit my health, and prepare for the duties and labors that await me on my return to the city. In such a situation one has not to make a constant effort to be agreeable. You can sit down and vegetate for a while, without being called upon to make any intellectual exertion whatever. Here one can sit or walk, wake or sleep, lounge or ride, as he chooses; he can read or write, or stroll forth amid the quiet fields, or sit beneath the shade of some wide-spreading tree. There is much in such a scene to hush all stormy passions to repose--to tranquilize one's existence, and to lift up the heart in devout aspirations to God. My location for a few weeks is in just such a rural district near the banks of Seneca Lake, a beautiful expanse of water, of which I will tell you more hereafter. Around me are scattered farm-houses and orchards, and smiling fields, interspersed here and there with remaining fragments of that once mighty forest, that in the early history of this country waved in unbroken majesty from the shores of one lake to another. Here we see all the beauty of dark, deep, American foliage, and all the light, glowing brightness of American verdure, so strikingly in contrast with the English. On every side of me, I see from the window where I sit writing, the busy scenes of the hay harvest--the mowers swinging their scythes or pausing for a moment to whet the shining steel--the young lads, full of the life and spring of joyous youth, spreading the new mown grass--the rakers gathering up the hay into winnows, or rolling it into heaps; and the loaded wains creaking under the burthen of the fragrant products of the meadow, slowly moving towards the barn or the rising stack. I look across to another field, and there waves in silent beauty the newly tasselled corn; while in a third, I see the golden headed wheat, gently nodding in the breeze, or bowing before the keen stroke of the cradler, or the more slow, but no less sure onward movement of the reaper. Above this rural scene spreads a cloudless canopy, and upon it the great luminary of day is pouring a flood of brightness. The sky, however, is not always cloudless here--the heavens not always serene--nor the day always bright, as I shall have occasion to relate to you before finishing these sketches.