We are looking to the north—your hand rests on the mouldering beams which form a side railing to the bridge, and as your eye is lifted from the deep waters at our feet, where they circle and whirl around the dark and sodden supporters, it is caught by one of the most beautiful waterfalls that ever cooled the summer air with its spray. A little up the stream, it foams and flashes over a solid ledge of rocks like an army of laughing children romping together and running races in the sunshine. Now and then you catch a flash of prismatic color just beginning to weave itself amid the water-drops that are forever flashing up as if to provoke the sunshine into forming a rainbow, and then your attention is drawn away by the wreaths of snowy foam and the thousand dimpling whirlpools that form beneath the fall and melt idly upon the more quiet waters long before they reach the dark shadow flung downward from the bridge. Is not that a magnificent bank stretching along the river’s brink far above the fall?—here, looming up in a broken mass of rocks—there, falling with a gentle slope to the water’s brink, sometimes cut into defiles and hollows by the rivulets that feed the brook, and everywhere covered with the quivering green of spring, the feathery red maple—wild-cherry trees, white with spring blossoms, and whole thickets of starry dog-wood flowers all tangled and luxuriating between sun and water. With what majesty the bank sweeps back at the fall, giving breadth to the valley below and hedging in, with its green rampart, this beautiful little plain with its fine grove which lies on our left, nestled almost entirely within its shadow! Now look down the stream. Follow the bank as it curves inward again, encompassing the rich surface of level ground in a semicircular sweep, till it terminates down the stream yonder, in a pile of rocks and foliage, half hill half mountain. There the river joins it again—winds around the precipice which forms its base, and is lost to sight, as if it terminated amid the dense shadows which lie sleeping there. Did you ever see anything more superb than that lofty pile of rocks and verdure, standing out over the very river, like a glorious old garrison guarding the passage? Its topmost trees are lost in a pile of fleecy clouds—the steep surface is burdened with foliage, and beautifully broken up with lights and shadows. See the sunshine flickering over those massive rocks and kindling with its silvery light the grape-vines that creep among the young trees, rooted in the clefts. A picturesque feature, in our sketch, is that old Castle-rock, and many a holiday have I spent, with a troop of school-mates, amid its clefts, piling up the rich mosses we found there, gathering honey-suckle apples, and sometimes doing terrible execution on the poor garter-snakes that crept harmlessly from their nests to sleep in the sunshine.