As a lover of quiet country strolls, I had been happy beyond measure, but the way of the archæologist, it would seem, is beset with thorns. Free for the Day. Free for the day! I scarce need tell the rest: An aimless youth again, and Nature’s guest. If magic lurks in any four words of the queen’s English, it is to be looked for here. Free for the day! Neither in books nor out of them have I met with a phrase more full of meaning, one more comprehensively suggestive. To me, eight weeks in the noisy city had seemed almost a year, and at last came a pause in my occupation and a day to myself. No decision could be reached in a reasonable time by calmly thinking the matter over, so, closing my eyes, I spun myself on one heel, determined to walk a good ten miles in whatever direction I faced when my whirling body came to rest. Fortune favored me, for I found myself looking directly toward the river. This put an end to my walking ten miles in a bee line, for the river was not one mile distant, and, except at a distant point, could not be crossed. With a light heart I made for the river, and, reaching the shore, sat in a cozy nook where driftwood had conveniently lodged. Walking is capital sport at all times, but a comfortable outlook never comes amiss, and resting at the end of one mile is as natural as at the end of a dozen. Thoreau speaks of looking seaward while at Cape Cod and having all America behind him. I took my cue from him, and, looking only down stream and not far beyond, saw only the rippling waters. Every ripple carried its atom of the town dust from my eyes, and in an hour I saw the world again with clear vision. Something of the old self thrilled my veins, but still I was loath to leave so sweet a spot. I had no promise of better things, and, though early February, the wild words of an ancient chronicler came to mind. Wrote a mendacious Englishman in 1648, of this river—the Delaware—that it was “scituate in the best and same temper as Italy,” and goes on to say, it “is freed from the extreme cold and barrennesse of the one [New England] and heat and aguish marshes of the other [Virginia]”; all of which is a (to put it mildly) mistake. And then the romancer adds, the Delaware Valley “is like Lombardy, ... and partaketh of the healthiest aire and most excellent commodities of Europe.” Then follows a bit of nonsense about the wild beasts and agricultural capabilities. Why could not those old travelers be truthful? There is not one but deals in absurdities, and it would appear that they rounded off every paragraph with a flight of the imagination. If his account be true, reindeer and moose, as well as elk and deer, tramped these river shores but three centuries ago, and the buffalo roamed over the Crosswicks meadows. This is extremely improbable. Moose and reindeer bones have been found, it is true, and even traces of the musk-ox, but all goes to show that it was