While American tourists are delightedly visiting and minutely describing the most hidden recesses of beauty among the mountains, plains, seas, lakes, and rivers of Europe, there are, close within their reach, innumerable spots well worthy of consideration, and hitherto entirely unknown to the great mass of pleasure and scenery seeking travellers. These fair but hidden gems have become of the more importance that the grand struggle convulsing our country has rendered foreign travel difficult, even when advisable, and has roused within our people a love for their own land, a pride in its loveliness, much more rarely felt before the attempt to dismember and ruin it had awakened dormant patriotism and completed the severance between the recent _province_ and the historically renowned mother country. American painters are worthily illustrating American life and landscape; American poets, and no less poetical prose writers, are singing the forests, skies, flowers, and birds of their native land; and the inquisitive traveller should surely not fail to add his humbler mite in the way of discovery and description. The following sketches are founded upon actual observation, and the delineations of scenery and manners therein contained are strictly in accordance with the personal experience of the author. I.--A SUMMER EXCURSION. 'All very well,' said Aunt Sarah; 'I have no doubt the excursion would be charming; but who will accompany you?' 'We do not require an escort; we can take care of each other,' 'Can it be that you, Lucy, a staid married woman of thirty-six, and you, Elsie, a demure young girl of twenty, are suddenly about to enter the ranks of the strong minded?' 'Why, dear aunt,' said Lucy D----, 'you would not have us weak minded, would you? I think I heard you say no longer ago than yesterday that half the domestic miseries in this world were due to the weak nerves and feeble intellects of poorly educated women.' 'True; but the technical expression, 'strong minded,' does not mean strong in mind--rather the contrary.' 'In other words, strong minded means weak minded, is that it, auntie?' laughed Elsie. 'I see, Aunt Sarah,' said Lucy, 'we shall be forced to call upon you for that most difficult of tasks, a definition. What is meant by the term, 'strong-minded woman'?' 'A monster,' replied Mrs. Sarah Grundy, 'who lectures, speaks in public, wants women to vote, to wear men's garments; in a word, one who would like to upset religion, social life, and the world in general.'