Immediately opposite "Placentia," at West Park on the west bank, is the home of John Burroughs, our sweetest essayist, the nineteenth century's "White of Selborne." Judge Barnard of Poughkeepsie, once said to the author of this handbook, "The best writer America has produced after Hawthorne is John Burroughs; I wish I could see him." It so happened that there had been an important "bank" suit a day or two previous in Poughkeepsie which was tried before the judge in which Mr. Burroughs had appeared as an important witness. The judge was reminded of this fact when he remarked with a few emphatic words, the absence of which seems to materially weaken the sentence: "Was that Burroughs? Well, well, I wish I had known it." * * * How soothing is this solitude With nature in her wildest mood, Where Hudson deep, majestic, wide, Pours to the sea his monarch tide. _William Wilson._ * * * =Mount Hymettus=, overlooking West Park, so named by "the author and naturalist," has indeed been to him a successful hunting-ground for bees and wild honey, and will be long remembered for sweeter stores of honey encombed and presented in enduring type. Washington Irving says of the early poets of Britain that "a spray could not tremble in the breeze, or a leaf rustle to the ground, that was not seen by these delicate observers and wrought up into some beautiful morality." So John Burroughs has studied the Hudson in all its moods, knowing well that it is not to be wooed and won in a single day. How clear this is seen in his articles on "Our River":