A rough plan was soon formed. I had saved nearly six dollars. It was Wednesday morning. I would give three days to uninterrupted walk, and by Friday evening I should reach Wilkesbarre. The whole of Saturday, if so much time were needed, could then be given to a search for employment; and the rest of Sunday would put me in trim to begin on Monday morning the work which would provide in a few days for present needs, and furnish a balance with which to begin the tramp once more. At an early hour I was upon the high-road which leads to Port Jervis. The day was a perfect type of the best season of our northern climate, cloudless but for a fleecy embankment behind the purple hills to the north, flooded with a glorious light touched with grateful warmth, and which revealed with articulate distinctness every visible object in the crystal-clear air--an air so pure and cool that it spurred you to your quickest step, and sent bounding through you a glad delight in breath and life. In all the landscape was the richness of color and the vividness of a transfigured world. An early frost had touched the foliage; the leaves of the hickory-trees and elms were rustling crisply at their tips, and the sumach deepened into a crimson that matched the color of its clustered seeds, while the oaks and maples maintained the dark luxuriance of their summer leafage, boastful of a hardihood which would succumb only to the keener cold of the later autumn. Up hill and down dale my road led me, where substantial farm-houses, and enormous barns, and fields of standing corn, and herds of cattle in the pasture-lands, all indicated the necessaries and even the comforts of life in rich abundance, and emphasized the wonder that from such surroundings should come the recruits who ceaselessly throng our crowded towns. A few miles farther on the whole topography of the country changed. I had passed through the village of Otisville and was walking in the direction of Huguenot when my way carried me to a hillside from which I could see the long stretch of a valley, reaching far to the westward, and lined on both sides, with almost artificial regularity, by ranges of hills, which rose sharply from the plain below. Through a break at the north the Delaware flows, and, crossing the plain-like valley, disappears among the southern hills, while the valley itself, in almost unbroken symmetry, reaches on to the west. At the foot of the northern range, and on the eastern bank of the river, is the town of Port Jervis. Its outer streets are the light, airy thoroughfares of the usual American town, faced by small wooden cottages, each with its plot of ground devoted in front to a few square yards of turf, and carefully economized behind the house for the purpose of supporting fruit-trees and providing a vegetable garden.