The great number of these individual homes, as indicating the manner of life of multitudes of the working classes in provincial towns, seemed to me to mark a conspicuous absence of crowded tenement living; and on its positive side to indicate at least the possibility of wholesome family life and of much home comfort. Certainly my experience at Highland Falls and at Middletown confirms this impression. In each of those cases the people with whom I stayed owned their home and the plot of land about it, which contributed thriftily toward the family support. The houses were ephemeral wooden cottages, done in the degrading ugliness inspired by the Queen Anne revival, and furnished in a taste even more florid, and they were not overclean. And yet they were comfortable homes, in which we fared handsomely, eating meat three times a day, and varieties of vegetables and admirable home-made bread, and knew no stint of sugar or butter, and slept in good beds in not too crowded rooms in an upper story. All about me here, and reaching down the long vistas of communicating streets, were the same external conditions, until I entered the closely built up "brick blocks" of the business quarter of the town. I could but think how characteristic of our smaller cities is this separate individual home-life of the wage-earning classes, and how increasingly are the improved means of transportation rendering like surroundings possible for the workmen of the larger towns. Having crossed the Delaware River, about four o'clock I began a walk through a region no less beautiful than that through which I had passed in the morning. My way lay in the valley, directly under the steep hills that wall it in on the north. Their densely wooded sides cast deep shadows obliquely across the road, and in this grateful shade I walked on, listening to the songs of birds and the murmur of mountain-streams, and the cooling sound of spray splashing from ledge to ledge of moss-grown rocks. At sunset I entered the village of Milford, which nestles securely at the foot of the mountains of Pike County, a beautiful village of wide, well-shaded streets, where there was little to mar the elegant simplicity of dignified country homes, untouched by harrowing attempts at the fantastic. By eight o'clock I was fast asleep in a workmen's boarding-house, and at sunrise on the next morning I was on the road which turns sharply up the mountain-side. A dense mist lay upon the valley, but my way soon led me up to the freer air, until, upon the summit of a ridge, I reached the clear sunshine, and could see the emerging ranges of hills to the east and south and the white mist resting motionless on the valley below. Up and up I climbed into higher altitudes. Each elevation appeared, as I approached it, the topmost crest of the mountain, and yet I gained it only to find another rough steep beyond.