After leave-takings as sad as funerals, the emigrants sorrowfully yet hopefully set forth. Slowly the beloved landmarks of the mountains sank as the miles lengthened behind them, and slowly unfolded before them level lands and sluggish streams. The earlier stages of the journey were relieved by trivial incidents, and the new experience of gypsy-like nightly encampment by the wayside; but as day after day and week after week passed, the new and unfamiliar scenes, still stranger and less homelike, grew wearisome to the tired men and jaded, homesick women and children, and incident became a monotonous round of discomfort. In 1825 a swifter and easier path was opened to the West when, two years after the Champlain Canal had connected the waters of Lake Champlain and the Hudson, the Erie Canal was completed. The new thoroughfare was thronged with emigrants, of whom Vermont furnished her full share of families, and of enterprising young men seeking to better their fortunes in the land of plenty known there in common speech as "The 'Hio," or in that farther region of prairies whose western bound was the golden sunset, and where they whose plough had turned no virgin soil till the axe had first cleared its path should behold the miracle of fertile plains that had never been shadowed by forest. When the long journey was accomplished, a quarter of the continent lay between them and the old home; and though they lived out the allotted days of man, the separation of kindred and friends was often as final as that of death. Mails were weeks in making the passage that is now accomplished in a few days; and the grass might be green on the graves of kindred and friends in the old or the new home before tidings of their death brought a new and sudden grief from the distant prairie, or from the New England hillside, where its pain had already grown dull with accustomed loss. The course of emigration tended westward nearly within the parallels of latitude that bound New England, and but few pioneers of Vermont birth diverged much below the southward limit of a region whose climate, kindred, emigrants, and familiar institutions, transplanted from the East, most attracted them. The fertile lands of Ohio were chosen by many, while more were drawn to Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, in all of whom Vermonters took their place as founders of homes and free commonwealths, and gave each some worthy characteristic of that from which they came. When gold was discovered in California, many Vermonters flocked thither in quest of fortune, and many remained there to become life-long citizens of the State in whose marvelous growth they were a part. From their inauguration, the great railroad systems of the West have made another and continuous drain upon the best population of the East; and in every department of the enormous business men of Vermont birth and training are found conspicuously honored for their ability and integrity.