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