Trust a mule for never losing his head when he runs away, as does his
hot-headed relative, the horse; who never once allows surrounding
circumstances to occupy his thoughts to an extent detrimental to his own
self-preservative interests. The Erie Canal mule's first mission in life
is to engender profanity and strife between boatmen and cyclists, and
the second is to work and chew hay, which brings him out about even with
the world all round. At Rome I enter the famous and beautiful Mohawk
Valley, a place long looked forward to with much pleasurable anticipation,
from having heard so often of its natural beauties and its interesting
historical associations. "It's the garden spot of the world; and
travellers who have been all over Europe and everywhere, say there's
nothing in the world to equal the quiet landscape beauty of the Mohawk
Valley," enthusiastically remarks an old gentelman in spectacles, whom
I chance to encounter on the heights east of Herkimer. Of the first
assertion I have nothing to say, having passed through a dozen "garden
spots of the world " on this tour across America; but there is no
gainsaying the fact that the Mohawk Valley, as viewed from this vantage
spot, is wonderfully beautiful. I think it must have been on this spot
that the poet received inspiration to compose the beautiful song that
is sung alike in the quiet homes of the valley itself and in the trapper's
and hunter's tent on the far off Yellowstone - "Fair is the vale where
the Mohawk gently glides, On its clear, shining way to the sea." The
valley ia one of the natural gateways of commerce, for, at Little Falls -
where it contracts to a mere pass between the hills - one can almost throw
a stone across six railway tracks, the Erie Canal and the Mohawk River.
Spending an hour looking over the magnificent Capitol building at Albany,
I cross the Hudson, and proceed to ride eastward between the two tracks
of the Boston & Albany Railroad, finding the riding very fair. From the
elevated road-bed I cast a longing, lingering look down the Hudson Valley,
that stretches away southward like a heaven-born dream, and sigh at the