soil and climate it offered to the settler, and the policy of William Penn to welcome good men without respect to race or religion, drew towards it the attention of the European nations in an especial manner. The Dutch, however, were really on the ground before Penn, and the Swedes even before them; so that when Penn came upon the scene he found a country already in part settled; at least along the course of the Delaware, for a considerable distance. In the first half of the last century a strong German Protestant emigration set in, meeting another steady stream of Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and giving a decided tone to the population of the State.

MR. GOLDUST That old Portage Road of which mention has been made is an interesting relic. I remember traveling over it in 1835. It was a connecting link, thirty-five miles long, between Johnstown on the western side of the Alleghanies, and Hollidaysburg on their eastern slopes. From Hollidaysburg there was a canal to Philadelphia, and from Johnstown there was a canal to Pittsburg. The first scheme to make this important link between east and west was by means of a canal with locks, but the difficulty and expense seemed insuperable. Then this old Portage road was built at a cost of nearly two million dollars. All the bridges were of stone; the rails were imported from England; and the whole was a solid and durable affair.

BERTRAM: Was it a steam road?

MR. GOLDUST: The inclined planes were worked by stationary engines, and the level portions of the road by horses at first, but afterwards by locomotives. There was a new Portage road built in 1856 without any inclined planes, and with two or three long tunnels; but even this was at last abandoned, or sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, who laid out and constructed the present track. Both of these Portage roads are now in ruins; the rails have been removed, and much of the road beds has been broken away by torrents, or obstructed by fallen trees. The tunnels are also unused.

At this stage travel for this evening was suspended, and the proceedings became informal.

CHAPTER XII.

THE SUSQUEHANNA AND DELAWARE RIVERS.

HE sixth evening was spent at the house of Mr. Goldust, and after the transaction of the usual routine business, Miss Laura Smith was invited to lead the club in a Conversational Tour through portions of the Susquehanna and Delaware Valleys.

LAURA (reading from notes): The river Susquehanna, from the Indian, signifying "Crooked River," is a noble stream, four hundred miles in length, taking its rise from Otsego lake, New York, and emptying itself, after a very tortuous course, through highly picturesque scenery, into the Chesapeake Bay, at Havre de Grace. Lake Otsego, with its magnificent hemlock trees, which give quite a character to its scenery, is classic region in American literature, the novelist J. Fennimore Cooper having made it the scene of many of his powerful stories.

Our party went to Otsego Lake from Albany by the Albany and Susquehanna Railroad. We stopped at Cooperstown, and made that village our head-quarters. The village is close to the lake on the south. The lake is about 1,200 feet above the sea, a beautiful sheet of water, eight or nine miles long, by about a mile broad, and set in a cluster of hills. Cooper has made the region very famous, and indeed it is a very charming place, and we enjoyed many a delightful sail upon its waters. THE PRESIDENT: You have probably looked up some facts about Cooper. As he is so closely associated with this region we ought to know something about him.

LAURA: Yes, I find that James Fennimore Cooper was the son of the founder of Cooperstown. His father owned a good deal of the land in this region, which was then (1790) on the frontier. Cooper was only a few months old when his father moved from Burlington, N. J., to Otsego Lake, and his boyhood was spent in this romantic and Indian-trodden region. At sixteen years old he entered the navy and served six years. He married in 1811, resigned his commission as lieu

tenant, and took up his residence at Mamaroneck, N. Y., where he wrote some of his earlier publications. The first work of his which attracted general attention was the "Spy," founded on American Revolutionary incidents; then came "The Pilot," "The Last of the Mohicans," and other volumes. He went to Europe in 1827, lived there six years, and wrote several works. On his return, his writings took a satirical bias, and he was much criticised by the American press for showing up the peculiarities of his countrymen. He settled down into a regular course of literary work at Cooperstown, and died of dropsy in 1851.

THE PRESIDENT: What do you consider the chief characteristics of Cooper as an author.

LAURA: I am hardly qualified to sit as a critic, but what little I have read of Cooper gives me the impression of a wonderfully imaginative faculty, in which the results of close and vivid observation serve as the groundwork, and give a living interest to his works hardly second to that of Sir Walter Scott.

MR. GOLDUST: I have never read a line of Cooper, and always supposed that his books were very trashy productions.

THE PRESIDENT: That depends upon the reader to a great extent; in reading fiction a great deal of mental winnowing has to be done, and it is this which makes it undesirable to become a great novel reader-the majority of people read for mere excitement, or to kill time, and forget what is really valuable as soon as it is read.

LAURA Cooperstown was the home of the novelist after his return from Europe, and the neighborhood is full of interest on his account.

In its course to the Atlantic the Susquehanna passes through a rich and beautiful country, receiving many tributaries, large and small, in its course. Passing into Pennsylvania, it waters the charming and famed Vale of Wyoming, where we again tread upon classic, even if we may not say, hallowed ground.

You are aware that this little valley-some twenty miles long by about three broad, and exceedingly lovely and peaceful in aspect, nestling between bold and rugged hills-was the scene of a fearful massacre during the war of Independence, and has been immortalized by the poet Campbell in his poem, Gertrude of Wyoming. The date of the massacre was July 3d, 1778. This district was then pretty well settled by an industrious, farming people. Sir Henry Clinton was commander

of the British forces at Philadelphia, and had earned anything but an honorable name as a soldier by the countenance he gave to marauding and robbery in the name of warfare. Most of the men of Luzerne county, in which Wyoming is situated, were away in Washington's army, when an infamous man, an American tory named Major Butler, planned a raid from New York State into Pennsylvania, and suddenly appeared on the banks of the Susquehanna near Wilkesbarre with six

The inhabitants

teen hundred men, half Indians, and half Canadians and British. gathered together, and, fortifying an old fort, defended themselves as best they could, but at length capitulated, on Butler's assurance that their lives would be spared. The instant they surrendered the massacre began, and hundreds of men, women, and children were slaughtered. Then the raiders separated into companies, and pillaged the whole country, driving the few surviving people into the mountains and swamps.