At an early hour I was upon the high-road which leads to Port Jervis. The day was a perfect type of the best season of our northern climate, cloudless but for a fleecy embankment behind the purple hills to the north, flooded with a glorious light touched with grateful warmth, and which revealed with articulate distinctness every visible object in the crystal-clear air—an air so pure and cool that it spurred you to your quickest step, and sent bounding through you a glad delight in breath and life.
In all the landscape was the richness of color and the vividness of a transfigured world. An early frost had touched the foliage; the leaves of the hickory-trees and elms were rustling crisply at their tips, and the sumach deepened into a crimson that matched the color of its clustered seeds, while the oaks and maples maintained the dark luxuriance of their summer leafage, boastful of a hardihood which would succumb only to the keener cold of the later autumn.
Up hill and down dale my road led me, where substantial farm-houses, and enormous barns, and fields of standing corn, and herds of cattle in the pasture-lands, all indicated the necessaries and even the comforts of life in rich abundance, and emphasized the wonder that from such surroundings should come the recruits who ceaselessly throng our crowded towns.
A few miles farther on the whole topography of the country changed. I had passed through the village of Otisville and was walking in the direction of Huguenot when my way carried me to a hillside from which I could see the long stretch of a valley, reaching far to the westward, and lined on both sides, with almost artificial regularity, by ranges of hills, which rose sharply from the plain below. Through a break at the north the Delaware flows, and, crossing the plain-like valley, disappears among the southern hills, while the valley itself, in almost unbroken symmetry, reaches on to the west.
At the foot of the northern range, and on the eastern bank of the river, is the town of Port Jervis. Its outer streets are the light, airy thoroughfares of the usual American town, faced by small wooden cottages, each with its plot of ground devoted in front to a few square yards of turf, and carefully economized behind the house for the purpose of supporting fruit-trees and providing a vegetable garden.
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.