316 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



ing, particularly to one who has ever been whirled along 

 with the power of steam through the valley of the Dela- 

 ware? We leave the city, foot of Duane street, at seven 

 in the morning, on board of one of the company's excel- 

 lent boats, and directly after we are called down to a 

 breakfast, ready for all that have not taken an earlier 

 one at home. In two hours we are landed upon the al- 

 most mile-long wharf at Piermont, twenty-five miles up 

 the Hudson. This is the first wonder. It must have cost 

 nearly a million of dollars. Whether judiciously ex- 

 pended or not, I will not discuss. Here it is, and will 

 remain an enduring monument to point to every passen- 

 ger upon the river, the easterly terminus of this great 

 road. It is very spacious, and brings the cars close down 

 to the boat. 



The rails are of the W pattern, and very heavy; laid 

 upon cross ties, and being six feet apart, give us very 

 roomy cars; in fact, the best in this country. Now we 

 begin to climb over the mountain barriers between the 

 Hudson and Delaware; up through the rugged Ramapo 

 Valley, winding along the Orange-county farms; noting 

 at every station the rows of milk cans, and baskets of 

 garden vegetables, ready for the "market train," until 

 we come to that once old inland town, (now inland no 

 longer,) of Goshen, fixed in my youthful memory as the 

 home of the old "butter hills," of a bank whose capital, 

 if not butter itself, was the product of it. At Port 

 Jervis, we come down upon the Delaware, a moderate 

 mill stream; seventy-seven miles from the Hudson, and 

 thence along the river bank as much further, crossing it 

 twice, through the v/ildest region that ever reverberated 

 the startling scream of the locomotive whistle. At one 

 point, the train is suspended, as it were, and it actually 

 appears, when seen from below, as if upon a narrow shelf 

 excavated out of the perpendicular face of the mountain, 

 where the very thought of a tumble is enough to make a 

 sensitive man's bones ache. What now shall be done to 

 make these pine-denuded hills productive, is a question 



