244 AN OCTOBER ABROAD. 



you leap a fence and there is the heather. On the 

 highest point of this mountain, and on the highest 

 point of all the mountains around, was a low stone 

 mound, which I was puzzled to know the meaning of. 

 Standing there, the country rolled away beneath me 

 under a cold, gray November sky, and, as was the case 

 with the English landscape, looked singularly deso- 

 late the desolation of a dearth, of human homes, in- 

 dustrial centres, families, workers, and owners of the 

 soil. Few roads, scarce ever a vehicle, no barns, no 

 groups of bright, well-ordered buildings, indeed no 

 farms and neighborhoods and school-houses, but a 

 wide spread of rich, highly-cultivated country, with 

 here and there visible to close scrutiny small gray 

 stone houses with thatched roofs, the abodes of pov- 

 erty and wretchedness. A recent English writer says 

 the first thing that struck him in American landscape 

 painting was the absence of man and the domestic 

 animals from the pictures, and the preponderance of 

 rude, wild nature ; and his first view of this country 

 seems to have made the same impression. But it is 

 certainly true that the traveler through any of our 

 older States, will see ten houses, rural habitations, to 

 one in England or Ireland, though, as a matter of 

 course, nature here looks much less domesticated and 

 much less expressive of human occupancy and con- 

 tact. The Old World people have clung to the soil 

 closer and more lovingly than we do. The ground 

 has been more precious. They have had none to 

 waste, and have made the most of every inch of it. 



