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FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 223 



actly at the foot of the mountain. You are walking on 

 smooth, fine meadow land, when you leap a fence and 

 there is the heather. On the highest point of this 

 mountain, and on the highest point of all the mount- 

 ains around, was a low stone mound, which I was puz- 

 zled 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 desolate — the desolation 

 of a dearth of human homes, industrial 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 poverty 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 impres- 

 sion. But it is certainly true that the traveller through 

 any of our older States will see ten houses, rural habi- 

 tations, to one in England or Ireland, though, as a 

 matter of course, nature here looks much less domesti- 

 cated and much less expressive of human occupancy 

 and contact. The Old World people have clung to 

 the soil closer and more lovingly than we do. The 



