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AT this elevation you may wear woollen, and sleep under blankets in
midsummer; and that is a pleasant temperature where much hard work is to
be done in the way of pleasure-hunting. No place is so agreeable as
Catskill after one has been parboiled in the city. New York is at the
other end of that long thread of a river, running away south from the
base of the mountain; and you may change your climate in so brief a
transit, that the most enslaved broker in Wall Street may have half his
home on Catskill. The cool woods, the small silver lakes, the falls, the
mountain-tops, are all delicious haunts for the idler-away of the hot
months; and to the credit of our taste, it may be said they are fully
improved. Catskill is a “resort.”
From Catskill the busy and all-glorious Hudson is seen winding half its
silver length,—towns, villas, and white spires sparkling on the shores,
and snowy sails and gaily-painted steamers specking its bosom. It is a
constant diorama of the most lively beauty; and the traveller as he
looks down upon it sighs to make it a home. Yet a smaller and
less-frequented stream would best fulfil desires born of a sigh. There
is either no seclusion on the Hudson, or there is so much that the
conveniences of life are difficult to obtain. Where the steamers come to
shore,—twenty a day, with each from one to seven hundred
passengers,—it is certainly far from secluded enough; yet away from the
landing-places servants find your house too lonely, and your table,
without unreasonable expense and trouble, is precarious and poor. These
mean and _menus plaisirs_ reach, after all, the very citadel of
philosophy. Who can live without a cook or a chamber-maid, and dine
seven days in the week on veal, consoling himself with the beauties of a
river-side?
On the smaller rivers these evils are somewhat ameliorated; for in the
rural and uncorrupt villages of the interior you may find servants born
on the spot, and content to live in the neighborhood. The market is
better, too, and the society less exposed to the evils that result from
too easy an access to the metropolis. No place can be rural, in all the
_virtues_ of the phrase, where a steamer will take the villager to the
city between noon and night, and bring him back between midnight and
morning. There is a suburban look and character about all the villages
on the Hudson which seem out of place among such scenery. They are
suburbs; in fact, steam has destroyed the distance between them and the
city.
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