CONCERNING THE POPULAR TASTE IN SCENERY AND SOME HAPPY PEOPLE We had somewhat scorned the idea of Watkins, as being one of Nature's show-places.

In fact, Watkins Glen is, so to say, so nationally beautiful as latterly to have received a pension from the Government of the United States, which now undertakes the conservation of its fantastic chasms and waterfalls.

Some one--I am inclined to think it was myself--once said that he never wished to go to Switzerland, because he feared that the Alps would be greasy with being climbed.

I think it is clear what he meant.

To one who loves Nature for himself, has his own discovering eyes for her multiform and many-mooded beauty, it is distasteful to have some excursionist effect of spectacular scenery labelled and thrust upon him with a showman's raptures; and, in revulsion from the hypocritical admiration of the vulgar, he turns to the less obvious and less melodramatic beauty of the natural world.