the power-houses, and one has to make a strenuous effort of detachment
from its excursionist associations to appreciate its sublimity.

Thus Colin and I discussed, in a somewhat bored way, whether we should
trouble to visit the famous Watkins Glen, as we sat over supper in a
Watkins hotel, one of the few really comfortable and cordial hotels we
met in our wanderings, and we smiled to think what the natives would have
made of our conversation. Two professional lovers of beauty calmly
discussing whether it was worth while walking half a mile to see one of
the natural, and national, wonders of America! Why, last season more than
half a million visitors kodaked it, and wrote their names on the face of
the rocks! However, a great natural effect holds its own against no
little vulgarization, and Watkins Glen soon made us forget the trippers
and the concrete footpaths and iron railings of the United States
government, in the fantasies of its weirdly channelled gorge and
mysterious busy water.

Watkins itself, despite its name, is sufficiently favoured by Nature to
make an easy annual living, situated as it is at the south end of the
beautiful Seneca Lake, and at the head of a nobly picturesque valley some
twenty miles long, with a pretty river spreading out into flashing
reed-grown flats, sheer cliffs and minor waterfalls, here and there a
vineyard on the hillside, or the vivid green of celery trenches in the
dark loam of the hollows, all the way to--Elmira! The river and the
trolley run side by side the whole charming way, and, as you near
Elmira, you come upon latticed barns that waft you the fragrance of
drying tobacco-leaves, suspended longitudinally for the wind to play
through. On the morning of our leaving Watkins, we had been roused a
little earlier than usual by mirthful sounds in the street beneath our
hotel windows. Light-hearted voices joking each other floated up to us,