break up into square cakes measuring twenty-two inches across. While the ploughing is in progress, a channel is cut from the field to the ice-house, and the ice therein got rid of by pressing it, a piece at a time, below the surface of the water, when the current carries it beneath the main ice-sheet. A way being thus opened between the depôt and the chequered ice-field, the latter is sawn into "floats," about twenty squares long and fourteen squares wide, which are afterwards broken up into long strips, by means of wedges applied to the grooves, and floated into the channel, where they are, finally, separated into cakes by men armed with chiselbars. When the cakes, pushed forward by the floats behind them, arrive at the bank, they are received upon an inclined steam-elevator, consisting of an endless chain furnished with carriers, an arrangement very much like that which conveys the straw from a thrashing-machine to the top of the straw-rick. The lower end of the endless chain, with its carriers, dips under the surface of the water below, while above, it enters the top of the ice-house, into which each cake, as it comes up on a carrier, is discharged upon "slide-ways," or rails of gentle grade, adjustable to any desired spot within the depôt. The elevators, in some of the largest establishments, are capable of raising fifty blocks, of a thousand pounds each, per minute, or fifteen hundred tons of ice in an hour. The ice-houses are immense wooden erections, without doors or windows, about a hundred and

fifty feet long and forty feet wide, each accompanied by a smaller building, containing a steam-engine for driving the elevator. The cakes of ice are stored with a three-inch space all around them, for the prevention of undue waste in breaking them out, and after the house has been filled and closed, the frozen mass within loses little by melting.

Summer having now come, the depôts, as we passed, were busily discharging ice, by means of 'slideways," into big brown barges which convey it to New York. These, when loaded with cakes, are collected into "tows," consisting of thirty or forty boats, arranged, four deep, in a line, and towed by very powerful paddle-wheel steamers. Among the varied craft which crowds the Hudson River, there is nothing so striking in appearance as these great ice-tows. Every barge is the home of a steersman, whose good wife flies a number of domestic flags upon the lines connecting the two stumpy masts of the vessel. In the bow of each boat, stands a miniature windmill, whose canvas sails, turned by the breeze which the movement of towing creates, give motion to a crank, and this to a pump, keeping the barge free of such water as drains from the ice-cakes. A stranger water-procession it is impossible to meet. First, the high and labouring paddle-wheeler comes into view from out of the river mist, and, presently, separated from her by the length of the scarcely visible towing-lines, the

mass of united barges steals noiselessly and gradually into sight. This has the appearance of a single strange and monstrous craft, bending flexibly around every curve of its course, fluttering with unknown bunting, and bewildering the eye with its array of whirling wind-sails.

At length, we reached Albany, the point whence, less than three centuries ago, Henry Hudson turned back from his search for the road to India; the capital of the great State of New York to-day. Being, now, a bird of passage, tarrying only for an hour in the city, there is, of course, little to be said of its appearance and people. But that hour gave me time, and to spare, for the discovery that something other than the width of the Hudson River divides the Empire State from New England; that, as I am much concerned to show, there are Americans and Americans. In spite of its splendid and still rising State House, one of the most ambitious public buildings in the world, and which has already absorbed nearly two and a half millions sterling, Albany proclaims itself to be without the public spirit and good municipal government of a New England city. Its streets are shamefully paved with rough boulders, its side-walks and gutters are the mere children of accident, and every public roadway is disgracefully out of repair. Its shops are less clean and respectable in appearance than those of any New England town, as its wayfarers are visibly

of a lower grade. Nothing in the general appearance of the town attracts the European visitor, while it must sadly disappoint those whose ideals have been formed upon New England models. I was glad when the train swept me away from the dirty railway depôt, towards the clear waters and wooded shores of Lake George.

CHAPTER XIX.

LAKES GEORGE AND CHAMPLAIN.

IN the same year that the Dutch navigator ascended the Hudson to its junction with the Mohawk River, Samuel Champlain, the famous French explorer, first made his way from Quebec to the lake which bears his name. From its southern extremity, he saw the smaller sheet of water now called Lake George, which, however, was not visited by a white man until three years later. Could Champlain and Hudson have pushed, the one forty miles farther south, the other forty miles farther north, France and Holland would have met at the head of Lake George, a hundred and fifty years before this spot saw the decisive battle which, after nearly seventy years of desultory warfare between England and France, prepared the way for the supremacy of the former in the New World. But Holland had been pushed aside by England almost a century before the forces of those two countries advanced, each with their savage allies, to meet in the death grip which was only relaxed on the heights of Abraham.