enthusiastically remarks an old gentelman in spectacles, whom I chance to encounter on the heights east of Herkimer.  Of the first assertion I have nothing to say, having passed through a dozen “garden spots of the world " on this tour across America; but there is no gainsaying the fact that the Mohawk Valley, as viewed from this vantage spot, is wonderfully beautiful.  I think it must have been on this spot that the poet received inspiration to compose the beautiful song that is sung alike in the quiet homes of the valley itself and in the trapper’s and hunter’s tent on the far off Yellowstone — “Fair is the vale where the Mohawk gently glides, On its clear, shining way to the sea.”  The valley ia one of the natural gateways of commerce, for, at Little Falls — where it contracts to a mere pass between the hills — one can almost throw a stone across six railway tracks, the Erie Canal and the Mohawk River.  Spending an hour looking over the magnificent Capitol building at Albany, I cross the Hudson, and proceed to ride eastward between the two tracks of the Boston & Albany Railroad, finding the riding very fair.  From the elevated road-bed I cast a longing, lingering look down the Hudson Valley, that stretches away southward like a heaven-born dream, and sigh at the impossibility of going two ways at once. " There’s $50 fine for riding a bicycle along the B. & A. Railroad,” I am informed at Albany, but risk it to Schodack, where I make inquiries of a section foreman.  “No; there’s no foine; but av yeez are run over an’ git killed, it’ll be useless for yeez to inther suit agin the company for damages,” is the reassuring reply; and the unpleasant visions of bankrupting fines dissolve in a smile at this characteristic Milesian explanation.  Crossing the Massachusetts boundary at the village of State Line, I find the roads excellent; and, thinking that the highways of the " Old Bay State " will be good enough anywhere, I grow careless about the minute directions given me by Albany wheelmen, and, ere long, am laboriously toiling over the heavy roads and steep grades of the Berkshire Hills, endeavoring to get what consolation I can, in return for unridable roads, out of the charming scenery, and the many interesting features of the Berkshire-Hill country.  It is at Otis, in the midst of these hills, that I first become acquainted with the peculiar New England dialect in its native home.  The widely heralded intellectual superiority of the Massachusetts fair ones asserts itself even in the wildest parts of these wild hills; for at small farms — that, in most States, would be characterized by bare-footed, brown-faced housewives — I encounter spectacled ladies whose fair faces reflect the encyclopaedia of knowledge within, and whose wise looks naturally fill me with awe.  At Westfield I learn that Karl Kron, the author and publisher of the American roadbook, " Ten Thousand Miles on a Bicycle” — not to be outdone by my exploit of floating the bicycle across the Humboldt