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By Root 2899 0

that they’d driven his brother to morphine and drink with their strict Dutch ways). Miss Howard, on the other hand, was clearly thinking about the many summers and autumns she’d spent hunting, shooting, and generally living a boy’s life with her beloved father, who’d had no son (nor any other child besides his one daughter) to share his sporting pursuits with. Said father had died in a mysterious hunting accident in amongst those woods some years back, and there’d been talk of suicide. But Miss Howard—who’d taken the death so hard that she’d had to retreat to a sanitarium for, a time—had always denied such rumors. Considering all this, it wasn’t too surprising to see the pair’s spirits sag beyond melancholy as they watched the high hills and thestately houses pass by. And though we eventually went below again to consume a very tasty lunch, and even managed to play a few silly but diverting deck sports afterwards, the general mood among our party remained what you might call reserved.

The Mary Powell stopped only briefly in Albany, a bustling city with many factories, railroad tracks, and workers’ houses lining its riverfront: not the kind of scenery that was going to put me or anyone else in a more cheerful state of mind. Many of the steamer’s passengers debarked at the state’s capital, leaving just them what were finishing off the round trip to New York, along with those of us who were going on through a dredged upper section of the river to Troy. Only a few miles of the riverside between Albany and Troy were still unpopulated, and the fiery, smoky factories that we passed, along with the large groups of dirty, miserable workers who were coming out of them, served to underline the notion that the countryside was becoming ever more infected by mankind’s petty but brutal desires.

As for the city of Troy, it was a prosperous but dreary place, its dozens of brick manufacturing works and cargo steamships fouling the river just so’s to make the latest laundry, gardening, and locomotive machinery available to the rest of the world. By the time we left the Mary Powell, a beautiful sunset had begun to appear above the western portion of the city, making me anxious to strike out into the country, toward that fiery sinking ball and away from the city; so it came as a great disapppointment to discover, when we reached the Union Depot and the offices of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Railroad Company, that the previous day’s great gale had struck this portion of the state, too, and caused a bad derailment on the line between Troy and Ballston Spa. We’d have to wait until morning to finish our journey, which meant spending a night in the nearby Union Hotel: not a terrible joint, by any means, but still discouraging for a young man who was chafing to get away from civilization and out into the wilderness.

The train ride the next morning offered me some relief, being as once we’d left Troy and its environs behind, we did start to pass through patches of countryside what hinted at how magical that part of the state must’ve been before civilization hit it like a runaway streetcar. There were long stretches of what seemed like ancient woodlands, and we passed by a couple of big silver lakes; but each time we’d quickly move on to some cluster of farms or past a bustling little town, all of which hammered home the point that the old forest was losing its fight for control of the landscape. Before long the conductor on our train was announcing our approach to Ballston Spa, and when we arrived at the town’s outskirts I found that my mood of the day beforehad returned, and maybe even gotten worse; though such was not a bad outlook to have, I quickly discovered, when you were entering the seat of Saratoga County.

Cyrus had brought along a little guidebook to the towns of the northern Hudson area, and he read from it as we chugged slowly toward the end of our journey. Ballston Spa, I learned, had once been famous for its string of quiet little health retreats, but over the last century things had changed pretty drastically: many of the mineral