Twenty years! Presto, what a change! Rip Van Winkle has awoke! Where stood the lonely hovel, now stands the commodious and comfortable farm house. Orchards, barns, granaries, flowers, luxuriant foliage, pure water, broad fields of grain and grass, lowing herds, good roads, schools, churches, neighbors, friends, cheerful and smiling faces, happiness and contentment have replaced the former surroundings. The poor and dejected emigrant is now the independent possessor of a domain a prince might envy. The disconsolate and almost broken hearted mother who, during long and weary days and nights, in solitude and loneliness, watched and nursed her puny and sickly brood, is now the happy, comely and dignified matron, whose children and grand-children are clustered around her. The friends and kindred with whom she parted so sorrowfully twenty years ago--those of them who are yet spared to earth--are again her neighbors. With them she frequently exchanges visits--from fifty to sixty hours only, at most, being necessary to bring them together. If Old Rip had actually gone to sleep, twenty years ago upon the prairies, upon awaking now, it is opined, his amazement would far exceed that inspired by the neighborhood of the Catskills. Who will now complain of the hardships incident to a removal from the most favored regions to a country, already so far advanced in all that contributes to the comfort, enjoyment and embellishment of life?
On the 6th August the world was astounded by the announcement that the Atlantic Cable was successfully laid. Previous failures had left no hope in the minds of any, even the most sanguine, of such a result. The short, laconic, simple dispatch of Mr. Field--the world renowned projector and master spirit of the work--flew with lightning wings throughout America and fell upon minds, where skepticism for a long time repelled and resisted conviction. Slowly the possibility of its truth gained the ascendency over disbelief and doubt, till at length, the amazing reality of the achievement began to be comprehended. The dispatch to his family of Capt. Hudson, of the United States' Steam Frigate Niagara, from which the cable was laid, was telegraphed over the country and dispelled all doubt. That dispatch, beautiful in its epigrammatic terseness, and sublime in its devout thankfulness and gratitude, will be carried down the coming centuries, as long as the remembrance of the great feat shall survive. "God has been with us! The telegraph cable is laid, without accident, and to Him be all the Glory. We are all well." In its first efforts at comprehension, the mind utterly fails to grasp and measure the terrible sublimity of Niagara, the awful majesty of Mont Blanc, or the colossal proportions of a vast cathedral, which