 CHAPTER IV. The ravages of the cholera having, in some degree, ceased, I left Prince Edward Island for the United States, and decided to endure the delays and inconveniences of the intercolonial route for the purpose of seeing something of New Brunswick on my way to Boston. The journey from the island to the States is, in itself, by no means an easy one, and is rendered still more difficult by the want of arrangements on the part of those who conduct the transit of travellers. The inhabitants of our eastern colonies do not understand the value of time, consequently the uncertain arrivals and departures of the Lady Le Marchant furnished matter for numerous speculations. From some circumstances which had occurred within my knowledge, one being that the captain of the steamer had forgotten to call for the continental males, I did not attach much importance to the various times which were fixed definitely for her sailing between the hours of four and ten. A cloudy, gloomy night had succeeded to the bright blaze of an august day, and midnight was fast approaching before the signal bell rang. Two friends accompanied me as far as Bedeck, and besides the gentleman under whose escort I was to travel, there were twelve island gentlemen and two ladies, all supposed to be bound, like myself, for Boston. All separate individuals were, however, lost amid the confusion of bare skin and waterproof coats and the impenetrable darkness which brooded both on wharf and steamer. An amusing scene of bungling marked our departure from Charlottetown. The captain, a sturdy old Northumbrian seamen, thoroughly understood his business, but the owners of the ship compelled him to share its management with a very pertinacious pilot, and the conflicting orders given and the want of harmony in the actions produced gave rise to many reflections on the evils of divided responsibility. On the night in question some mysterious spells seemed to bind us to the shores of Prince Edward Island. In an attempt to get the steamer off she ran stern foremost upon the bow sprit of a schooner, then broke one of the piles of the wharf to pieces, crushing her fender to atoms at the same time. Some persons on the pier, compassionating our helplessness, attempted to stave the ship off with long poles, but this well-meant attempt failed, as did several others, until someone suggested to the captain the very simple expedient of working the engines, when the steamer slowly moved away, smashing the bulwarks of a new brig, and soon in the dark and murky atmosphere the few lights of Charlottetown ceased to be visible. The compass was then required, but the matches in the ship hung fire, and when a passenger at length produced a light it was discovered that the lamp in the binocle was without that essential article oil. Meanwhile, no one had ascertained what had caused the heavy smash at the outset, and certain timid persons in the idea that a hole had been knocked in the ship's side were in continual apprehension that she would fill and sink. To drown all such gloomy anticipations we sang several songs. Among others the appropriate one, Isle of Beauty, Fair the Well. The voices rapidly grew more faint and spiritless as we stood farther out to sea, a failure which might have been attributed to grief at leaving old friends on the chance of making new ones, had not hints and questions been speedily interchanged, such as, Do you like the sea? Are you feeling comfortable? Would you prefer being downstairs? And the like. Cloaks and pillows became more thought of than either songs or friends. Indefinable sensations of melancholy rendered the merriest of the party silent, and a perfect alluge of rain rendered a retreat into the lower regions a precautionary measure which even the boldest were content to adopt. Below, in addition to the close, overpowering odor of cabins without any ventilation, the smell of the bilge water was sufficient in itself to produce nausea. The dark den called the ladies' cabin, which was by no means clean, was the sleeping abode of twelve people in various stages of discomfort, and two babies. I spent a very comfortless four hours and went on deck at dawn to find a thick fog, a heavy rain, the boards swimming with soot and water, and one man cowering at the wheel. Most of the gentlemen, induced by the discomfort to be early risers, came up before we reached Bedeck, in oil skin caps, coats and leggings, wearing that expression on their physiognomies peculiar to anglo-saxons in the rain. The case wished me to go ashore here, but the skipper, who seemed to have been born with an ejection on the tip of his tongue, dissuaded me, as the rain was falling heavily and the boat was a quarter full of water. But as my clothes could not be more thoroughly saturated than they were, I landed, and even at the early hour of six we found a blazing log fire in the shipbuilder's hospitable house, and Bede, more the Bede of an Irish novelist than a servant in real life, with her merry face, rich brogue and potato cakes, welcomed us with many expressions of commiseration for our drowned plight. Who, that has ever experienced the miseries of a voyage in a dirty, crowded, and ill-ventilated little steamer, has not also appreciated the pleasure of getting upon the land even for a few minutes. The consciousness of the absence of suffocating sensations, and of the comfort of a floor which does not move under the feet, of space and cleanliness and warmth, soon produces an oblivion of all past miseries. But if the voyage has not terminated and the relief is only temporary, it enhances the dread of future ones to such an extent that, when the captain came to the door to fetch me, I had to rouse all my energies before I could leave a blazing fire to battle with cold and rain again. The offer of a cup of tea, which I would have supposed irresistible, would not induce him to permit me to finish my breakfast. But at length his better nature prevailed, and he consented to send the boat a second time. After allowing my pockets to be filled with notions by the generous biddy, I took leave of Miss Kenjans, who is good, clever, and agreeable enough to redeem the young ladyhood of the island. Nor was there enough of pleasant promise for the future to compensate for the regret I felt, at leaving those who had received a stranger with such kindness and hospitality. I jumped into the boat, where I stood with my feet in the water, in company with several gentlemen with dripping umbrellas, whose marked want of nasal development rendered Disraeli's description of flat-nosed francs peculiarly appropriate. The rain poured down as rain never pours in England, and under these very dispiriting circumstances I began my travels over the North American continent. I went down to my miserable birth, and vainly tried to sleep, the discomfort and mismanagement which prevailed leading my thoughts by force of contrast to the order, cleanliness, and regularity of the inimitable line of steamers on the West Highland coast. Wherever the means of locomotion are concerned, these colonies are very far behind either the old country or their enterprising neighbors in Canada, and at present they do not appear conscious of the deficiencies which are sternly forced upon a traveller's observation. The prospect which appeared through the door was not calculated to please, as it consisted of a low, dark, and suffocating cabin, filled with men in suits of oil-skin, existing in a steamy atmosphere, loaded with the odours of India rubber, tobacco, and spirits. The stewardess was ill, and my companions were groaning, unheeded babies were crying, and the only pleasing feature in the scene was the gruff old pilot, ubiquitous in kindness, overperforming some act of humanity. At one moment he was holding smelling salts to some exhausted lady, at another carrying down a poor Irish woman, who, though a steerage passenger, should not, he said, be left to perish from cold and hunger, and again feeding some crying baby with bread and milk. My clothes were completely saturated, and his good offices probably saved me from a severe illness by covering me up with a blanket. At twelve we reached Shediak in New Brunswick, a place from which an enormous quantity of timber is annually exported. It is a village in a marsh, on a large bay surrounded by low, wooden hills, and presents every appearance of unhealthiness. Huge, square-sided ships, English, Dutch, and Austrian, were swallowing up rafts of pine which kept arriving from the shore. The water on this coast is shallow, and though our steamer was not of more than one hundred and fifty tons burden, we were obliged to anchor nearly two miles from shore. Shediak had recently been visited by the cholera, and there was an infectious melancholy about its aspect, which coupled with the fact that I was wet, cold, and weary, and with the discovery that my escort and I had not two ideas in common, had a tendency to produce anything but a lively frame of mind. We and our luggage were unceremoniously trundled into two large boats. Some of the gentlemen, I am sorry to say, forcing their way into the first, in order to secure for themselves inside places in the stage. An American gentleman offered our rowers a dollar if they could gain the shore first, but they failed in doing so, and these very un-gallant individuals hired the first wagon and drove off at full speed to the bend on the Petticodiak River, confident in the success of their scheme. What was their surprise and mortification to find that a gentleman of our party, who said he was an old stager and up to a dodge or two, had leisurely telegraphed from Shediak for nine places? Thus on their arrival at the bend, the delinquents found that, besides being both censured and laughed at for their selfishness, they had lost their places, their dinners, and their tempers. As we were rowing to shore, the captain told us that our worst difficulty was yet to come, and in supproble one he added to corpulent persons. There was no landing-place for boats, or indeed for anything at low water, and we had to climb up a wharf ten feet high, formed of huge round logs placed a foot apart from each other, and slippery with sea-grass. It is really incredible that, at a place through which a considerable traffic passes, as being on the high road from Prince Edward Island to the United States, there should be a more inconvenient landing-place than I ever saw at a Highland village. Large, high, springless wagons were waiting for us on this wharf, which, after jolting us along a bad road for some distance, deposited us at the door of the inn as Shediak, where we came for the first time upon the track of the cholera, which had recently devastated all the places along our route. Here we had a substantial dinner of a very homely description, and, as in Nova Scotia, a cup of tea sweetened with molasses was placed by each plate, instead of any intoxicating beverage. After this meal I went into the house-room, or parlor, a general rendezvous of lady-visitors, babies, unmanorly children, Irish servant-girls with tangled hair and bare feet, colonial gossips, cute urchins, and, not infrequently, of those curious-looking beings, pauper immigrant lads from Aron, who do a little of everything and nothing well, denominated stable-helps. Here I was assailed with a host of questions as to my country, objects in traveling, et cetera, and I speedily found that being from the old country gave me a status in the eyes of the colonial ladies. I was requested to take off my cloak to display the pattern of my dress, and the performance of a very inefficient country modeste passed off as the latest Parisian fashion. My bonnet and cloak were subjected to alike scrutiny, and the pattern of the dress was taken, after which I was allowed to resume my seat. Interrogatories about England followed, and I was asked if I had seen the queen. The hostess guessed that she must be a tall, grand lady, and one pretty damsel, that she must dress beautiful and always wear the crown out of doors. I am afraid that I rather lessened the estimation in which our graceless, leech lady was held by her subjects when I replied that she dressed very simply on ordinary occasions had never, I believed, worn the crown since her coronation, and was very little above my height. They inquired about the royal children, but evinced more curiosity about the princess royal than with respect to the heir to the throne. One of the queerest had been at Boston, but guessed that London must be a pretty considerable touch higher. Most, however, could only compare it in an idea with St. John, New Brunswick, and listened with the greatest appearance of interest to the wonders which I narrated of the extent, wealth, and magnificence of the British metropolis. All together I was favourably impressed by their intelligence, and during my short journey through New Brunswick I formed a higher opinion of the uneducated settlers in this province than of those in Nova Scotia. They are very desirous to possess a reputation for being to use their borrowed phraseology, knowing coons, with their eye-teeth well cut. It would be well if they borrowed from their neighbours, the Yankees, something more useful than their slaying, which renders the vernacular of the province rather repulsive. The spirit of enterprise, which has done so much for the adjacent state of Maine, has not yet displaced itself in New Brunswick in the completion of any works of practical utility, and though the soil in many places has great natural capabilities, these have not been taken due advantage of. There are two modes of reaching St. John from Shediak, one by stage, the other by steamer, and the ladies and children, fearful of the fatigue of a land journey, remained to take the steamer from the bend. I resolved to stay under Mr. Stanford's escort, and to go by land, one of my objects being to see as much of the country as possible. Also, my late experiences of colonial steamboat travel had not been so agreeable as to induce me to brave the storms of the Bay of Fundy in a crazy vessel which had been injured only two nights before by a collision in a race. On the night in which some of my companions sailed the crales, engines were disabled, and she remained in a helpless condition for four hours, so I had a very fortunate escape. Taking leave of the amusingly miscellaneous party in the house-room, I left Shediak for the bend, in company with seven persons from Prince Edward Island, in a wagon drawn by two ponies, and driven by the landlord, a shrewd specimen of a colonist. This mode of transit deserves a passing notice. The wagon consisted of an oblong, shallow wooden tray on four wheels. On this were placed three boards resting on a high, unsteady prop, and the machine was destitute of springs. The ponies were thin, shaggy, broken knead-beings, under fourteen hands high, with harness of a most meager description, and its cohesive quality seemed very small, if I might judge from the frequency with which the driver alighted to repair its parts with pieces of twine, with which his pockets were stored, I suppose, in anticipation of such occasions. These poor little animals took nearly four hours to go fourteen miles, and even this rate of progression was only kept up by the help of continual admonitions from a stout leather thong. It was a dismal evening, very like one in England at the end of November, the air cold and damp, and I found the chill from wet clothes and in east wind anything but agreeable. The country was also extremely uninviting, and I thought its aspect more gloomy than that of Nova Scotia. Sometimes we traversed swamps swarming with bullfrogs on corduroy roads which nearly jolted us out of the vehicle, then dreary levels abounding in speedy heck-metach, hemlock, and birch trees. Next we would go down into a cedar swamp alive with mosquitoes. These forests, impassable morasses, and sedgy streams always bounded the immediate prospect, and the clearings were few and far between. Nor was the conversion of my companions calculated to beguile a tedious journey. It was on snatchings, snarlings, and other purilities of island politics, corn, sugar, and molasses. About dusk we reached the bend, a dismal piece of alluvial, swampy-looking land, drained by a wide muddy river called the Petty Kodiak, along the shore of which a considerable ship-building village is located. The tide here rises and falls twenty-four feet, and sixty at the mouth of the river in the Bay of Fundy. It was a dispiriting view, acres of mud, bare at low water, and miles of swamp covered with rank, coarse grass, intersected by tide streams which are continually crossed on rotten wooden bridges without parapets. This place had recently been haunted by fever and cholera. As there was a slight incline into the village, our miserable ponies commenced a shambling trot, the noise of which brought numerous idolers to the indoor to inquire the news. This inn was a rambling, unpainted erection of wood, opposite to a cash, credit, and barter-store, kept by an enterprising Caledonian, an additional proof of the saying which ascribes ubiquity to scots, new-castle grindstones, and Birmingham buttons. A tidy, bustling landlady, very American in her phraseology, but kind in her way, took me under her special protection, as forty men were staying in the house, and there was an astonishing paucity of the softer sex. Indeed, in all my subsequent travels I met with an undo and rather disagreeable preponderance of the lords of the creation. Not being inclined to sit in the parlor with a very motley company, I accompanied the hostess to the kitchen, and sat by the fire upon a chopping-block, the most luxurious seat in the apartment. Two shoeless Irish girls were my other companions, and one of them, hearing that I was from England, inquired if I were acquainted with one Mike Donovan of Skibereen. The landlady's daughter was also there, a little, sharp-visaged, precocious torment of three years old, who spilt my ink and lost my thimble, and then, coming up to me, said, Well, stranger, I guess you're kinder tired. She very unceremoniously detached my watch from my chain, and, looking at it quite with the eye of a connoisseur, guessed it must have cost a pretty high figure. After she had filled my purse with ink, for which misdemeanor her mother offered no apology, I looked into the tea-room, which presented the curious spectacle of forty men, including a number of ship-carpenters of highly respectable appearance, taking tea in the silent, business-like way in which transatlantic meals are generally dispatched. My own meal, which the landlady evidently intended should be a very luxurious one, consisted of stewed tea, sweetened with molasses, soft cheese instead of butter, and dark rye bread. The inn was so full that my hostess said she could not give me a bed, rather an unwelcome announcement to a way-worn traveller, and with considerable complacency she took me into a large, whitewashed, carpetless room, furnished with one chair, a small table, and my valise. She gave me two buffalo robes, and left me, hoping I should be comfortable. Rather disposed to quarrel with a hardship, which shortly afterwards I should have laughed at, I rolled up my cloak for a pillow, wrapped myself in a buffalo skin, and slept as soundly as on the most luxurious couch. I was roused early by a general thumping and clattering, and making the hasty toilette which one is compelled to do when destitute of appliances, I found the stage at the early hour of six ready at the door, and, to my surprise, the coachman was muffled up in furs, and the morning was intensely cold. This vehicle was of the same construction as that which I have already described in Nova Scotia, but being narrower was infinitely more uncomfortable. Seven gentlemen and two ladies went inside, in a space where six would have been disagreeably crowded. Mr. Hanford preferred the outside, where he could smoke his cigar without molestation. The road was very hilly, and several times our progress was turned into retrogression, for the horses invariably refused to go uphill, probably poor things, because they felt their inability to drag the loaded wane up the steep declivities which we continually met with. The passengers were therefore frequently called upon to get out and walk. A very agreeable recreation, for the ice was the thickness of a penny, the thermometer stood at thirty-five degrees, there was a piercing north-east wind, and though the sun shone from a cloudless sky, his rays had scarcely any power. We breakfasted at eight, at a little wayside in, and then travelled till midnight with scarcely any cessation. The way would have been very tedious had it not been enlivened by the eccentricities of Mr. Latham, an English passenger. After breakfast the conversation in the stage was pretty general, led by the individual aforesaid, who lectured and preached rather than conversed. Few subjects were untouched by his eloquence. He spoke with equal ease on a difficult point in theology and on the confirmation of the sun. He lectured on politics, astronomy, chemistry, and anatomy with great fluency and equal incorrectness. In describing the circulation of the blood he said, it's a purely metaphysical subject, and the answering remarked, it is the most purely physical, made him vehemently angry. He spoke of the sun by saying, I've studied the sun, I know it as well as I do this field. It's a dark body with a luminous atmosphere, and a climate more agreeable than that of the earth. Thus announcing as a fact what has been timidly put forward as a theory only by our greatest astronomers. Politics soon came on the top-east, when he attacked the British institutions violently with an equal amount of ignorance and presumption, making such glaring misstatements that I felt bound to contradict them, when he, not liking to be lowered in the estimation of his companions, contested the points in a way which closely bordered upon rudeness. He made likewise a very pedantic display of scientific knowledge in virtue of an occasional attendance at meetings of mechanics-institutes, and asked the gentleman, for we're all gentlemen here, numerous questions to which they could not reply, when one of the party took courage to ask him why fire burned. Oh, because of the hydrogen in the air, of course, was the complacent answer. I beg your pardon, but there is no hydrogen in atmospheric air. There is. I know the air well. It is composed of one half of hydrogen, the other half of nitrogen and oxygen. You're surely confounding it with water. No, I am as well acquainted with the composition of water as with that of air. It is composed of the same gases, only in different proportions. This was too monstrous, and his opponent, while contradicting the statement, could not avoid a hardy laugh at its absurdity in which the others joined without knowing why, but which so raised the color of this irascible gentleman that it was most difficult to soothe matters. He contended that he was right and the other wrong, that his propositions were held by all chemists of eminence on both sides of the water, that, though he had not verified the elements of these fluids by analysis, he was perfectly acquainted with their nature, that the composition of air was a mere theory, but that his opponent's view was not held by any savance of note. The latter merely replied, When you next light a candle, you may be thankful that there is no hydrogen in the air, after which there was a temporary cessation of hostilities. But towards night, being still unwarrant by the disconfitures of the morning, he propounded some questions which his companions could not answer, among which was, Why are there black sheep? How he would have solved this difficult problem in natural history I do not know. Mystification sat on all faces when the individual who had before attacked Mr. Latham's misstatements took up the defense of the puzzled colonists by volunteering to answer the question if he would explain how impossible roots enter equations. No reply was given to this when, on some of the gentlemen urging him, perhaps rather mischievously to answer, he retorted angrily, I am a master of mathematics as well as of other sciences, but I see there is an intention to make fun of me. I don't choose to be made a bud of, and I'll show you that I can be as savage as other people. This threat had the effect of producing a total silence for the remainder of the journey, but Mr. Latham took an opportunity of explaining to me that in this speech he intended no personal illusion, but had found it necessary to check the ill-timed mirth in the stage. In spite of his presumption and pedantry he never lost an opportunity of showing kindness. I saw him last in the very extremity of terror during a violent gale off the coast of Maine. For the first fifty miles after leaving the bend our road lay through country as solitary and wild as could be conceived, high hills covered with endless forests of small growth. I looked in vain for the gigantic trees so celebrated by travelers in America. If they ever grew in this region they now, in the shape of ships, are to be found on every sea where England's flag waves. Occasionally the smoke of an Indian wigwam would rise in a thin blue cloud from among the dark foliage of the hemlock, and by the primitive habitation one of the aboriginal possessors of the soil might be seen, in tattered habillement, cleaning a gun or repairing a bark canoe, scarcely daining an apathetic glance at those whom the appliances of civilization and science had placed so immeasurably above him. Then a squaw, with a papu strapped upon her back, would peep at us from behind a tree, or a half-clothed urchin would pursue us for coppers, contrasting strangely with the majesty of Uncus, or the sublimity of Chingachook, portraits which it is very doubtful if Cooper ever took from life. In the few places where the land had been cleared the cultivation was tolerable and the house is comfortable, surrounded generally by cattle-sheds and rich crops of tartarian oats. The potatoes appear to be free from disease and the pumpkin crop was evidently abundant and in good condition. Sussex Valley, along which we passed for thirty miles, is green, wooded, and smilingly fertile, being watered by a clear rapid river. The numerous haimos and the neat appearance of the arable land reminded me of England. It is surprising, considering the advantages possessed by New Brunswick, that it has not been a more favorable resort of emigrants. It seems to me that one great reason of this must be the difficulty and expense of land-traveling, as the province's destitute of the means of internal communication in the shape of railways and canals. It contains several navigable rivers, and the tracks of country near the St. John, the Petticoat, and the Miramichi rivers are very fertile and adapted for cultivation. The lakes and minor streams in the interior of the province are also surrounded by rich land and the capacious bays along the coast abound with fish. New Brunswick possesses responsible government and has a governor, an executive council, a legislative council, and a house of assembly. Except that certain expenses of defense, etc., are borne by the home government, which would protect the colony in the event of any predatory incursions on the part of the Americans, it has all the advantages of being an independent nation, and it is believed that the reciprocity treaty, recently concluded with the United States, will prove of great commercial benefit. Yet the number of emigrants who have sought its shores is comparatively small, and these arrivals were almost exclusively of the laboring classes, attracted by the extraordinarily high rate of wages, and were chiefly absorbed by mechanical employments. The numbers landed in 1853 were 3,762, and in 1854, 3,618. With respect to the general affairs of New Brunswick, it is very satisfactory to observe that the provincial revenue has increased upwards of 200,000 pounds per annum. Fredrickton, a town of about 9,000 inhabitants on the St. John River, by which it has a daily communication with the city of St. John, 90 miles distant by steamer, is the capital and seat of government. New Brunswick has considerable mineral wealth, coal and iron are abundant, and the climate is less foggy than that of Nova Scotia, but these great natural advantages are suffered to lie nearly dormant. The colonists are very hardy and extremely loyal, but the vice of drinking, so prevalent in northern climates, has recently called for legislative interference. We stopped at the end of every stage of 18 miles to change horses, and at one of the little ends, an old man brought to the door of the stage a very pretty, interesting looking girl of fifteen years old, and placed her under my care, requesting me to see her safely to her home in St. John, and not allow any of the gentlemen to be rude to her. The latter part of the instructions was very easy to fulfill, as whatever faults the colonists possess they are extremely respectful in their manners to ladies. But a difficulty arose, or rather what would have been a difficulty in England, for the stage was full both inside and out, and all the passengers were desirous to reach Boston as speedily as possible. However, a gentleman from New England, seeing the anxiety of the young girl to reach St. John, got out of the stage, and actually remained at the little roadside inn for one whole day and two nights, in order to accommodate a stranger. This act of kindness was performed at great personal inconvenience, and the gentleman who showed it did not appear to attach the slightest merit to it. The novelty of it made a strong impression upon me, and it fully bore out all I had read or heard of the most exaggerated difference to ladies which custom requires from American gentlemen. After darkness came on, the tedium of a journey of twenty hours performed while sitting in a very cramped posture was almost insupportable, and the monotony of it was only broken by the number of wooden bridges which we crossed, and the driver's admonition, bridge dangerous, passengers get out and walk. The night was very cold and frosty, and so productive of anguished chills that I was not at all sorry for the compelled pedestrianism entailed upon me by the insecure state of these bridges. My young charge seemed extremely timid while crossing them, and uttered a few suppressed shrieks when curious splitting noises, apparently proceeding from the woodwork, broke the stillness. There was I altogether surprised at her emotions when, as we were walking over a bridge nearly half a mile in length, I was told that a coach and six horses had disappeared through it a fortnight before, at the cost of several broken limbs. While crossing the St. John near the pretty town of Hampton, one of our leaders put both his forefeet into a hole, and was with difficulty extricated. Precisely at midnight the stage clattered down the steep streets of the city of St. John, to which the ravages of the cholera had recently given such a terrible celebrity. After a fruitless pilgrimage to three hotels we were at length received at Waverly House, having accomplished a journey of one hundred miles in twenty hours. On ringing my bell it was answered by a rough porter, and I soon found that waiting chambermaids are not essential at transatlantic hotels, and the female servants, or rather helps, are of a very superior class. A friend of mine, John leaving an hotel at Niagara, offered a dexur in the shape of half a dollar to one of these, but she drew herself up and proudly replied, American ladies do not receive money from gentlemen. Having left my keys at the bend, I found my valise a useless encumbrance, rather annoying after a week of travelling. We spent the Sunday at St. John, and the opportune arrival of my keys enabling me to don some Abiliman suitable to the day, I went to the church, where the service, with the exception of the sermon, was very well performed. A solemn thanksgiving for the removal of the cholera was read, and it was rendered very impressive by the fact that most of the congregation were in new mourning. The angel of death had long hovered over the doomed city, which lost rather more than a tenth of its population from a disease which in the hot summer of America is nearly as fatal and terrible as the plague. All who could leave the town fled, but many carried the disease with them and died upon the road. The hotels, shipyards, and stores were closed, bodies rudely nailed up in boards were hurried about the streets, and met with hasty burial outside the city, before vital warmth had fled. The holy ties of natural affection were disregarded, and the dying were left alone to meet the king of terrors, none remaining to close their eyes. The ominous clang of the death-bell was heard both night and day, and a dense brown fog was supposed to brood over the city, which for five weeks was the abode of the dying and the dead. A temporary regard for religion was produced among the inhabitants of St. John by the visit of the pestilence. It was scarcely possible for the most sceptical not to recognize the overruling providence of God, and I have seldom seen more external respect for the Sabbath and the ordinances of religion than in this city. The preponderance of the rougher sex was very strongly marked at Waverly House. Fifty gentlemen sat down to dinner, and only three ladies, inclusive of the landlady. Fifty-three cups of tea graced the table, which was likewise ornamented with six boiled legs of mutton, numerous dishes of splendid potatoes and corn cobs, squash and pumpkin pie in true colonial abundance. I cannot forbear giving a conversation which took place at a meal at this inn. It is very characteristic of the style of persons whom one continually meets with in travelling in these colonies. I guess you're from the old country, commenced my vis-à-vis, to which recognition of my nationality I humbly bowed. What do you think of us here down east? I have been so short of time in these provinces that I cannot form any just opinion. Oh, but you must have formed some. We'd like to know what old country folks think of us. Thus asked I could not avoid making some reply, and said, I think there is a great want of systematic enterprise in these colonies. You do not avail yourselves of the great natural advantages which you possessed. Well, the fact is, old Father Jackie Bullock to help us, or let us go off on our own hook right entirely. You have responsible government, and to use your own phrase you are on your own hook in all but the name. Well, I guess we are. We're a long chalk above the Yankees, though them as fellers as think nobody's got their eye-teeth cut but themselves. The self-complacent ignorance with which this mark was made was ludicrous in the extreme. He began again, what do you think of Nova Scotia and the Blue Noses? Halifax is a grand place, surely. At Halifax I found the best inn such a one has no respectable American would condescend to sleep at, and a town of shingles with scarcely any sidewalks. The people were talking largely of railways and steamers, yet I traveled by the mail to Truro and picked to in a conveyance that would have scarcely been tolerated in England two centuries ago. The people of Halifax possessed the finest harbor in North America, yet they have no docks and scarcely any shipping. The Nova Scotians, it is known, have iron, coal, slate, limestone, and freestone, and their shores swarm with fish, yet they spend their time in talking about railways, docks, and the House of Assembly and end by walking about doing nothing. Yes, chimed in a Boston sea captain, who had been our fellow passenger from Europe, and prided himself upon being a thorough, going-down Easter. It takes as long for a Blue Nose to put on his hat as for one of our free and enlightened citizens to go from Boston to New Orleans. If we don't whip all creation it's a pity. Why, stranger, if you were to go to Connecticut and tell them what you've been telling the seer-child, they'd guess you'd been with Colonel Crockett. Well, I proceeded in answer to another question from the new Brunswicker. If you wish to go to the north of your own province, you require to go round Nova Scotia by sea. I understand that a railway to the Bay of Chalur has been talked about, but I suppose it has ended where it began, and for want of a railway to Halifax, even the Canadian traffic has been diverted to Portland. We want to invest some of our surplus revenue, said the Captain. It'll be a good speck when Congress buys these colonies. Some of our ten-horsepower chaps will come down, and before you could whistle Yankee Doodle, we'll have a canal to bathe art, with a town as big as New Haven at each end. The Blue Noses will look kind of street then, I guess. The new Brunswicker retorted, with some fierceness, that the handful of British troops at Fredericton could chow up the whole American army, and the conversation continued for some time longer in the same boastful and exaggerated strain on each side, but the above is a specimen of colonial arrogance and American conceit. The population of New Brunswick in 1851 was 193,800, but it is now over 210,000, and will likely increase rapidly should the contemplated extension of the railway system to the province ever take place, as in that case the route to both the Canadas by the port of St. John will probably supersede every other. The spacious harbor of St. John has a sufficient depth of water for vessels of the largest class, and its tidefall of about twenty-five feet effectually prevents it from being frozen in the winter. The timber trade is a most important source of wealth to the colony. The timber floated down the St. John alone in the season of 1852 was of the value of 405,208 pounds sterling. The saw mills, of which by the last census there were 584, gave employment to 4,302 hands. By the same census there were 87 ships, with an average berthin of 400 tons each, built in the year which it was taken, and the number has been on the increase since. These colonial built vessels are gradually acquiring a very high reputation. Some of our finest clippers, including one or two belonging to the celebrated white star line, are by the St. John builders. Perhaps, with the single exception of Canada West, no colony offers such varied inducements to immigrants. I saw as much of St. John as possible, and on a fine day was favorably impressed with it. It well deserves its cognomen, the city of the rock, being situated on a high, bluff, rocky peninsula, backed on the landside by steep barren hills. The harbor is well sheltered and capacious, and the suspension bridge above the falls very picturesque. The streets are steep, wide, and well paved, and the stores are more pretentious than those of Halifax. There is also a very handsome square, with a more respectable fountain in it than those which excite the ridicule of foreigners in front of our National Gallery. It is a place where a large amount of business is done, and the shipyards alone give employment to several thousand persons. Yet the lower parts of the town are dirty in the extreme. I visited some of the streets near the water before the cholera had quite disappeared from them, nor did I wonder that the pestilence should linger in places so appropriate to itself, for the roadways were strewn to a depth of several inches with sawdust, emitting a foul decomposing smell, and in which lean pigs were rooting and fighting. Yet St. John wears a lively aspect. You see a thousand boatmen, raftmen, and millmen, some warping, dingy scows, others loading huge, square-sided ships, busy gangs of men in fustian jackets, engaged in running off the newly sawed timber, and the streets bustling with storekeepers, lumber merchants, and marketmen, all combining to produce a chaos of activity very uncommon in the towns of our North American colonies. But too often murky-looking wharves, storehouses, and half-dismantled ships are enveloped in a drizzling fog, the fog rendered yet more impenetrable by the fumes of coal tar and sawdust, and the lower streets swarm with a demoralized population. Yet the people of St. John are so far beyond the people of Halifax that I heartily wish them success, and a railroad. The air was ringing with the clang of a thousand saws and hammers, when, at seven on the morning of a brilliant August day, we walked through the swarming streets bordering upon the harbor to the Ornivorgh steamer, belonging to the United States, built for Long Island Sound, but now used as a coasting steamer. All my preconceived notions of a steamer were here at fault. If it were anything in nature it was like Noah's Ark, or, to come to something post-Diluvian, one of those covered hulls, or ships in ordinary, which are to be seen at Portsmouth and Devonport. She was totally unlike an English ship, painted entirely white, without mass, with two small black funnels alongside each other, and several erections one above the other for decks, containing multitudes of windows about two feet square. The fabric seemed kept together by two large beams, which added to the top heavy appearance of the whole affair. We entered by the paddle-box, which was within the outer casing of the ship, in company with a great crowd, into a large, square, uncarpeted apartment, called the hall, with offices at the sides for the sale of railway and dinner tickets. Separated from this by a curtain is the lady's saloon, a large and almost two-ary apartment extending from the hall to the stem of the ship, well furnished with sofas, rocking chairs, and marble tables. A row of berths runs along the side, hung with festooned drapery of satin damask, the curtain's being of muslin, embroidered with rose-colored braid. Above this is the general saloon, a large, handsomely furnished room, with state rooms running down each side, and opening upon a small deck fourteen feet long, also covered, the roof of this and of the saloon, forming the real, or hurricane, deck of the ship, closed to passengers, and twelve feet above which works the beam of the engine. Below the hall, running the whole length of the ship, is the gentleman's cabin, containing one hundred and seventy berths. This is lighted by artificial light and is used for meals. An enclosure for the engine occupies the center, but is very small, as the machinery of a high, pressure engine is without the encumbrances of a condenser and air-pump. The engines drove the unwieldy fabric through the calm water at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. I have been thus minute in my description, because this one will serve for all the steamers in which I subsequently traveled in the United States and Canada. The city of St. John looked magnificent on its lofty steep, and for some time we had some very fine coastal scenery, lofty granite cliffs rising abruptly from the water, clothed with forests, the sea adjoining them so deep that we passed them as proved by actual demonstration within a stone's throw. At one we arrived at Eastport, in Maine, a thriving-looking place, and dinner was served while we were question at the wharf. The stewardess hunted up all the females in the ship, and, preceding them downstairs, placed them at the head of the table. Then, and not an instant before, were the gentlemen allowed to appear, who made a most obstiferous rush at the Veyons. There were about two hundred people seated in a fetid and dimly-lighted apartment at a table covered over with odiferous Veyons, pork stuffed with onions, boiled legs of mutton, boiled chickens and turkeys, roast geese, beef steaks, yams, tomatoes, squash, mush, corn cobs, Johnny cake, and those endless dishes of pastry to which the American palate is so partial. I was just finishing a plate of soup when a waiter touched me on the shoulder, dinner ticket, or fifty cents, and almost before I had comprehended the mysteries of American money sufficiently to pay, other people were eating their dessert. So simple, however, is the coinage of the United States, that in two days I understood it as well as our own. Five dollars equal an English sovereign, and one hundred cents make a dollar, and with this very moderate amount of knowledge one can conduct one's pecuniary affairs all over the Union. The simplicity of the calculation was quite a relief to me after the relative values of the English sovereign in the colonies, which had greatly perplexed me. Twenty-five shillings, six pence in New Brunswick, twenty-five shillings in Nova Scotia, and thirty shillings in Prince Edward Island. I sat on deck till five when I went down to my birth. As the evening closed in gloomily the sea grew coarser, and I heard the captain say, We are likely to have a very fresh night of it. At seven a wave went down the companion-way, and washed half the tea-things off the table, and before I fell asleep the mate put his head through the curtain to say, It's a rough night, ladies, but there's no danger, a left-handed way of giving courage, which of course frightened the timid. About eleven I was awoke by confused cries, and in my dawning consciousness everything seemed going to pieces. The curtain was undrawn, and I could see the hall continually swept by the waves. Everything in our saloon was loose. Rocking chairs were careering about the floor and coming into collision. The stewardess, half dressed, was crawling about from birth to birth, answering the inquiries of terrified ladies, and the ship was groaning and straining heavily. But I slept again, till awoke at midnight by a man's voice shouting, Get up, ladies, and dress, but don't come out till you're called. The gales very heavy. One followed a scene. People, helpless in illness a moment before, sprang out of their births and hastily huddled on their clothes. Mothers caught hold of their infants with a convulsed grasp. Some screamed, others sat down in apathy, while not a few addressed agonized supplications to that God, too often neglected in times of health and safety, to save them in their supposed extremity. Crash went the lamp which was suspended from the ceiling as a huge wave struck the ship, making her real and stagger, and shrieks of terror followed this event, which left us in almost total darkness. Rush came another heavy wave, sweeping up the saloon, carrying chairs and stools before it, and as rapidly retiring. The hall was full of men, clinging to the supports, each catching the infectious fear from his neighbor. Wave after wave now struck the ship. I heard the captain say the sea was making a clean breach over her, and order her deck load overboard. Shortly after, the water, sweeping in from above, put out the engine fires, and as she settled down continually in the trough of the sea, and lay trembling there as though she would never rise again, even in my ignorance I knew she had no way on her, and was at the mercy of the waters. I now understood the meaning of blowing great guns. The wind sounded like continual discharges of heavy artillery, and the waves as they struck the ship felt like cannonballs. I could not get up and dress, for being in the top berth I was unable to get out in consequence of the rolling of the ship, and so, being unable to mend matters, I lay quietly, the hull passing before me as a scene. I had several times been called on to anticipate death from illness, but here, as I heard the men say, she's going down, she's waterlogged, she can't hold together, there was a different prospect of sinking down among the long trailing weeds in the cold, deep waters of the Atlantic. Towards three o'clock, a wave, striking the ship, threw me against a projecting beam of the side, cutting my head severely and stunning me, and I remained insensible for three hours. We continued in great danger for ten hours, many expecting each moment to be their last, but in the morning the gale moderated, and by most strenuous exertions at the pumps the water was kept down till assistance was rendered, which enabled us about one o'clock to reach the friendly harbor of Portland in Maine, with considerable damage and both our boats stove. Deep thankfulness was expressed by many at such an unlooked for termination of the night's terrors and adventures, many the resolutions expressed not to trust the sea again. We were speedily moored to the wharf at Portland, amid a forest of masts, the stars and stripes flaunted gaily overhead in concert with the American eagle, and as I stepped upon those shores on which the sanguins opposed the Anglo-Saxon race is to renew the vigour of its youth, I felt that a new era of my existence had begun. CHAPTER V of the English Woman in America by Isabella Lucy Bird CHAPTER V The city of Portland, with its busy streets and crowded wharfs and handsome buildings and railway depots, rising as it does on the barren coast of the sterile state of Maine, fully bears out the first part of an assertion which I had already heard made by Americans. We're a great people, the greatest nation on the face of the earth. A polite custom house officer asked me if I had anything contraband in my trunks, and on my reply in the negative they were permitted to pass without even the formality of being uncoorded. Enlightened citizens they are truly, I thought, and with the pleasant consciousness of being in a perfectly free country where everyone can do as he pleases, I entered an hotel near the water and sat down in the lady's parlor. I had not tasted food for twenty-five hours, my clothes were cold and wet, a severe cut was on my temple and I felt thoroughly exhausted. These circumstances, I thought, justified me in ringing the bell and asking for a glass of wine. Visions of the agreeable refreshment which would be produced by the juice of the grape appeared simultaneously with the waiter. I made the request, and he breastfully replied, You can't have it, it's contrary to law. In my half-drowned and faint condition the refusal appeared tatamount to positive cruelty, and I remembered that I had come in contact with the celebrated Maine Law. But the inhabitants of the State of Maine are not free, was thus placed practically before me at once. Whether they are enlightened, I doubted at the time, but leave the question of the prohibition of fermented liquors to be decided by Abler's social economists than myself. I was hereafter informed that to those who goes downstairs and ask to see the striped pig, wine and spirits are produced, that a request to speak with Dusty Ben has a like effect, and that on asking for sassaparilla at certain stores in the town the desired stimulant can be obtained. Indeed it is said that the consumption of this drug is greater in Maine than in all the other states put together. But injustice to this highly respectable State, I must add that the drunkenness which forced this stringent measure upon the legislature was among the thousands of English and Irish immigrants who land annually at Portland. My only companion here was a rosy-cheeked, simple country girl who was going to Kennebunk, and never having been from home before had not the slightest idea what to do. Presuming on my antiquated appearance she asked me to take care of her and to get her ticket for her, for she daren't ask those men for it and to let her sit by me in the car. She said she was so frightened with something that she'd seen that she didn't know how she should go in the cars. I asked her what it was. Oh! she said, it was a great thing, bright red, with I don't know how many wheels, and a large black top, and bright shining things moving about all over it, and smoke and steam coming out of it, and it made such an awful noise that it seemed to shake the earth. At half-past three we entered the cars in a long shed, where there were no officials in uniform as in England, and we found our way as we could. All aboard is the signal for taking places, but on this occasion a loud shout of tumble-in-fear lives greeted my amused ears, seceded by, go ahead, and off we went, the engineer tolling a heavy bell to notify our approach to the passengers in the streets along which we passed. America has certainly flourished under her motto, go ahead, but the cautious all-right of an English guard who waits to start till he is sure of his ground being clear gives one more confidence. I never experienced the same amount of fear which is expressed by Bunn and other riders, for, on comparing the number of accidents with the number of miles of railway open in America, I did not find the disadvantage in point of safety on her side. The cars are a complete novelty to an English eye. They are twenty-five feet long and hold about sixty persons. They have twelve windows on either side, and two and a door at each end. A passage runs down the middle, with chairs to hold two each on either side. There is a small saloon for ladies with babies at one end, and a filter containing a constant supply of iced water. There are rings along the roof for a rope which passes through each car to the engine, so that anything wrong can be communicated instantly to the engineer. Every car has eight solid wheels, four being placed close together at each end, all of which can be locked by two powerful brakes. At each end of every car is a platform, and passengers are prohibited from standing upon it at their peril, as also from passing from car to car while the train is in motion. But as no penalty attaches to this law, it is incessantly and continuously violated, free and enlightened citizens being at perfect liberty to imperil their own necks, and poor, ignorant, benighted Britishers soon learn to follow their example. Persons are forever passing backwards and forwards, exclusive of the conductor whose business it is, and water carriers, book, bonbon, and peach-vendors. No person connected with these railways wears a distinguishing dress, and the stations, or depots as they are called, are generally of the meanest description, mere wooden sheds with a ticket office very difficult to discover. If you are so fortunate as to find a man standing at the door of the baggage-car, he attaches copper plates to your trunks, with a number and the name of the place you are going to upon them, giving you labels with corresponding numbers. By this excellent arrangement, in going a very long journey in which you are obliged to change cars several times, and cross rivers and lakes and steamers, you are relieved of all responsibility, and only require, at the end, to give your checks to the hotel porter who regains your baggage without any trouble on your part. This plan would be worthily imitated at our termini in England, where I have frequently seen unprotected females in the last stage of frenzy at being pushed out of the way, while some persons unknown are running off with their possessions. When you reach a depot, as there are no railway porters, numerous men clamor to take your effects to a hotel, but as many of these are thieves, it is necessary to be very careful in only selecting those who have hotel badges on their hats. An immigrant car is attached to each train, but there is only one class. Thus it may happen that you have on one side the President of the Great Republic, and on the other the gentleman who blacked your shoes in the morning. The Americans, however, have too much respect for themselves and their companions to travel except in good clothes, and this mingling of all ranks is far from being disagreeable, particularly to a stranger like myself, one of whose objects was to see things in their everyday dress. We must be well aware that in many parts of England it would be difficult for a lady to travel unattended in a second class, impossible in a third class carriage, yet I traveled several thousand miles in America, frequently alone, from the house of one friend to another's, and never met with anything approaching to incivility, and I have often heard it stated that a lady, no matter what her youth or attractions might be, could travel alone through every state in the Union and never meet with anything but attention and respect. I have had considerable experience of the cars, having traveled from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence, and found the company so agreeable in its way, and the cars themselves so easy, well ventilated and comfortable, that were it not for the disgusting practice of spitting upon the floors in which the lower classes of Americans dulled, I should greatly prefer them to our own exclusive carriages, denominated in the state's coon sentry boxes. Well, we are seated in the cars, a man shouts go ahead and we are off, the engine ringing its heavy bell, and thus begin my experiences of American travel. I found myself in company with eleven gentlemen and a lady from Prince Edward Island, whom a strange, gregarious instinct had thus drawn together. The engine gave a hollow groan, very unlike our cheerful whistle, and soon moving through the town we reached the open country. Fair was the country that we passed through in the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Oh, very fair, smiling, cultivated in green, like England, but far happier, for slavery which disgraces the New World, and poverty which desolates the old, are nowhere to be seen. There were many farmhouses surrounded by the nearly finished harvest, with verandas covered with vines and roses, and patriarchal looking family groups seated under them, engaged in different employments, and enjoying the sunset, for here it was gorgeous summer. And there were smaller houses of wood painted white, with bright, green geluces in gardens of pumpkins and surrounded by orchards. Apples seemed almost to grow wild, there were as many orchards as cornfields, and apple and pear trees grew in the very hedgerows. And such apples, not like our small, sour, flavorless things, but some southern fruit, huge balls, red and yellow, such as our caricatured in wood, weighing down the fine, large trees. There were heaps of apples on the ground, and horses and cows were eating them in the fields, and rows of freight cars at all the stations were laden with them, and little boys were selling them in the cars, in short, where were they not? There were smiling fields with verdant hedgerows between them, unlike the untidy snake fences of the colonies, and meadows like parks, dotted over with trees, and woods filled with sumac and scarlet maple, and rapid streams hurrying over white pebbles, and villages of green jaloused houses, with churches and spires, for here all places of worship have spires, and the mellow light of a declining sun streamed over this varied scene of happiness, prosperity, and comfort, and for a moment I thought, oh, traitorous thought, that the New England was fairer than the old. Nor were the more material evidences of prosperity wanting, for we passed through several large towns near the coast, Newberry Port, Salem, and Portsmouth, with populations varying from thirty to fifty thousand souls. They seemed bustling, thriving places, with handsome stores, which we had an opportunity of observing, as in the states the cars run right into the streets along the carriage way, traffic being merely diverted from the track while the cars are upon it. Most of the railways in the states have only one track or line of rails, with occasional slidings at the stations for the cars to pass each other. Offense is by no means a matter of necessity, and two or three animals are destroyed every day from straying on the line. The engines, which are nearly twice the size of ours, with a covered enclosure for the engineer and stoker, carry large fenders or guards in front, to lift encumbrances from the track. At eight o'clock we found ourselves passing over water and between long rows of gas lights, and shortly afterwards the cars stopped at Boston, the Athens of America. Giving our baggage checks to the porter of the American house, we drove to that immense hotel where I remained for one night. It was crammed from the very basement to the most undesirable locality nearest the moon. I believe that it had seven hundred inmates. I arranged to travel to Connecticut and from thence to Toronto with Mr. and Mrs. Walrants, but on reaching Boston I found that they feared fever and cholera, and leaving me to travel alone from Albany would meet me at Chicago. Under these circumstances I remained with my island friends for one night at this establishment, a stranger in a land where I had few acquaintances, though I was well armed with letters of introduction. One of these was to Mr. Amy, a highly respected merchant of Boston, who had previously informed me by letter of the best route to the States, and I immediately dispatched a note to him, but he was absent at his country house, and I was left to analyze the feeling of isolation inseparable from being alone in a crowd. Having received the key of my room I took my supper in an immense hall, calculated for dining four hundred persons. I next went into the lady's parlor and felt rather out of place among so many richly dressed females, for as I was proceeding to write a letter a porter came in and told me that writing was not allowed in that saloon. Freedom again, thought I. On looking round I did feel that my antiquated goose-quill and rusty-looking ink-stand were rather out of place. The carpet of the room was of a richly floured Victoria pile, rendering the heaviest footstep noiseless. The tables were marble on gilded pedestals, the couches covered with gold brocade. At a piano of rich workmanship an elegantly dressed lady was seated, singing, And will you love me always? A question apparently satisfactorily answered by the speaking eyes of a bearded southerner who was turning over the pages for her. A fountain of antique workmanship threw up a jet dough of iced water, scented with odour cologne, and the hole was lighted by four splendid chandeliers intermittently reflected, for the walls were mirrors divided by marble pillars. The room seemed appropriate to the purposes to which it was devoted, music, needle-work, conversation, and flirting. With the single exception of the rule against writing in the Lady's Saloon, a visitor at these immense establishments is at perfect liberty to do as he pleases, provided he pays the moderate charge of two dollars or eight shillings a day. This includes, even at the best hotels, a splendid table-dote, a comfortable bedroom, lights, attendance, and society in abundance. From the servants one meets with great attention, not combined with deference of manner, still less with that obsequiousness which informs you, by a suggestive bow, at the end of your visit, that it has been meted out with a reference to the probable amount of half-sovereigns, shillings, and sixpences at your disposal. It will not be out of place here to give a sketch of the peculiarities of the American hotel system, which constitutes such a distinctive feature of life in the United States, and is a requirement arising out of the enormous extent of their territory, and the nomad life led by vast numbers of the most restless and energetic people under the sun. People will turn hastily over the pages when they come to this, was the remark of a lively critic on reading this announcement, but while I promised my readers that hotels shall only be described once, I could not reconcile it to myself not to give them information on things as they are in America when I had an opportunity of acquiring it. The American house at Boston, which is a fair specimen of the best class of hotels in the States, though more frequented by mercantile men than by tourists, is built of gray granite, with a frontage to the streets of one hundred feet. The ground floor to the front is occupied by retail stores, in the center of which a lofty double doorway denotes the entrance, marked in a more characteristic manner by groups of gentlemen smoking before it. This opens into a lofty and very spacious hall, with a checkered floor of black and white marble. There are lounges against the wall, covered over with buffalo skins, and except at mealtimes this capacious apartment is a scene of endless busy life, from two to three hundred gentlemen constantly thronging it, smoking at the door, lounging on the satis, reading the newspapers, standing in animated groups discussing commercial matters, arriving or departing. Examples of luggage in which one sees with dismay one's light traveling valise crushed under a gigantic trunk occupy the center. Porters seated on a form wait for orders, parapetetic individuals walk to and fro, a confused babble of voices is ever ascending to the galleries above, and at the door, hacks, like the ale-vagon of Germany are ever depositing fresh arrivals. There is besides this a private entrance for ladies. At the entrance is a counter, where four or five clerks constantly attend, under the superintendence of a cashier, to whom all applications for rooms are personally made. I went up to this functionary, wrote my name in a book. He placed a number against it, and giving me a key with a corresponding number attached, I followed a porter down a long corridor, and up to a small, clean room on the third story, where to all intents and purposes my identity was lost, searched in a mere numeral. At another side of the hall is the bar, a handsomely decorated apartment, where lovers of such beverages can procure toddy, night-caps, mint-julip, ginsling, etc. On the door of my very neat and comfortable bedroom was a printed statement of the rules, times of meals, and charge per diem. I believe there are nearly three hundred rooms in this house, some of them being bedrooms as large and comodious as in a private mansion in England. On the level of the entrance is a magnificent eating saloon, principally devoted to male guests, and which is eighty feet long. Upstairs is a large room furnished with a rare combination of splendor and taste, called the Lady's Ordinary, where families, ladies, and their invited guests take their meals. Breakfast is at the early hour of seven, and remains on the table till nine, dinner is at one, and tea at six. At these meals every delicacy of the season is served in perfusion, the Daily Bill of Fair would do credit to a banquet at the mansion-house, the chef de cuisine is generally French, and an epicure would find ample scope for the gratification of his pallet. If people persist in taking their meals in a separate apartment, they are obliged to pay dearly for the indulgence of their exclusiveness. There are more than one hundred waiters, and the ladies at the table are always served first, and to the best pieces. Though it is not part of the hotel system, I cannot forbear mentioning the rapidity with which the Americans dispatch their meals. My next neighbor has frequently risen from his seat after a substantial and varied dinner while I was sending away my soup plate. The effect of this at a table-dote, where four hundred or six hundred sit down to dine, is unpleasant, for the swing-door is incessantly in motion. Indeed, the utter absence of repose is almost the first thing which strikes a stranger. The incessant sound of bells and gongs, the rolling of hacks to and from the door, the arrivals and departures every minute, the trampling of innumerable feet, the flirting and talking in every corridor, make these immense hotels more like a human beehive than anything else. The drawing-rooms are always kept very hot by huge fires of anthracite coal, and the doors are left open to neutralize the effect. The temperance at table filled me with surprise. I very seldom saw any beverage but pure iced water. There are conveniences of all descriptions for the use of the guest. The wires of the electric telegraph, constantly attended by a clerk, run into the hotel. Porters are ever ready to take your messages into the town. Pens, paper, and ink await you in recesses in the lobbies. A man is ever at hand to clean and brush soiled boots. In short, there is every contrivance for abridging your labor and mounting up the stairs. But the method of avoiding the confusion and din of two or three hundred bells must not be omitted. All the wires from the different rooms center at one bell, which is located in a case in the lobby, with the mechanism seen on one side through a sheet of plate glass. The other side of the case is covered with numbers in rows. By each number is a small straight piece of brass which drops and hangs down when the bell is sounded, displaying the number to the attention of the clerk, who sends a waiter to the apartment and places the piece of brass in its former position. Steam laundries are connected with all the large hotels. At American House the laundry is under the management of a clerk, who records all the minor details. The linen is cleansed in a churn-like machine moved by steam and wrung by a novel application of the principle of centrifugal force, after which the articles are dried by being passed through currents of hot air so that they are washed and ironed in the space of a few minutes. The charge varies from six to ten shillings a dozen. There are also suites of hot and cold baths and barber's shops. Before I understood the mysteries of these hotels, I used to be surprised to see gentlemen traveling without even carpet bags. But it soon appeared that razors and hair brushes were superfluous, and that the possessor of one shirt might always pass as the owner of half a dozen, for while taking a bath the magic laundry would reproduce the article in its pristine glories of whiteness and starch. Every attendant to the comfort and luxury of the guest is paid at American House, and its spirited proprietor, Mr. Rice, serves the patronage which the travelling public so liberally bestow upon him. On ringing my bell it was answered by a garçon, and it is rather curious seldom or never to see a chamber-mate. CHAPTER VI of the English Woman in America by Isabella Lucy Byrd. I rose the morning after my arrival at five, hoping to leave Boston for Cincinnati by the Lightning Express, which left at eight. But on summoning the cashier, or rather requesting his attendance, for one never summons any one in the States, and showing him my hill of exchange drawn on Barkley and Company of London, he looked at me, then at it, suspiciously, as if doubting whether the possessor of such a little way-worn portmanteau could be the bona-fide owner of such a sum as the figures represented. There is so much bad paper going about, we can't possibly accommodate you, was the discouraging reply, so I was compelled patiently to submit to the detention. I breakfasted at seven in the lady's ordinary, without exchanging a syllable with any one, and soon after my kind friend, Mr. Amy, called upon me. He proved himself a friend indeed, and his kindness gave me at once a favourable impression of the Americans. First impressions are not always correct, but I am happy to say that they were fully borne out, in this instance, by the uniform kindness and hospitality which I experienced during my whole tour. Mr. Amy soon procured me the money for my bill, all in five dollar notes, and I was glad to find the exchange greatly in favour of England. He gave me much information about my route, and various customs which I found very useful, and then drove me in a light wagon round the antiquated streets of Boston, crowded with the material evidences of prosperity, to his pretty villa three miles distant, in one of the villages of ornamental dwelling-houses which render the appearance of the environs of Boston peculiarly attractive. I saw a good deal of the town in my drive, but as I returned to it before leaving the States, I shall defer my description of it, and request my readers to dash away at once with me to the far west, the goal alike of the traveller and the adventurer, and the El Dorado of the emigrant's misty ideas. Leaving American house with its hull swarming like a hive of bees, I drove to the depot in a hack with several fellow passengers. Mr. Amy, who was executing a commission for me in the town, having promised to meet me there, but he being detained I arrived alone and was deposited among piles of luggage in a perfect babble of men vociferating, where are you for, lightning-express, all aboard for Western cars, et cetera. Someone pounced upon my trunks and was proceeding to weigh them when the stage-driver stepped forward and said, it's a lady's luggage upon which he relinquished his intention. He also took my ticket for me, handed me to the cars, and then withdrew, wishing me a pleasant journey, his prompt civility having assisted me greatly in the chaotic confusion which attends the departure of a train in America. The cars by which I left were guaranteed to take people to Cincinnati a distance of one thousand miles in forty hours, allowing time for refreshments. I was to travel by five different lines of railway, but this part of the railway system is so well arranged that I only took a ticket once, rather a curious document, a strip of paper half a yard long, with passes for five different roads upon it. Thus, whenever I came upon a fresh line, the conductor tore off a piece, giving me a ticket in exchange. Tickets are not only to be procured at the stations, but at several offices in every town, in all the steamboats and in the cars themselves. For the latter luxury, for such it must certainly be considered, as it enables one to step into the cars at the last moment without any preliminaries, one only pays five cents extra. The engine told its heavy bell, and soon we were amid the beauties of New England, rocky hills, small lakes, rapid streams, and trees distorted into every variety of the picturesque. At the next station from Boston the Walrances joined me. We were to travel together, with our ulterior destination, a settlement in Canada West, but they would not go to Cincinnati. There were lions in the streets, cholera and yellow fever. They said were raging. In short, they left me at Springfield to find my way in a strange country as best I might, our rendezvous to be Chicago. At Springfield I obtained the first seat in the car, generally the object of most undignified elbowing, and had space to admire the beauties among which we passed. For many miles we traveled through a narrow gorge between very high precipitous hills, clothed with wood up to their summits, those still higher rising behind them, while the track ran along the very edge of a clear rushing river. The darkness, which soon came on, was only enlivened by the sparks from the wood fire of the engine, so numerous and continuous as to look like a display of fireworks. Just before we reached Albany a very respectable looking man got into the car, and as his manners were very quiet and civil, we entered into civilization about the trade and manufacturers of the neighborhood. When we got out of the cars on the east side of the river he said he was going no farther, but as I was alone he would go across with me and see me safe into the cars at the other side. He also offered to carry my reticule and umbrella and looked after my luggage. His civility so excited my suspicions of his honesty that I did not trust my luggage or reticule out of my sight, mindful of a notice posted up at all the stations, beware of swindlers, pickpockets and luggage thieves. We emerged from the cars upon the side of the Hudson River in a sea of mud, where, had not my friend offered me his arm as Americans of every class invariably due to an unprotected female in a crowd, I should have been borne down and crushed by the shoals of knapsack-carrying pedestrians and truck-pushing porters who swarmed down the dirty wharf. The transit across occupied fully ten minutes, in consequence of the numerous times the engine had to be reversed, to avoid running over the small craft which infest this stream. My volunteer escort took me through a crowd through which I could not have found my way alone, and put me into the cars which started from the side of a street in Albany, requesting the conductor, whose countenance instantly pre-possessed me in his favour, to pay me every attention on the route. He remained with me until the car started and told me that when he saw ladies travelling alone he always made a point of assisting them. I shook hands with him at parting, feeling real regret at losing so kind and intelligent a companion. This man was a working engineer. Some time afterwards, while travelling for two successive days and nights in an unsettled district in the west, on the second night fairly overcome with fatigue, and unable from the crowded state of the car to rest my feet on the seat in front, I tried unsuccessfully to make a pillow from my head by rolling up my cloak, which attempts being perceived by a working mechanic he accosted me thus. Stranger, I guess you're almost used up. Maybe you'd be more comfortable if you could rest your head. Without further parley he spoke to his companion, a man in a similar grade in society. They both gave up their seats and rolled a coat round the arm of the chair, which formed a very comfortable sofa, and these two men stood for an hour and a half to give me the advantage of it, apparently without any idea that they were performing a deed of kindness. I met continually with these acts of hearty, unaustentious good nature. I mention these injustice to the lower classes of the United States, whose rugged exteriors and uncouth vernacular render them peculiarly liable to be misunderstood. The conductor quite verified the good opinion which I had formed of him. He turned a chair into a sofa, and lent me a buffalo robe, for hot though the day had been the night was intensely cold, and several times brought me a cup of tea. We were talking on the peculiarities and amount of the breakage power on the American lines as compared with ours, and the interest of the subject made him forget to signal the engine driver to stop at a station. The conversation concluded he looked out of the window. Dear me, he said, we ought to have stopped three miles back. Likely there was no one to get out. At midnight I awoke shivering with cold, having taken nothing for twelve hours, but at two we stopped at something called a courtesy station, and the announcement was made, cars stopped three minutes for refreshments. I got out, it was pitch dark, but I, with a young lady following a lantern into a frame shed floored by the bare earth. Visions of Swindon and Wolverton rose before me, as I saw a long table supported on rude trestles, bearing several cups of steaming tea, while a dirty boy was opening in frizzling oysters by a wood fire on the floor. I swallowed a cup of scalding tea, some oysters were put upon my plate, six cents was shouted by a nasal voice in my ear, and while hunting for the required sum, all aboard warned me to be quick, and jumping into the cars, just as they were in motion, I left my untasted supper on my plate. After show your tickets, frequently accompanied by a shake, had roused me several times from a sound sleep, we arrived at Rochester, an important town on the Genesee Falls, surrounded by extensive clearings, then covered with whorefrost. Here we were told to get out, as there were twenty minutes for breakfast, but whither should we go when we had got out? We were at the junction of several streets, and five engines with cars attached, were snorting and moving about. After we had run the gauntlet of all these, I found men ringing bells and negroes rushing about, tumbling over each other, striking gongs, and all shouting, the cheapest house in all the world, house for all the nations, a splendid first breakfast for twenty cents, and the light, at length seeing an unassuming placard, hot breakfast twenty-five cents, I ventured in, but an infusion of mint was served instead of the china leaf, and I should be afraid to pronounce upon the antecedents of the stakes. The next place of importance we reached was Buffalo, a large thriving town on the south shore of Lake Erie. There had been an election for Congress at some neighboring place the day before, and my vis-a-vis, the editor of a Buffalo paper, was arguing vociferously with a man on my right. At length he began to talk to me very vivaciously on politics, and concluded by asking me what I thought of the late elections. Wishing to put an end to the conversation, which had become tedious, I replied that I was from England. English, you surprise me, he said, you've not the English accent at all. What do you think of our government? was his next question. Knowing that you started free and had to form your institutions in an enlightened age, and that you had the estimable parts of our constitution to copy from, while its faults were before you to serve as beacons, I think your constitution ought to be nearer perfection than it is. I think our constitution is as near perfection as anything human can be. We are the most free, enlightened, and progressive people under the sun, he answered, rather hotly, but in a few minutes resuming the conversation with his former companion I overheard him say, I think I shall give up politics altogether, I don't believe we have a single public man who is not corrupt. A melancholy result of a perfect constitution and a humiliating confession for an American, I observed. The conversations in the cars are well worth the traveller's attention. They are very frequently on politics, but often one hears stories such as the world has become familiarized with from the early pages of Barnum's autobiography abounding in racy anecdote, broad humour and cunning imposition. At Erie we changed cars, and I saw numerous immigrants setting on large blue boxes, looking disconsolatly about them, the Irish physiognomy being the most predominant. They are generally so dirty that they travel by themselves in a partially lighted van, called the Immigrant's Car, for a most trifling payment. I once got into one by mistake, and was almost sickened by the smell of tobacco, spirits, dirty, fustian, and old leather, which assailed my olfactory organs. Leaving Erie, beyond which the lake of the same name stretched to the distant horizon, blue and calm like a tideless sea, we entered the huge forest on the south shore, through which we passed, I suppose, for more than one hundred miles. My next neighbour was a stalwart, bronzed Kentucky farmer in a palm leaf hat, who, strange to say, never made any demonstrations with his bowie-knife, and having been a lumberer in these forests, pointed out all the objects of interest. The monotonous sublimity of these primeval woods far exceeded my preconceived ideas. We were locked in among gigantic trees of all descriptions, their huge stems frequently rising without a branch for a hundred feet, then breaking into a crown of the most luxuriant foliage. There were walnut, hickory, elm, maple, beech, oak, pine, and hemlock trees. With many others which I did not know, and the only undergrowth a tropical-looking plant with huge leaves and berries like bunches of purple grapes. Though it was the noon of an unclouded sun, all was dark, and still, and lonely. No birds twitted from the branches, no animals enlivened the gloomy shades. No trace of man or of his works was there, except the two iron rails on which we flew along, unfenced from the forest, and those trembling electric wires which will only cease to speak with the extinction of man himself. Very occasionally we would come upon a log shanty, that most picturesque of human habitations, the walls formed of large logs with the interstices filled up with clay, and the roof of rudely sawn logs projecting one or two feet, and kept in their places by logs placed upon them. Windows and doors there were none, but where a door was not I generally saw four or five shoeless ragged urchins whose light-tangled hair and general aspect were sufficient to denote their nationality. Sometimes these cabins would be surrounded by a little patch of cleared land, prolific in Indian corn and pumpkins, the brilliant orange of the latter contrasting with the charred stumps among which they grew, but more frequently the lumberer supported himself solely by his axe. These dwellings are suggestive, for they are erected by the pioneers of civilization, and if the future progress of America be equal in rapidity to its past, in another fifty years the forests will have been converted into lumber and firewood, rich and populous cities will have replaced the cabins and shanties, and the children of the urchins who gazed vacantly upon the cars will have asserted their claims to a voice in the councils of the nation. The rays of the sun never penetrate the forest, and evening was deepening the gloom of the artificial twilight, when gradually we became enveloped in a glare, redder, fiercer than that of moonlight, and looking ahead I saw the forest on fire, and that we were rushing into the flames. Close the windows, there is a fire ahead, said the conductor, and after obeying this commonplace direction, many of the passengers returned to the slumbers which had been so unseasonably disturbed. On, on, we rushed. The flames encircled us round. We were enveloped in clouds of stifling smoke. Crack, crash went the trees. A blazing stem fell across the line. The fender of the engine pushed it aside. The flames hissed like tongues of fire, and then, leaping like serpents, would rush up to the top of the largest tree, and it would blaze like a pine-knot. There seemed no egress, but in a few minutes the raging, roaring configuration was left behind. A forest on fire from a distance looks very much like Punch's picture of a naval review. A near view is the height of sublimity. The dangers of the cars, to my inexperience, seemed by no means over with the escape from being roasted alive. A few miles from Cleveland they rushed down a steep incline, apparently into Lake Erie, but in reality upon a platform supported on piles so narrow that the edges of the cars hung over it so that I saw nothing but water. A gale was blowing and drove the surf upon the platform and the spray against the windows. Having such a feeling of insecurity that for a moment I wished myself in one of our Coon sentry-boxes. The cars were very full after leaving Cleveland, but I contrived to sleep soundly till awakened by the intense cold which attends dawn. It was a glorious morning. The rosy light streamed over hills covered with gigantic trees and park-like glades watered by the fair Ohio. There were bowers of myrtle and vineyards ready for the vintage, and the rich aromatic scent wafted from glorives of blossoming magnolias told me that we were in a different climb and had reached the sunny south. And before us, placed within a perfect amphitheater of swelling hills, reposed a huge city whose countless spires reflected the beams of the morning sun, the creation of yesterday, Cincinnati, the queen city of the west. I drove straight to Burnett House, almost the finest edifice in the town, and after traveling a thousand miles in forty-two hours, without either water or hairbrush, it was the greatest possible luxury to be able to remove the accumulations of soot, dust, and cinders of two days and nights. I spent three days at Clifton, a romantic village three miles from Cincinnati, at the hospitable house of Dr. Milvane, the Bishop of Ohio, but it would be an ill return for the kindness which I there experienced to give details of my visit, or gratify curiosity by describing family life in one of the homes of the new world. CHAPTER VII. The important towns in the United States bear designations of a more poetical nature than might be expected from so commercial a people. New York is the Empire City, Philadelphia the city of brotherly love, Cleveland the forest city, Chicago the prairie city, and Cincinnati the queen city of the west. These names are no less appropriate than poetical, and none more so than that applied to Cincinnati. The view for many of the terraced heights round the town is magnificent. I saw it first bathed in the mellow light of a declining sun. Hill beyond hill, clothed with the rich furdure of an almost tropical climb, slopes of vineyards just ready for the wine-press, magnolias with their fragrant blossoms, and that queen of trees, the beautiful elanthus, the tree of heaven, as it is called, and everywhere foliage so luxuriant that it looked as if autumn and decay could never come. And in a hollow nearest lay the huge city, so full of life, its busy hum rising to the height where I stood, and two hundred feet below the beautiful cemetery where it's dead await the morning of the resurrection. Yet while contrasting the trees and atmosphere here with the comparatively stunted puny foliage of England and the chilly skies of a northern climb, I thought, with cowper respecting my own dear but far distant land, England with all thy faults I love thee still, my country, I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies and fields without a flower for warmer France, with all her vines, nor for Ossonia's groves, her golden frutage or her myrtle-bowers. The change in the climate was great from that in which I had shivered a week before, with a thermometer at thirty-three degrees in the sun, yet I did not find it oppressive here at one hundred and five degrees in the shade, owing to the excessive dryness of the air. The sallow complexions of the New Englanders were also exchanged for the fat, ready faces of the people of Ohio, the Buckeyes as their neighbors designate them. The town of Cincinnati, situated on the navigable stream of the Ohio sixteen hundred miles from the sea, is one of the most remarkable monuments of the progress of the West. A second Glasgow in appearance, the house is built substantially of red brick, six stories high, huge signboards outside each floor denoting the occupation of its owner or lessie, heavily laden trays rumbling along the streets, quays at which steamboats of ferry architecture are ever lying, massive warehouses and rich stores, the sidewalks a perfect throng of foot passengers, the roadways crowded with light carriages, horsemen with palmetto hats and high-peaked saddles galloping about on the magnificent horses of Kentucky, an air of life, wealth, hustle and progress, are some of the characteristics of a city which stands upon ground where sixty years ago an unarmed white man would have been tomahawked as he stood. The human aspect is also curious. Palmetto hats, light blouses and white trousers form the prevailing costume, even of the clergy, while Germans smoke chabooks and luxuriate in their shirt sleeves. Rovers with the innervated look arising from residence in a hot climate lounge about the streets. Dark-browed Mexican in sombreras and high-slashed boots dash about on small, active horses with mum-look bits. Rovers and adventurers from California and the far west, with massive rings in their ears, swagger about in a manner which shows their country in calling, and females richly dressed are seen driving and walking about, from the fair complexioned European to the Negres or mulatto. The windows of the stores are arranged with articles of gaudy attire and heavy jewelry suited to the barbaric taste of many of their customers, but inside I was surprised to find the richest and most elegant manufacturers of Paris and London. A bookseller's store, an aggregate of two or three of our largest, indicated that the culture of the mind was not neglected. The number of carriages, invariably drawn by two horses, astonished me. They were the red horses of Kentucky and the jet black of Ohio, splendid, proud-looking animals, looking as if they could never tire or die. Except the trotting baskets and light wagons, principally driven by swells or young Americans, all the vehicles were covered to preserve their inmates from the intense heat of the sun. In the evening hundreds, if not thousands, of carriages are to be seen in the cemetery and along the roads, some of the German ladies driving in low dresses and short sleeves. As everybody who has one hundred yards to go drives or rides, rings are fastened to all sidewalks in the town to tether the horses to. Many of the streets are planted with the Elanthus tree, and frequently one comes upon churches of tasteful architecture, with fretted spires pointing to heaven. I went upon the Ohio, lessened by long drought into a narrow stream, in a most commodious high-pressure steamboat, and deemed myself happy in returning uninjured, for beautiful and fairy-like as these vessels are, between their own explosive qualities and the snags and soyers of the rivers, their average existence is only five years. Cincinnati in eighteen hundred was a wooden village of seven hundred and fifty inhabitants. It is now a substantially built brick town containing two hundred thousand people, and thousands of fresh settlers are added every year. There are nearly fifty thousand Germans, and I believe forty thousand Irish, who distinctly keep up their national characteristics. The Germans almost monopolize the handicapped trades, where they find a fruitful field for their genius and industry. The Irish are here, as everywhere, hewers of wood and drawers of water, they can do nothing but dig, and seldom rise in the social scale. The Germans, as at home, are thinking, skeptical, theorizing people, in politics, socialists, in religion, and atheists. The Irish are still the willing and ignorant tools of an ambitious and despotic priesthood. And in a land where no man is called to account for his principles, unless they proceed to physical development, these errors grow and luxuriate. The Germans, in that part of the town almost devoted to themselves, have succeeded in practically abolishing the Sabbath, as they utterly ignore that divine institution even as a day of rest, keeping their stores open the whole day. The creeds which they profess are socialism and universalism, and at stated periods they assemble to hear political harangues and address invocations to universal deity. Skilled, educated, and intellectual, they are daily increasing in numbers, wealth, and political importance, and constitute an influence of which the Americans themselves are afraid. The Irish are a turbulent class, forever appealing to physical force, influencing the elections and carrying out their clan feuds and faction fights. The Germans, finding it a land like their own, of corn and vineyards, have named the streets in their locality in Cincinnati after their old towns in the old world, to which, in idea, one is frequently carried back. On Sunday, after passing through this continental portion of the town, I found all was order and decorum in the strictly American part, where the whole population seemed to attend worship of one form or another. The church which I attended was the most beautiful place of worship I ever saw. It had neither the hallowed but comfortless antiquity of our village churches, nor the glare and crush of our urban temples. It was of light, Norman architecture, and lighted by windows of rich stained glass. The pews were wide, the backs low, and the doors and moldings were of polished oak. The cushions and linings were of crimson damask, and light fans for real use were hung in each pew. The pilpit and reading desk, both of carved oak and of a tulip shape, were placed in front of the communion rails on a spacious platform ascended by three steps. This, the steps, and the aisles of the church were carpeted with beautiful kid-or-minster carpeting. The singing and chanting were of a very superior description, being managed as also a very fine-toned organ by the young ladies and gentlemen of the congregation. The ladies were more richly dressed and in brighter colors than the English, and many of them in their features and complexions bore evident traces of African and Spanish blood. The gentlemen universally wore the mustache and beard, and generally blue or green frock coats. The collars turned over with velvet. The responses were repeated without the assistance of a clerk, and the whole service was conducted with decorum and effect. The same favorable description may apply generally to the churches of different denominations in the United States. Coldness and discomfort are not considered as incentives to devotion, and the houses of worship are ever crowded with regular and decorous worshipers. Cincinnati is the outpost of manufacturing civilization, though large, important, but at present unfinished cities are rapidly springing up several hundred miles farther to the West. It has regular freight steamers to New Orleans, St. Louis, and other places on the Missouri and Mississippi, to Wheeling and Pittsburgh, and thence by railway to the great Atlantic cities, Philadelphia and Baltimore, while it is connected with the Canadian lakes by railway and canal to Cleveland. Till I thoroughly understood that Cincinnati is the center of a circle embracing the populous towns of the South and the increasing populations of the lake countries in the Western territories, with their ever-growing demand for the fruits of manufacturing industry, I could not understand the utility of the vast establishments for the production of household goods, which arrest the attention of the visitor to the Queen City. There is a furniture establishment in Baker Street, London, which employs perhaps eighty hands, and we are rather inclined to boast of it, but we must keep silence when we hear of a factory as large as a Manchester cotton mill, five stories high, where two hundred and sixty hands are constantly employed in making chairs, tables, and bedsteads. At the factory of Mitchell and Rammelsburg, common chairs were the principal manufacturer, and are turned out at the rate of twenty-five hundred a week, worth from between one pound one shilling to five pounds one shilling a dozen. Rocking chairs, which are only made in perfection in the states, are fabricated here, also chests of drawers of which two thousand are made annually. Baby rocking cribs, in which the brains of the youth of America are early habituated to perpetual restlessness, are manufactured here in surprising quantities. The workmen at this factory, most of whom are Native Americans and Germans, the English and Scotch being rejected on account of their intemperance, earn from twelve to fourteen dollars a week. At another factory, one thousand bedsteads, worth from one pound one shilling to five pounds one shilling each, are completed every week. There are vast boot and shoe factories, which would have shot our whole Crimean army in a week, at one of which the owner pays sixty thousand dollars or twelve thousand pounds in wages annually. It consumes five thousand pounds weight of boot-nails per annum. The manufacturers of locks and guns, tools and carriages, with countless other appliances of civilized life, are on a similarly large scale. Their products are to be found among the sugar plantations of the South, the diggers of California, the settlers in Oregon, in the infant cities of the far west, the tent of the hunter, and the shanty of the immigrant, in one word, wherever demand and supply can be placed in conjunction. And while the demand is ever increasing as the tide of immigration rolls westward, so the inventive brains of the Americans are ever discovering some mechanical means of abridging manual labor, which seldom more ever meets the demand. The saws, axes, and indeed all cutting tools made at respectable establishments in the States, are said to be superior to ours. On going into a hardware store at Hamilton in Upper Canada, I saw some English spades and axes, and I suppose my face expressed some of the admiration which my British pride led me to feel. For the owner, taking up some spades and cutting tools of Cincinnati manufacturers, said, We can only sell these, the others are bad workmanship and won't stand two days hard work. Examples of English manufacture are not seen in considerable quantities in the wholesale stores, and even the import of foreign wines has been considerably diminished by the increasingly successful culture of the grape in Ohio, 130,000 gallons of wine having been produced in the course of the year. Wines resembling hawk, clare, and champagne are made, and good judges speak very highly of them. Cincinnati is famous for its public libraries and reading rooms. The Young Men's Mercantile Library Association has a very handsome suite of rooms opened as libraries and reading rooms, the number of books amounting to 16,000, these with upwards of 100 newspapers being well selected by a managing committee, none of our English works of good repute being a wanting. The facility with which English books are reprinted in America and the immense circulation which they attain in consequence of their cheapness greatly increases their responsibility, which rests upon our authors as to the direction which they give, whether for good or evil, to the intelligent and inquiring minds of the youth of America, minds ceaselessly occupied, both in religion and politics, on investigation and inquiry, in overturning old systems before they have devised new ones. I believe that the most important religious denominations in Cincinnati are the Episcopalian, the Baptist, and the Wesleyan. The first is under the superintendence of the learned and pious Bishop Milvane, whose apostolic and untiring labors have greatly advanced the cause of religion in the State of Ohio. There is a remarkable absence of sectarian spirit, and the ministers of all Orthodox denominations act in harmonious combination for the general good. But after describing the beauty of her streets, her astonishing progress, and the splendor of her shops, I must not close this chapter without stating that the Queen City bears the less elegant name of Porcopolis, that swine, lean, gaunt, and vicious-looking riot through her streets, and that on coming out of the most splendid stores one stumbles over these disgusting intruders. Cincinnati is the city of pigs. As there is a railway system and a hotel system, so there is also a pig system, by which this place is marked out for many other. Huge quantities of these useful animals are reared after harvest in the cornfields of Ohio, and on the beach mast and acorns of its gigantic forests. At a particular time of year they arrive by thousands, brought in droves and steamers to the number of five hundred thousand to meet their doom, when it is said that the Ohio runs red with blood. There are huge slaughterhouses behind the town, something on the plan of the abattoirs of Paris, large wooden buildings with numerous pens, from once the pigs march in single file along a narrow passage, to an apartment where each, on his entrance, receives a blow with a hammer, which deprives him of consciousness, and in a short time, by means of numerous hands and a well-managed cauldron system, he is cut up and ready for pickling. The day on which a pig is killed in England constitutes an era in the family history of the year, and squeals of a terrific description announce the event to the neighborhood. There is not time or opportunity for such a process at the Porcopolis, and the first notification which the inhabitants receive of the massacre is the thousand barrels of pork on the quays, ready to be conveyed to the Atlantic cities for exportation to the European markets. At one establishment twelve thousand pigs are killed, pickled, and packed every fall, and in the whole neighborhood, as I have heard in the cars, the hog crop is as much the subject of discussion and speculation as the cotton crop of Alabama, the hop picking of Kent, or the harvest in England. Kentucky, the land by reputation of red horses, bowie knives, and gouging, is only separated from Ohio by the river Ohio, and on a day when the thermometer stood at one hundred and three degrees in the shade, I went to the town of Covington. Marked, wide, and almost inestimable is the difference between the free state of Ohio and the slave state of Kentucky. They have the same soil, the same climate, and precisely the same natural advantages, yet the total absence of progress, if not the appearance of retrogression and decay, the loungers in the streets, and the peculiar appearance of the slaves, afford a contrast to the bustle on the opposite side of the river, which would strike the most unobservant. I was credibly informed that property of the same real value was worth three hundred dollars in Kentucky and three thousand in Ohio. Free immigrants and workmen will not settle in Kentucky, where they would be brought into contact with compulsory slave labor. Thus the development of industry is retarded, and the difference will become more apparent every year, till possibly some great changes will be forced upon the legislature. Few English people will forget the impression made upon them by the first sight of a slave, a being created in the image of God, yet the bona fide property of his fellow man. The first I saw was an African female, the slave of a lady from Florida, with a complexion black as the law which held her in captivity. The subject of slavery is one which has lately been brought so prominently before the British people by Mrs. Beecher Stowe, that I should be pardoned for making a few remarks upon it. Powerfully written as the book is, and as much as I admire the benevolent intentions of the writer, I am told that the effect of the volume has been prejudicial, and this assertion is borne out by persons well acquainted with the subject in the free states. A gentleman very eminent in his country, as having devoted himself from his youth to the cause of abolition, as a steadfast pursuer of one grand principle, together with other persons, say that Uncle Tom's cabin had thrown the cause back for many years. The excitement on the subject still continues in England, though it found a safety valve in the Stafford House Manifesto, and the received impression, which no force of fact can alter, is that the slave-owners are divided into but two classes, brutalized, depraved, legrees, or enthusiastic, visionary Sinclairs, the former, of course, predominating. Slavery, though under modifications which rendered it a little more than the apprenticeship of our day, was permitted under the mosaic dispensation, but it is contrary to the whole tenor of Christianity, and the system which lowers man as an intellectual and responsible being is no less morally than politically wrong. That it is a political mistake is plainly evidenced by the retarded development and apparent decay of the southern states, as compared with the ceaseless material progress of the north and west. It cannot be doubted that in Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana legrees are to be found, for cruelty is inherent in base natures. We have legrees in our factories and coal pits, but in England their most terrible excesses are restrained by the strong arm of law, which, when appealed to, extends its protection to the feeblest and most helpless. What then must such men become in the isolated cotton or sugar plantations of the south, distant from their strengths which public opinion exercises, and where the evidence of a slave is inadmissible in a court of justice? The full extent of the cruelty's practice will never be known until revealed at the solemn tribunal of the last day. But we dare not hope that such men are rare, though circumstances of self-interest combine to form a class of slave owners of a higher grade. These are men who look upon their slaves as we do upon our cows and horses, as mere animal property of greater or less value according to the care which is taken of them. The slaves of those persons are well clothed, lodged and fed. They are not overworked, and dancing, singing, and other amusements which increase health and cheerfulness are actively promoted. But the system is one which has for its object the transformation of reason into instinct, the lowering of a rational being into a machine scarcely more intelligent in appearance than some of our own ingeniously contrived steam engines. Religious teaching is withheld, and the instruction of a slave in it, punished as a crime, lest he should learn that freedom is his birthright. A third and very large class of slave owners is to be found, who, having inherited their property in slaves, want the means of judiciously emancipating them. The negroes are not in a condition to receive freedom in the reckless way in which some abolitionists propose to bestow it upon them. They must be prepared for it by instruction in the precepts of religion, by education, and by the reception of those principles of self-reliance, without which they have not the moral perception requisite to enable them to appreciate the blessings of freedom. And this very ignorance and obtuseness is one of the most telling arguments against the system which produces it. The want of this previous preparation has been frequently shown, particularly in Kentucky, where whole bodies of emancipated slaves, after a few days' experience of their new condition, have been treated for a return to servitude. These slave owners, of whom I now speak, deeply deplore the circumstances under which they are placed, and, while wanting the spirit of self-sacrifice and the moral courage which would lead them, by manumitting their slaves, to enter into a novel competition with slave labor on other estates, to do their best to ameliorate the condition in which the Africans are placed, encourage them, by the sale of little articles of their own manufacture, to purchase their freedom, which is granted at a very reduced rate. I had opportunities of conversing with several of these freed Negroes, and they all expressed attachment to their late owners, and spoke of the mildness with which they were treated, saying that the great threat made use of was to send them down south. The slaves in the northern slave states are a thoughtless, happy set, spending their evenings in dancing or singing to the banjo, and, oh, carry me back to old Virginia, or Susanna, don't you cry for me, may be heard on summer evenings rising from the maze and tobacco grounds of Kentucky. Yet whether naturally humane instincts may lead to merciful treatment of the slave, or the same result be accomplished by the rigorous censorship of public opinion in the border states, apart from the abstract question of slavery, that system is greatly to be reprobated, which gives power without responsibility, and permits the temporal, yes, the eternal well-being of another to depend upon the will and caprice of a man, when the victim of his injustice is deprived of the power of an appeal to an earthly tribunal. Instances of severe treatment on one side and of kindness on the other cannot fairly be brought as arguments for or against the system. It must be justified or condemned by the undeviating law of moral right as laid down in divine revelation. Slavery existed in 1850 in 15 out of 31 states, the number of slaves being 3,204,345, connected by sympathy and blood with 433,643 colored persons, nominally free, but who occupy a social position of the lowest grade. It is probable that this number will increase, as it has hitherto done, in a geometrical ratio, which will give six million in 1875 of a people dangerous from numbers merely, but doubly, trebly so in their consciousness of oppression and in the passions which may incite them to a terrible revenge. America boasts of freedom and of such a progress as the world has never seen before, but while the tide of the Anglo-Saxon race rolls across her continent, and while we contemplate with pleasure a vast nation governed by free institutions and professing a pure faith, a hand, faintly seen at present, but destined ere long to force itself upon the attention of all, points to the empires of a bygone civilization, and shows that they had their periods in which to rise, flourish, and decay, and that slavery was the main cause of that decay. The exasperating reproaches addressed to the Americans in ignorance of the real difficulties of dealing with the case have done much harm in inciting that popular clamour which hurries on reckless legislation. The problem is one which occupies the attention of thinking and Christian men on both sides of the Atlantic, but still remains a gigantic evil for philanthropists to mourn over and for politicians to correct. An unexceptional censure ought not to be pronounced without a more complete knowledge of the subject than could be gained from novels and newspapers. Still less ought this censure to extend to America as a whole, for the people of the northern states are more ardent abolitionists than ourselves. More consistent, in fact, for they have no white slaves, no oppressed factory children, the cry of whose wrongs ascends daily into the ears of an avenging judge. Still blame must attach to them for the way in which they place the colored people in an inferior social position, a rigid system of exclusiveness shutting them out from the usual places of amusement and education. It must not be forgotten that England bequeathed this system to her colonies, though she has nobly blotted it out from those which still own her sway, that it is encouraged by the cotton lords of Preston and Manchester, and that the great measure of negro emancipation was carried, not by the violent declamation and ignorant railings of men who sought popularity by exciting the passions of the multitude, but by the persevering exertions and practical Christian philanthropy of Mr. Wilberforce and his co-ajuders. It is naturally to be expected that a person writing a book on America would offer some remarks upon this subject and raise a voice, however feeble, against so gigantic an evil. The conclusions which I have stated in the foregoing pages are derived from a careful comparison and study of facts which I have learned from eminent speakers and writers both in favor of and against the slave system.