that he may the more easily keep his own in bondage. Is he, then, a freeman, or is he not rather the slave of a most evil and unhappy system?

Should a young lady from a free state, without sufficient knowledge of how matters stand, become the wife of a southerner, she, poor inexperienced child! if she carry conscience and humanity with her, may be alarmed to find herself called upon to exercise the offices and wisdom of age, being looked up to by a band of people utterly unused to confide in themselves and each other. Though a coloured nurse watch by the bed of the sick domestic slave, the lady must drop the medicine. She must look upon the timepiece for the moment to administer it. She, though at midnight, or early morning hours, may be awakened to give the potion. She must not only provide clothes for her numerous family, which has no provident habit because it is untrusted, but she may find it necessary to shape them, and fix the seams for the overgrown children who can with needle and thread be taught to fasten them together. Is she free? I speak not of her moral, but of her mere physical condition. Does she not discover that she has married into bondage? Some of the most elegant, refined, intelligent, princess-like women that I have met with in the United States were such. They have learnt to be waited upon, to have their slightest wish attended to, and, withal, because they, with woman's nature, are pitiful to the sick and feeble, they have exercised much benevolence.

They have, mayhap, endured much in being aware of cruelties which they had not power to mitigate. All this has refined their characters-still they are not Cornelias and Portias, fit mothers for the sons of a republic; they are refined into amiable despots, and fit mothers for the owners of slaves.

But the mouldering farms of Virginia have betrayed me into the subject which it is so unavailing for me to touch, though it never fails to oppress my heart; and I must resume my journey.

The railway which runs between Albany and Buffalo, though it passes many cities that were already made rich by possessing means of carriage on the great canal, establishes new centres of traffic, as well as greatly enhances the wealth of the old ones. Yet in some parts the country is but newly opened. The engineer goes forth in search of levels, not of fertility or beauty. And thus he has crashed his way through many a swamp inhabited by doleful creatures, and many a forest, untrodden since the Indian hunter has faded away before the white man.

We were told that we should have found plains and valleys smiling under the influence of skilful industry, if we had travelled by the high road. Yet it is only fifty years since that road was slowly piercing its way through regions as unaccustomed to man as those more recently penetrated by the iron path. In far less than fifty years more, those unsightly and tangled underwoods, those undrained marshes, and those dreary girdled trees and black

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stumps, will disappear from the track of the railway, and smoother fields, and comfortable dwellings, and zigzag fences take their place. These fences are the reverse of pleasing objects in the landscape; yet in a country where the quantity of wood to be cleared away forms the difficulty, it is a wiser plan to use the dead wood in forming divisions, than it would be to plant other shrubs and trees for fences. English eye, accustomed to polished fields cultivated for centuries, chequered with beautiful hedgerows, finds this part of the country very rough, and in every part misses the hawthorn. But the circumstances are so different as to render comparison unreasonable. One is inclined to take up the prophetic strain of which the American is accused, and say what this district will presently become when we see what it is even already in its difficult and rugged progress. Here you see a brick-field, with two or three cottages near it. A little further on a forge, and by and by a carpenter's shop, and, in a position accessible to them all, though by deep and difficult footpaths, a store partaking the character of the village shop of Scotland, known by the familiar name of "Willie a' things." Everything you can want in a rough way is to be had there, from cheese, ham, needles, nails, tea, hammers, sugar, and grindstones, down to spelling-books, butter, and Bibles, as I have seen "Willie's" list of wares made out.

Who that has travelled through the cultivated parts of New York or New Jersey, or that has

stood on the summit of Mount Holyoke and surveyed the windings of the Connecticut river, through a valley equal in fertility and agricultural excelence to the lands that are intertwined with the links of the Forth, can fail to see that time only is wanting to bring the whole of the country into the finest bearing condition? The climb to Mount Holyoke, though toilsome, is richly rewarded by the view obtained. You can trace the limits of snug farms, and see their regularly laid out ridges which could not be surpassed for accuracy of line in a Northumberland or Roxburghshire ploughingmatch-you can count their convenient farm-houses and onsteads, for miles, till the eye is weary, and rest it on the pretty spires among the trees that look so like Old England. Everything in the Connecticut valley is rich and regular. The land is peopled up to its capabilities; and if the sharp frosts and scorching suns would suffer the quickset hedge to grow, and that feature were added to the landscape, it would be exactly like home. We must, however, always except the giant style of everything American. The Forth, with all its lovely links, even though a tide-river, lies but like a silver thread in the landscape, compared to the Connecticut. The latter river has proved the weight of its waters, by cutting its way through the neck of a peninsula around which it had flowed for centuries, so that at last it has possessed itself of a picturesque islet in its bosom consisting of several

acres of the richest alluvial soil which centuries of river laving could deposit. The contrast between the whole district and some parts of that between Albany and Buffalo, is as complete as can be between the smooth-polished and productive and the newlypossessed and wild.

For many miles the nor'-western rail runs parallel with the Mohawk River; the valley is narrow, and occasionally the rocks which hem it in are precipitous and exhibit some rugged grandeur—but in no place is it so narrow as to exclude its three remarkable features. First, the Old Mohawk, which has had time enough to cut its way through these rocks since the waters of the deluge subsided. Second, the canal a Herculean labour, which has united Lake Erie with the Hudson River for many a year, and carried many a white boat laden with produce down to the river's margin. And, last, the iron way, which in that part has been put down with little trouble of blasting rocks or raising levels. One skims over scores of miles without a tunnel, and with only here and there a bridge over some mountain torrent that is skipping its way down to join the waters at the bottom of the valley.

The progress of the canal-boats, after they join the Hudson, has been much accelerated by the use of steam-tugs. Instead of tacking about and creeping down the great river, they make a steady undeviating progress, as many as half a score at a time. The persevering "Walk-on-the-Water" steamboat,