ys and the big boys have all got their supply
of rockets, which they fire off in the streets--some running
horizontally up the pavement, and sticking into the back of a passenger;
and others mounting slantingdicularly and Paul-Prying into the bed-room
windows on the third floor or attics, just to see how things are going
on _there_. Look in any point of the compass, and you will see a shower
of rockets in the sky: turn from New York to Jersey City, from Jersey
City to Brooklyn, and shower is answered by shower on either side of the
water. Hoboken repeats the signal: and thus it is carried on to the
east, the west, the north, and the south, from Rhode Island to the
Missouri, from the Canada frontier to the Gulf of Mexico. At the
various gardens the combinations were very beautiful, and exceeded
anything that I had witnessed in London or Paris. What with
sea-serpents, giant rockets scaling heaven, Bengal lights, Chinese
fires, Italian suns, fairy bowers, crowns of Jupiter, exeranthemums,
Tartar temples, Vesta's diadems, magic circles, morning glories, stars
of Colombia, and temples of liberty, all America was in a blaze; and, in
addition to this mode of manifesting its joy, all America was tipsy.

There is something grand in the idea of a national intoxication. In
this world, vices on a grand scale dilate into virtues; he who murders
one man, is strung up with ignominy; but he who murders twenty thousand
has a statue to his memory, and is handed down to posterity as a hero.
A staggering individual is a laughable and, sometimes, a disgusting
spectacle; but the whole of a vast continent reeling, offering a
holocaust of its brains for mercies vouchsafed, is an appropriate
tribute of gratitude for the rights of equality and the _levelling
spirit_ of their institutions.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER NINE.

Once more flying up the noble Hudson. After you have passed West Point,
the highlands, through which the river has forced its passage, gradually
diminish, and as the shore becomes level, so does the country become
more fertile.

We passed the manor of Albany, as it is called, being a Dutch grant of
land, now in the possession of one person, a Mr Van Rensalaer, and
equal to many a German principality, being twenty miles by forty-eight
miles square. Mr Van Rensalaer still retains the old title of Patroon.
It is generally supposed in England that, in America, all property must
be divided between the children at the deceas