beings. This dance lasted a long while, until the music
turned to croaking, and the perspiration was abundant; they stopped at
last, and then announced that their exercise was finished. I waited a
little while after the main body had dispersed, to speak with one of the
elders. "I will be with you directly," replied he, walking hastily
away; but he never came back.

I never heard the principle upon which they dance. David danced before
the ark; but it is to be presumed that David danced as well as he sung.
At least he thought so; for when his wife Michal laughed at him, he made
her conduct a ground of divorce.

Every community which works in common, and is provided for in the mass,
must become _rich_, especially when it has no children to maintain. It
is like receiving a person's labour in exchange for victuals and
clothing only, and this is all I can perceive that can be said in favour
of these people. Suffice it to say, I have a very bad opinion of them:
and were I disposed to dilate on the subject, I should feel no
inclination to treat them with the lenity shewn to them by other
travellers.

From this mockery, I went to see what had a real tendency to make you
feel religious--the Falls of the Mohawk, about three miles from Troy.
Picturesque and beautiful as all falling water is, to describe it is
extremely difficult, unless, indeed by a forced simile; the flow of
language is too tame for the flow of water; but if the reader can
imagine a ledge of black rocks, about sixty or seventy feet high, and
that over this ledge was poured simultaneously the milk of some millions
of cows, he will then have some idea of the beauty of the creaming Falls
of the Mohawk, imbedded as they are in their wild and luxuriant scenery.

Close to the Falls, I perceived a few small wooden shealings, appearing,
under the majestic trees which overshadowed them, more like dog-kennels
than the habitations of men: they were tenanted by Irish emigrants, who
had taken work at the new locks forming on the Erie canal. I went up to
them. In a tenement about fourteen feet by ten, lived an Irishman, his
wife, and family, and seven boys as he called them, young men from
twenty to thirty years of age, who boarded with him. There was but one
bed, on which slept the man, his wife, and family. Above the bed were
some planks, extending half way the length of the shealing, and there
slept the seven boys, without any mattress, or even straw, to lie up