wider, and the stores
handsomer, than the majority of those in New York. It has five or six
very fine churches, a handsome theatre, town-hall, and market, and three
or four hotels, one of which is superior to most others in America; and
to these we must add a fine stone pier, with a lighthouse, and a harbour
full of shipping and magnificent steam-boats. It is almost
incomprehensible, that all this should have been accomplished since the
year 1814. And what has occasioned this springing up of a city in so
short a time as to remind you of Aladdin's magic palace?--the Erie
Canal, which here joins the Hudson River with the Lake, passing through
the centre of the most populous and fertile States.

At present, however, the business of Buffalo, as well as of every other
city, is nearly at a stand-still; the machinery of America is under
repair, and until that repair is completed, the country will remain
paralysed. America may just now be compared to one of her own
steamboats, which, under too high pressure, has burst her boiler. Some
of her passengers have (in a commercial point of view) been killed
outright, others severely injured, and her progress has for a time been
stopped: but she will soon be enabled to go a-head again as fast as
ever, and will then probably pay a little more attention to her
safety-valve.

I went out to the Indian reservation, granted to the remnant of the
Seneca tribe of Indians, once a portion of the Mohawks, and all that now
remains in the United States of the famed six nations. The chief of
them (Red Jacket), lately dead, might be considered as the last of the
Mohicans. I had some conversation with his daughter, who was very
busily employed in the ornamenting of a pair of mocassins, and then
visited the tomb, or rather the spot, where her father was buried,
without name or record. This omission has since been repaired, and a
tablet is now raised over his grave. It is creditable to the profession
that the "poor player," as Shakespeare hath it, should be the foremost
to pay tribute to worth. Cooke, the tragedian, was lying without a
stone to mark his resting-place, when Kean came to America, found out
the spot, and raised a handsome cenotaph to his memory; and it is to Mr
Placide, one of the very best of American actors, that Red Jacket is
indebted for the tablet which has been raised to rescue his narrow home
from oblivion.

Red Jacket was a great chief and a great man, but, like most