which is directly opposite to Detroit, where the river is
about half a mile across, are stores of English goods, sent there
entirely for the supply of the Americans, by smugglers. There is also a
row of tailor shops, for cloth is a very dear article in America, and
costs nearly double the price it does in the English provinces. The
Americans go over there, and are measured for a suit of clothes which,
when ready, they put on, and cross back to Detroit with their old
clothes in a bundle. The smuggling is already very extensive, and will,
of course, increase as the Western country becomes more populous.

Near Windsor and Sandwich are several villages of free blacks, probably
the major portion of them having been assisted in their escape by the
Abolitionists. They are not very good neighbours from their propensity
to thieving, which either is innate, or, as Miss Martineau would have
it, is the effect of slavery. I shall not dispute that point; but it is
certain that they are most inveterately hostile to the Americans, and
will fight to the last, from the dread of being again subjected to their
former masters. They are an excellent frontier population; and in the
last troubles they proved how valuable they would become, in case their
services were more seriously required.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.

Once more on board of the Michigan, one of the best vessels on Lake
Erie; as usual, full of emigrants, chiefly Irish. It is impossible not
to feel compassion for these poor people, wearied as they are with
confinement and suffering, and yet they do compose occasionally about as
laughable a group as can well be conceived. In the first place, they
bring out with them from Ireland, articles which no other people would
consider worth the carriage. I saw one Irish woman who had old tin tea
pots; there was but one spout among the whole, and I believe not one
bottom really sound and good. And then their costumes, more
particularly the fitting out of the children, who are not troubled with
any extra supply of clothes at any time! I have witnessed the seat of
an old pair of corduroy trowsers transformed into a sort of bonnet for a
laughing fair-haired girl. But what amused me more was the very reverse
of this arrangement; a boy's father had just put a patch upon the hinder
part of his son's trousers; and cloth not being at hand, he had, as an
expedient for stopping the gap, inserted a piece of an old straw bonnet