before you come
to Pittsburg, are literally heaps of coal. In height they vary from 100
to 500 feet, and nothing more is required than to clear off the soil,
and then dig away the treasure.

What struck me most was the immense number of children everywhere
gazing upon us from the river's banks. At settlements of not more than
half-a-dozen houses, I counted a groupe of more than twenty children.

LETTER XXIII.

Arrival at Pittsburg--Its Trade and Prospects--Temperance--Newspapers
--Trip up the Monongahela to Brownsville--Staging by Night across the
Alleghany Mountains--Arrival at Cumberland--The Railway Carriages of
America.

Arriving at Pittsburg in the middle of the night of the 10th of March,
we remained on board till morning. As we had been accustomed on this
"Clipper No. 2" to breakfast at half-past 7, I thought they surely
would not send us empty away. But no! we had to turn out at that early
hour of a morning piercingly cold, and get a breakfast where we could,
or remain without. This was "clipping" us rather too closely, after we
had paid seven dollars each for our passage and provisions.

Pittsburg is in the State of Pennsylvania. Its progress has been rapid,
and its prospects are bright. Seventy years ago the ground on which it
stands was a wilderness, the abode of wild beasts and the hunting
ground of Indians. Its manufactures are chiefly those of glass, iron,
and cotton. It is the Birmingham of America. Indeed one part of it,
across the river, is called "Birmingham," and bids fair to rival its
old namesake. Its advantages and resources are unparalleled. It
occupies in reference to the United States, north and south, east and
west, a perfectly central position. It is surrounded with, solid
mountains of coal, which--dug out, as I have intimated, with the
greatest ease--is conveyed with equal ease down inclined planes to the
very furnace mouths of the foundries and factories! This great workshop
communicates directly, by means of the Ohio, the Mississippi, Red
River, &c., with immense countries, extending to Texas, to Mexico, and
to the Gulph. Its population, already 70,000, is (I believe)
incomparably more intelligent, more temperate, more religious, and more
steady than that of any manufacturing town in England. In fact, England
has not much chance of competing successfully with America, unless her
artizans copy more extensively the example of the American people in
the entire abandonment of int