superintendant
of the establishment, I made the remark to him, and he told me,
that the reality corresponded with the appearance. All of them
had been detected in some act of dishonesty; but the boys, when
removed from the evil influence which had led them so to use
their ingenuity, rose like a spring when a pressure is withdrawn;
and feeling themselves once more safe from danger and from shame,
hope and cheerfulness animated every countenance. But the pour
girls, on the contrary, can hardly look up again. They are as
different as an oak and a lily after a storm. The one, when the
fresh breeze blows over it, shakes the raindrops from its crest,
and only looks the brighter; the other, its silken leaves once
soiled, shrinks from the eye, and is levelled to the earth for
ever.

We spent a delightful day in New Jersey, in visiting, with a most
agreeable party, the inclined planes, which are used instead of
locks on the Morris canal.

This is a very interesting work; it is one among a thousand which
prove the people of America to be the most enterprising in the
world. I was informed that this important canal, which connects
the waters of the Hudson and the Delaware, is a hundred miles
long, and in this distance overcomes a variation of level
amounting to sixteen hundred feet. Of this, fourteen hundred are
achieved by inclined planes. The planes average about sixty feet
of perpendicular lift each, and are to support about forty tons.
The time consumed in passing them is twelve minutes for one
hundred feet of perpendicular rise. The expense is less than a
third of what locks would be for surmounting the same rise. If
we set about any more canals, this may be worth attending to.

This Morris canal is certainly an extraordinary work; it not only
varies its level sixteen hundred feet, but at one point runs
along the side of a mountain at thirty feet above the tops of the
highest buildings in the town of Paterson, below; at another it
crosses the falls of the Passaic in a stone aqueduct sixty feet
above the water in the river. This noble work, in a great
degree, owes its existence to the patriotic and scientific energy
of Mr. Cadwallader Colden.

There is no point in the national character of the Americans
which commands so much respect as the boldness and energy with
which public works are undertaken and carried through. Nothing
stops them if a profitable result can be fairly hoped for. It is
this which ha