play
worthy of their loyalty and of the occasion.

Between Le Roy, a town of remarkable neatness, and Batavia, I
encountered my first sample of a corduroy-road, or, as it is sometimes
facetiously termed, a Canadian railway.

Our driver, a merry fellow, called out that we must look out "not to get
mixed up of a heap," and rattled at it. I did not require much
experience to decide that travelling over a road of corduroy was by no
means going on velvet; but the effect was not so bad as I had expected
to prove it: by holding fast, one could keep one's seat tolerably well,
without much fear of dislocation; but I would strongly recommend any man
having loose teeth, to walk over this stage, unless he desires to have
them shaken out of his head.

From Batavia the road is execrable, and the country without a feature to
interest or amuse, uncultivated, wild, and dismal. It was about half an
hour before sunset when we entered Buffalo, the City of the Lakes, the
entrepot for these inland oceans.

BUFFALO.

America is, perhaps, in our day, the only country wherein these infant
capitals, these embryo cities, may be seen, and their growth noted, as
they are gradually developed before living eyes.

A very few years back, this frontier, now so populous and thriving, was
only known as "the Wilderness;" and upon the edge of this, washed by the
waters of Lake Erie, has Buffalo sprung up. The great source of that
gratification which is felt on a near view of this, and other places of
similar origin, is to be found in the feeling that they derive their
being from the prosperous industry of our fellow-men, and that in their
increase we behold its happy continuance. They are the vouchers which
America may fairly produce to show that the fruition of liberty has been
with her productive of increased energy and spreading enterprise.

These places have not, like St. Petersburg, been raised up in obedience
to the policy or the caprice of a despot; the work of bondsmen, founded
amidst pestilence, and cemented with blood and tears. The unfinished
palace of the half-savage prince already the tomb of hundreds of its
miserable builders; a city of marble founded upon a marsh.

Here, it is true, was a wonder having no parallel, of which the living
of the last century might have observed the progress,--one may add, the
completion, as, should its lord so will, the present generation may look
upon its abandonment and depopulation;--but the c