ed or in
clusters, built hastily for emigrants along unpaved and powdery streets. I
saw, however, on a little excursion which I made into the surrounding
country, that pleasant little neighborhoods are rising up at no great
distance, with their neat houses, their young trees, and their new
shrubbery. They have a fine building material at Buffalo--a sort of brown
stone, easily wrought--but I was sorry to see that most of the houses
built of it, both in the town and country, seemed to have stood for
several years.

We visited the new fort which the government is erecting on the lake, a
little to the north of the town, commanding the entrance of Niagara river.
It is small, but of wonderful apparent strength, with walls of prodigious
thickness, and so sturdy in its defences that it seemed to me one might as
well think of cannonading the cliffs of Weehawken. It is curious to see
how, as we grow more ingenious in the means of attack, we devise more
effectual means of defence. A castle of the middle ages, in which a grim
warrior of that time would hold his enemies at bay for years, would now be
battered down before breakfast. The finest old forts of the last century
are now found to be unsafe against attack. That which we have at St.
Augustine was an uncommonly good sample of its kind, but when I was in
Florida, three or four years since, an engineer of the United States was
engaged in reconstructing it. Do mankind gain any thing by these
improvements, as they are called, in the art of war? Do not these more
dreadful engines of attack on the one side, and these more perfect means
of protection on the other, leave the balance just where it was before?

On Tuesday evening, at seven o'clock, we took passage in the steamer
Oregon, for Chicago, and soon lost sight of the roofs and spires of
Buffalo. A lady of Buffalo on her way to Cleveland placed herself at the
piano, and sang several songs with such uncommon sweetness and expression
that I saw no occasion to be surprised at what I heard of the concert of
Leopold de Meyer, at Buffalo, the night before. The concert room was
crowded with people clinging to each other like bees when they swarm, and
the whole affair seemed an outbreak of popular enthusiasm. A veteran
teacher of music in Buffalo, famous for being hard to be pleased by any
public musical entertainment, found himself unable to sit still during the
first piece played by De Meyer, but rose, in the fullness of his delight,