as if he need to thank the Lord for any thing. It cost him about 2000 dollars in broken wagons and other accidents, to perform his journey." The bed is thrown over the remaining horse.-Note 15. Canto ii. Every one who has crossed the Alleghanies on the great route to Pittsburgh, can never forget the wo-begotten countenances of mothers, situated literally as is here described. Their misfortunes begin with their journey; the expenses soon eat up the reserved change, and nothing remains to do, but to part with some of their loading at every stop; and this is done to the greatest disadvantage; when all is gone but the bed, that is commonly laid over the horse, and the woman rides on it; while the little ones, like gypsies' heirs, sometimes lead and sometimes follow. People on the road described.-Note 16. Canto iii.' 66 Add to all the vexations which are seen to attend this journey, that of hearing the questions which you put to the people on the road answered in some broken-jaw'd language, which you cannot understand: or, what is still more provoking, a total indifference,—as "shall I find the road a-head any better!" 'So-oh, so-so, tolerable bad." Compare this with the well-known courtesy of Old Massachusetts.—— There is, however, a kind of hospitality to be found among the backwoodsmen, who reside off the great routes, which I have not seen elsewhere. The following is an instance. I was travelling through a western bottom, in an unfrequented path.--In my course lay a river, and I knew not the fording place. I was hesitating, at the moment a young man of the country accosted me familiarly-" Stranger, for God O'mighty's sake give me a chew of tobacco." —Friend, I use none can you direct me to the ford ?"-"Stranger, I'll show you :" and he commenced running by my horse's side-talked incessantly of "below," i. e. states east of the Alleghany. He was Nature's own child, though a white man. His rifle frock was blue and white chambray, close buckled with a webbing belt, and fringed with a bright oppossum colour. His rifle and powder-horn bespoke no mean rank of their owner. His mockasins were new, and seemed almost to give springs to the feet and ankles. We were soon at the fording place, although he had run full two miles to serve me. As 1 crossed he watched me, and pointed to the right or left, as deeps and shallows required. When safe over, he waved his hand, and said--" Stranger, I wish you well," and suddenly disappeared: yet I could hear him, with a bold, unspent voice, sing- "Bright chanticleer proclaims the dawn, And spangles deck the thorn." And did you reward him handsomely? thinks the reader. I gave him nothing but a cheerful attention to what he said to me, which was principally in short questions, as, "Stranger, you come from below?" "Yes." "That's a great country-you have bridges there?" "Yes." "You have roads, where ladies drive wheel-carriages all safe: you have schools too; every one from below reads well, and can write; a [This single action overbalances in worth all the manners, taken with the meannesses, of the writer's refined and polished towns.] but a man may be a greater rogue for it. Did you ever see the Constitution, Independence, or any of those great ships ?" "Yes." " Oh, that's a great country, where every nation's vessels can come to. They say, in New-England you are never out o' sight of a steeple, and from one hill you may see a dozen or more. My mother was a Christian, and she told me of the Old States. My father cared for nothing but his bottle and his hounds. Did you ever hear a bugle horn?" "I did, from Queenston heights." "Oh, then you have seen the British red coats! Oh, yours is a great country, with all the world around you!" Wife bewails her sad fate.-Note 17. Canto iii. A man, with a common share of magnanimity or enterprise, may render almost any situation tolerable. But 'tis not so with woman. She must have a home :-the little expectancies of every day must be realized; her landscape must speak human residence and cultivation : her house must be inviting; her rooms furnished: she must possess the facility of social intercourse, the smooth road, and spring-carriage. If she be married, her husband must not be a boor, but a civilized man, who keeps up with the times-who-needs not a hunt, a horse-race, or a whiskey shop, to enable him to endure life; but who, in the hours of business, is industrious in a respectable calling, which enables and disposes him to spend his leisure and resting hours in the bosom of his rising family, amid the pledges of affection, the promises of a future race, who shall honour the memory of those who watched and nursed their helpless infancy. Banish a woman from all this, and after mountains of suffering and fatigue, place her in a log cabin, the chinks daubed with mud, the light of heaven coming in only where the smoke goes out; their all paid on the road for trouble; her husband out of employ; her babe rolled in a rug, laid in a bit of hollow log which rocks on a slab floor; herself shaking with an ague, and shrinking before an attack of fever; her other children, which once were dressed in white, and rocked on a rich carpet in a still cradle, now smoked and dingy, running in and out where a slab is shoved aside for a door; now begging for a piece of hoe-cake, or for parched corn--can she be happy? Sideling Hill.-Note 18. Canto iii. This monstrous mountain, Sideling Hill, lies nearly at right angle with the other ridges of the Alleghanies, so that the path, running on the north side near its back-bone, carries the wagon so near a topsy-turvy position, the driver feels for whole days as if his wagon, wife, children, horses and all were plunging, broadside foremost, down into the great north-west abyss, there to remain a prey to ravens and turkey-buzzards. Laurel Hill.-Note 19. Canto iii. Of all the mountains "Laurel Hill" is the worst. The paths over it pass necessarily in a zigzag direction, and the several tacks of road become so many cave-troughs for the torrents of rain and melting snows, which channel out excavations broad and deep enough to swallow up a house. But as there are no houses to tumble in, the bottom is only piled with undermined stones and rocks, which to pass over safely would puzzle a mountain goat.-'Tis ten miles over this hill. Arrive at last.--Note 20. Canto iii. Perhaps our readers (if readers we have any,) will guess our travellers have got new horses, or they could not bounce along at this rate, towards the fag end of creation, and the winding up of a heap of toils and discomfitures. But they will guess wrong; for the wife is still pinioued on the bed which still hangs over the back of the relict of a pair of yankee horses-and the husband is half his way deliberating, whether to jump into a slough or a thorn-bush. Yet we say they got to Ohio, and refrain to linger out a diary of disasters; but one word more of sloughs and thorn-bushes. The roads through the bottoms in the western country are literally mud without bottom; and the borders most bushily palisaded with thorns: so that the foot traveller, such as our unhorsed, unhoused, husband, in his impatience to extricate his feet, up to his knees or more in mire, drives his head into a thorn-bush; and thus becomes fast anchored, not by his head alone, as was Absalom, but by his feet too, or, as the sailors say, "moored, sir, by a bow fast and a stern fast, which makes all fast." The woodsmen sometimes attempt to mend the roads in the swales, as they say, by cutting and laying logs side by side for a long distance. This is vastly better. It is like riding over an everlasting wood-pile; and besides, a rain or a thaw puts this all afloat. And to crown all, after the flood ceases, the boasted log-way is part in the place where a road should be, and the rest are heads and points and every which way, as the Pennsylvanians say. To a place of much wood.-Note 21. Canto iii. Nothing can exceed the irksomeness of for ever inhaling the smell of rotten wood, of being day and night immersed in the dank vapours of a woody bottom: oozing continually a fever and ague sweat: and how much is this enhanced to those whose memories are constantly presenting images "Of hills, and dales, *** and lawns, and spires, 66 CONCLUSION. Finally, the question is simply this shall I stay, and enjoy the fruits of two hundred years' labour of my ancestors; or go, and toil and sweat for those who shall come two hundred years after me! Not indeed for those of my posterity; for if they inherit the true spirit of emigration in their several generations, they will get to be subjects of king Maquina, or some other North-west-coast potentate, long before two hundred years have elapsed, or run by like so many bedeviled swine into the western ocean. And now, gentle reader, one more story, and we will take leave of each other: I to my patrimony, in the land of steady habits; and you, if you please, to the fabled regions of the west.-On my return to the eastern states, I stopped for the night at an inn in Fairfield co. Conn. My chervalles, and other riding habiliments, quite worn, led the circle round a cheerful Christmas fire of walnut wood, to inquire if I had been over the mountains. I said yes-and a conversation followed.Gent. "You have travelled in Ohio?" Yes sir." Is the water VOL. I. 27 good?" Sir, it will nauseate you, or any other New-England man. "I am told the streams are boatable to their very source-is it so?" In freshet time, every valley is a river; and in drought, every river is a dry ditch. "Then what secures the bridges in floods, and supplies the mills in drought?" Nothing. "They say crops are liable to few casualties there?" If floods, and droughts, and hurricanes, are erased from their chapter of casualties, it reads like yours. "Hurricanes ?" The tops of all their hills are bared with them, and the cornfields so frequently ruined, that the planter considers an escape two years in three, better than the common run. "Hills?'tis represented all a plain, a dead level!" I know they say so, but I who have been familiar with Vermont and New-Hampshire from my youth, never have seen such hills as those of the Ohio. "What have they then?" Plenty of wild hogs, hominy, hoe-cakes, and fever-" and maladie du pays, "a adds a gentleman opposite, who had also a travelling garb not a little worn. "Have you, sir, been there too?" "I have," says the traveller." What do you bring us of that country?" " Nothing in addition to what you have heard, but the filling up of the outline so honestly sketched by the gentleman in chervalles." "How is it possible then to keep up the delusion?" "Why, sir," says the traveller, "when I first went over the mountains, two years since, every emigrant I fell in with, was preaching up the country as the pinnacle of perfection. I soon learned the dialect of the backwoodsmen, and could effectually keep from my countrymen that I was a yankee. In this way I traversed most of the western regions, stopping with the eastern emigrants, and feigning myself a Kentuckian: for I could say I had come all the way from Rocky River;' that I was a real horse ;' that I had seen a steam-boat-and whoever rides me rides a d-d stiff colt;' that I'd the best shooting rifle, the fastest trotting mare, and the handsomest sister in all Kentuck, by G!' And although I could act the backwoodsman to the life, yet I did it no farther than to serve my purpose. As often as an opportunity offered, I entered the cabins of my countrymen, and questioned them of their country. An instance I will particularize; the man had gone for some beer, which he kindly proffered me. In his absence, Madam,' said I, don't you think you'd been as happy had you staid in your own country?' 'O sir, it was a delightsome land to dwell in, and over near Boston.'So soon as the man came in, I said again-Old gentleman, are you more happy than if you had staid below?' 'O sir, that is a delightsome land to dwell in—that Boston state;' and the tears filled both their eyes. I pursued my route, and every day found yankees; and never found any, but upon questioning of their old homes, would immediately fall into a strain of repinings, and in the most plaintive tone describe the enjoyments of their former situation, which, compared with their tale of suffering since they left them, added to the despair of ever again visiting their native soil, or making their adopted country seem like home-was enough to wring the hard heart of a land-jobber him a Home sickness. self. I shall for ever hold in utter abhorrence those men who bait my countrymen to exile. "All this I have seen, and 'tis too much; the delusion practised upon the people of New England is beyond all human endurance. The conscriptions of Bonaparte were fair dealing, compared with the arts and practices of land speculators in this country. In Europe, the imperial ravisher of villages in time became the patron of his victims : If he despoiled their bosoms of the sacred love of home, in its stead he infused the love of glory; if he placed them in a new sphere, himself was there; he shared their toils and privations, and held within their reach the star of honour. Not so with the evil Genius which haunts New-England; like the mean archer, he is ever where he cannot be hit, and his victim carries a poisoned wound for ever in his bosom-the remembrance of better days, and a better home than the lone land of exile." Thus we have, as was proposed, selected from the notes, mentioned in the beginning of this book, such pieces of history as would best exhibit the effects of emigration on the happiness of those, who leave their homes for a wilderness. Whether the picture drawn is true or false must be decided by those who have visited western bottoms, yet have no interest there. Hitherto the world has been inundated with "tales" and "tours," and histories of a country beyond the hills, which escaped the curse of " Cain's unresting doom;" but facts are rising up, and wrecks are drifting eastward. [From the Monthly Review.-Lond. March, 1820.] ART. X.-The Emigrant's Directory to the Western States of North America; including a Voyage out from Liverpool; the Geography and Topography of the whole Western Country, according to its latest Improvements; with Instructions for descending the Rivers Ohio and Mississippi; also, a brief Account of a new British Settlement on the Head-Waters of the Susquehanna, in Philadelphia [Pennsylvania]. By WILLIAM AMPHLETT, formerly of London, and late of the County of Salop, now Resident on the Banks of the Ohio River. Crown 8vo. pp. 280. London. 1819. THE present small volume appears on perusal to contain the most impartial account of the Western States of North America that we have yet seen. The author, disclaiming all intention of offering advice on the subject of emigration to the American continent, confines himself to a description of the country; and he does not appear to be one of those speculators who have land to sell, and are therefore interested in recommending any one particular state. The first fifty-seven pages are occupied with a description of the voyage from Liverpool to Philadelphia. [This voyage, we suppose, is intended to form a part of the objections to the Western world :—like the objections of the writer in the |