dearest friends.

There were thousands of such cases. Northern men, married to Southern wives, Northern women married to Southern husbands, were spread over the whole South. have never heard of a case in which they were not true to their adopted land.

I

There is another feature of the case I have described above. This lady, when we were friends in her Northern home, was an ardent Abolitionist. Noble, pure-minded, and earnestly religious, she became, notwithstanding, mistress and owner of many slaves, and her conscience then revolted as urgently against the cruelty of turning them out to take care of themselves, as it once would have done against holding a fellow creature in bondage. It was a common thing, however, for abolitionists to lose their feeling against slavery when they came in contact with it, and for Northern emigrants to the South to become the most ardent Southerners.

Lowell has greatly changed. The population has increased to over forty thousand. It is so largely Irish that there are four Roman Catholic churches. There is now a resident population of operatives, who must be quite a different class from the rosy country girls who used to come in their white sunbonnets packed into those long waggons. Many other large manufacturing towns have grown up, fostered by high protective tariffs, that give a virtual monopoly of many kinds of fabrics, and which enabled the American mill-owners to buy cotton at Liverpool, while half a million of operatives in Lancashire were reduced to pauperism for the want of it.

Lowell has now ten manufacturing corporations, having an aggregate capital of about £3,000,000, 12,234 looms, 400,000 spindles, 12,500 operatives, and makes two and a half million yards of fabrics a-week. There are twenty churches, an abundance of schools, and four or five newspapers.

I must say a word of this beautiful Merrimack river. The name is Indian, and was also given to the United States steam

frigate, converted by the Confederates into an iron-clad, which did such terrible execution in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The Merrimack is formed by the union of two roaring mountain streams, at the southern base of the White Mountains in New Hampshire; then it runs, with a clear swift current, through beautiful valleys, down a series of rapids to the Atlantic Ocean, running south some eighty miles to Lowell, and then east thirty-five miles, and at its debouchment making a harbour for the pretty town of Newburyport. Besides hundreds of mills and factories, the Merrimack supplies water-power to four large towns, Nashua and Manchester in New Hampshire, and Lowell and Lawrence in Massachusetts, doing the work of more steamengines, or horses, or men than I have time to calculate, or the reader would be likely to remember.

CHAPTER XI.

BUFFALO.

I WENT to the little frontier city of Buffalo, in Western New York, at the outlet of Lake Erie into the Niagara river, about twenty miles south of the great cataract, in 1837. Railways had not at that time stretched across the Empire State. There were two modes of reaching Buffalo-the mail-coaches and the canal-packets. I chose the latter mode as the cheaper and

pleasanter.

The canal-packet is out of date, and would be considered very slow in these days; but it was not a bad way of getting through the world to one who had his whole life before him, who was fond of beautiful scenery, and was in no hurry. Our sharp, narrow, gaily painted boat was drawn by three fine

horses, each ridden by a smart boy, and we glided along at the regular pace of five miles an hour. A greater speed washed away the embankments, and was not permitted. But when opposition boats were running they sometimes doubled this pace, and the boats would run on the swell wave they had first created, as fast as the horses could gallop.

We wound through a varied, fertile, and beautiful country, through romantic valleys, and by the side of silvery streams. In level countries canals are straight and uninteresting; but a canal which must keep its level in a broken country winds around the hills, crosses the streams, and becomes very picturesque. We passed through great farms and pretty villages, all bright with new, white cottages with green blinds, gardens, and shrubberies.

All rose early, and after ablutions in the wash-room, which was not very large, went on deck for fresh air and a promenade. Our luggage was ranged along the centre, but there was a space to walk on each side. If inclined to take a run, the steersman would lay up to the tow-path, and with a spring on shore we trotted after the horses.

The breakfast was announced by a very noisy hand-bell, rung as obstreperously by the demonstrative negro steward as if his boarders were a mile away. The long narrow table through the centre of the cabin is covered with Yankee luxuries-hot Indian-corn bread, milk-toast, hot rolls, beefsteaks, veal cutlets, fricassed chickens, fried potatoes, ham and eggs, apple sauce, and all the rest, washed down with many cups of hot coffee. The "captain" sits at the head of the table, and his lady passengers are to the right and the left of him, whom he converses with affably, and helps politely to the dainties around him. This captain of a canal boat, be it observed, is a character. He dresses a little too much for a gentleman, perhaps. His diamonds are too large, and his waistcoats of too loud a pattern. But, as he rises in the world, commands a steamboat, keeps an

hotel, and then goes to Congress, or runs for Governor, he will tone down to the proper standard; and, if he gets rich enough, may become in his old age as shabby as a millionaire.

After breakfast a turn on deck, while the waiters and boat hands breakfast and the tables are cleared. We walk, or sit on the trunks, talk politics or business, get up a flirtation at short notice with a pretty girl going to Wisconsin, having and needing no protector, or read, or look upon the ever-changing scenery through which we are so noiselessly gliding. In either case we are liable to interruptions. Every farmer-proprietor who owns land on both sides of the canal has a right to a bridge across it. These bridges, for the sake of economy, were built just high enough to let the boats pass under them with two feet or perhaps only eighteen inches to spare. The luggage is ranged on the deck so as just to clear the beams of the lowest bridges. So, as we glide along, in the midst of an animated discussion, or a delightful chat, or an absorbing passage in the last novel, when the pursuing postchaise is just about to overtake the trembling runaways flying for Gretna Green, the steersman shouts, with startling emphasis, "Bridge!" Down we all go upon our marrow-bones, crouching low, until the boat shoots out again into the daylight, and we gallantly assist the ladies to their feet and resume our occupations. In ten minutes more there comes another cry sharper and sterner from the watchful steersman, but for whose care we might all be crushed to jelly on our portmanteaus. This time the cry is, "Low bridge !" and this time it is not enough to kneel and crouch, but down we go flat and sprawling on the deck. The danger past, we scramble up again, laughing at our ridiculous positions, and getting better acquainted with every bridge we pass under. Luckily the "raging canal" does not make us sea-sick, and our ups and downs give us good appetites for our dinner.

The dinner is plentiful and good. Roast turkey, chickens, beef, ham, vegetables, pies, and puddings make an ample meal;

but we wonder how it was ever cooked in the little closet aft, devoted to culinary operations. The dinner is a mid-day meal, not later than one o'clock. The Americans have kept to the fashions which prevailed in England when their forefathers emigrated. Only of late years, in the larger towns, and among the more fashionable classes, have people dined as late as five or six o'clock.

On the packet-boat we had a substantial tea at six o'clock, and then watched a glorious sunset falling into twilight. In those deep blue skies the bright mirrors of the Western lakes make such gorgeous sunsets as I have never seen elsewhere. I wish that Turner could have seen them. He alone of painters could have done them some faint justice on his canvas with such poor colours as our earthly minerals give, and such dim light as they are able to reflect.

When it was dark we found the long cabin lighted. Some read, some play at cards; gaming was not out of fashion then, and the steward knew the secret of mint-juleps. We glide on with soft washing and gurgling sounds. At ten o'clock a heavy curtain is drawn across the cabin, separating the ladies' portion from the rest; berths are put up along the sides of the cabin, the lights are diminished, and the wash and gurgle lull us to sleep.

We

True, it takes us twenty hours to go a hundred miles. are three days from Albany to Buffalo; but what a nice journey it was! We never forget it. A thousand landscapes fill the gallery of our memory. We have passed over dizzy viaducts, and through miles of deep-cut ravines; we have ascended steep hills through a succession of locks. At Lockport we are gently lifted up the very precipice over which Niagara pours fifty miles away, and are even with Lake Erie, whose waters have floated us up, up, up to their own level.

And so gliding along the Tonewanda Creek, and by the great rushing Niagara river, which seemed hurrying down to