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and, as was the case the day before, we were not allowed to stop for dinner, there being no coach proprietor upon the road. "The Fountain Inn" is a miserable log-house, or what you would call a dog-hole: it was crowded with emigrants. I asked for something to eat, but could only obtain for answer, I guess whiskey is all the feed we have on sale." I have met with several similar instances, when I have asked, "Have you any meat?" "No."-"Either cold or hot will make no difference to me." "I guess I don't know."-" Have you any fowls?" "No."- "Ham?" "No."-" Bread?" "No.""Cheese?" "No."-" Crackers (biscuits)?" “No.”—“ I will pay you any price you please." "I guess we have only rum and whiskey feed.'

"No."-" Fish?"

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At the foot of Turtle-creek-hill where our traveller alighted from his waggon knee-deep in mud, he came up with ‘a woman and girl with two infants in their arms, who came, to use their own language, "vrom Zomerzetshire in Hingland." They spoke of their own country with heartfelt attachment; were sorry they had ever been persuaded to leave it; they had been told that America was the first country in the world, but they had experienced nothing but difficulties since they had set their foot upon it. The husband was dragging on their little all, having been forty-five days from Philadelphia.' p. 197. It is such instances as these which afflict us. The expatriation of a thousand such essential admirers of civil and religious liberty' as Mr. Fearon's consistent and conscientious' employers, might be contemplated with perfect composure; but the departure of one honest and credulous family like this must excite pity and regret. The former have many consolations to which the latter cannot look: these poor people bear no hatred to their country, nor hope, by taking their little all abroad, to inflict a wound on her prosperity; they feel no instinctive horror at the name of a king, nor look for credit among strangers by traducing his character, and reviling his servants. At home, they are condemned to labour, it is true;-they cannot live without labour in America: but here they labour with the companions of their youth, and grow old in the society which waxes gray around them. If they are in absolute want, they are relieved; if they are sick and infirm, they find medicine: in health, they partake in the public worship of their Creator; on the bed of death, they enjoy the soothing consolations of the religion which they love; and they repose at last by the side of their forefathers, whose graves they dug in the pious and cheering hope that they should one day sleep with. them, and wake together with them to a joyful resurrection. What of all this can they hope to find in the land to which the artifices and persuasions of the Birkbecks and the Fearons are eagerly propelling them? An advance in the scale of being,' (if they understand such jargon) and food for

their labour,' amidst loneliness, dejection, and despair, with the certainty of receiving, at last, the burial of a dog, and the memorial of a ditch or puddle!

Pittsburgh, situated at the confluence of two rivers, whose united streams form a third, which affords it a direct communication with the Atlantic, though at the distance of 2500 miles, is perhaps the most interesting place in the United States; and, though not a second Birmingham, as the natives call it by that figure of speech which Morris Birkbeck has named anticipation;' yet from its advantageous situation, as the connecting link between New and Old America,' may prove one day as important to the Western States, as Birmingham is to England.

'The published accounts,' says Mr. Fearon, of this city are so exaggerated and out of all reason, that strangers are usually disappointed on visiting it. This, however, was not my case. I have been in some measure tutored in American gasconade. When I am told that at a particular hotel there is handsome accommodation, I expect that they are one remove from very bad; if "elegant entertainment,” I anticipate tolerable; if a person is 66 a clever man," that he is not absolutely a fool; and if a manufactory is the "first in the world," I expect, and have generally found, about six men, and three boys employed.- -With all its advantages for the establishment of manufactories, the shops (he adds) are literally stuffed with goods of English manufacture, consisting of articles of the most varied kind, from a man's coat, or lady's gown, down to a whip or an oyster knife.'—p. 208.

If trade, as our traveller subsequently assures us, be at a stand here, it is evidently from no want of rath-ripe calculating heads. On the evening of his arrival, Mr. Fearon attended the theatre; the play (he says) was Hamlet, and the acting was, perhaps, superior to the audience.' As the representative of the philosophical Horatio was dead drunk and extremely dirty,' the compliment to the latter need not put their modesty to the blush: but Mr. Fearon found entertainment not specified in the bills.

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'Between the acts, two boys, not fourteen years of age, were very solemnly discussing what the profits of the house would be monthly, if that night could be taken as an average. From this they took a view of what interest the house paid to its owner. Their calculations were made with the precision of state financiers, and their conclusions drawn with the gravity of sages, After a long dispute, whether the interest were 83, or 83 per cent., they determined that the theatre was good property.'-p. 212.

'This occurrence,' he adds,' is in perfect accordance with national character. Gain is the education-the morals, the politics, the theology, and stands in the stead of the domestic comfort of all ages and classes of Americans; it is the centre of their system, from which they derive both light and heat.' We will not dis

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pute the heat; but for the light,-if we are to judge of it from the various instances of incredible, unimaginable stupidity which Mr. Fearon witnessed during his short residence at Pittsburgh, we cannot avoid saying, that the darkness of the poor savages of Baffin's Bay was noon-day radiance to it.

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Understanding,' Mr. Fearon says, that mechanics in every occupation met at "Carey's Porter-house," I went there several times for the purpose of obtaining information. I found them chiefly English, and all discontented with America.' In this porter-house his attention was directed to a mean looking wretch, sitting like a sot in a corner, who turned out to be that offspring of folly and sedition-the assassin Watson, little known and less regarded. 'Americans,' Mr. Fearon adds, who have heard of him, either care nothing about him, or despise him for the political part which he has taken.' Not so our traveller; and it is curious to observe the tenor of his language on the occasion. The crimes for which this villain fled his country were of the most atrocious nature; yet they appear to have impressed a very favourable idea of the perpetrator on Mr. Fearon's mind. I had,' he says, 'imagined young Watson to be a daring, bold, enthusiastic indiscreet young man.' p. 212. Now as he could have no criterion whatever to judge of young Watson but the enormities of which he had been guilty, namely sedition, robbery, and murder, we can desire no better proof of Mr. Fearon's mode of thinking, and that of those to whom he is not afraid or ashamed to address such language, than the passage before us. 'Enthusiasm! indiscretion!" And Mr. Fearon is evidently disappointed when he finds his martyr of liberty-what all the world knows him to be-a drunkard and a driveller. Yet he cannot quite give him up. The attempt to forward the good cause, however unsuccessful, claims, at least, the kind remembrance of the party; and Mr. Fearon therefore makes over to him again the enthusiasm of which he had deprived him, in a preceding paragraph, and insists that it was 'called into action' (very justifiably no doubt)' by an order of things which deprives a great part of the population of England of the actual necessaries of life.'

From Pittsburgh our traveller proceeds into the State of Ohio, over an uninterrupted level, composed chiefly of close timbered forests, and prairies of eight or ten miles square without a shrub upon them. It is not to him however that we are indebted for the information that this American prairie is not that pretty French word which means green grass bespangled with daisies and cowslips,' he does not tell us that it is a wide expanse covered with rank coarse rush-like grass, sometimes flooded middle deep, and wearing the appearance of an inland sea;' but such is the

fact;

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fact; and the dry prairies are little better. Mr. Fearon, however, does venture to say that the dreary monotony of limited views of such endless uniformity produces sensations of the most depressing melancholy; and (with a compliment to his own country) that head-aches and intermittent fevers are so general, that a man's being sick is as common in this country, as being in distress is in England.' He notices also another circumstance, which he could not illustrate by a disadvantageous comparison with his country. The first article of the constitution is, All men are born equally free and independent, yet the people of Ohio have coloured people which they call their property;' negro slaves, in short. "The mode in which they effect this perpetuation of slavery, in violation of the constitution, is to purchase blacks and have them apprenticed to them. Some are so base as to take these negroes down the river at the approach of the expiration of their apprenticeship, and sell them at Natchez, for life!'-p. 227. Mr. Fearon affects surprise at this; why, we cannot pretend to say. The people are here more lengthy and sallow,' if possible, than in other parts of the United States; and, if we are right in our interpretation of Mr. Fearon's vaulty aspect,' they are generally of a cadaverous appearance.

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The circulating medium through the Western country is chiefly paper, generally small notes from 3d. to 2s. 6d. The very trifling quantity of specie consists of Spanish dollars cut into halves, quarters, and eighths; nay they divide the small notes into parts, which pass current, even in the capital, where Mr. Fearon purchased a pair of worsted gloves of the commonest kind for half a dollar, such as cost 8d. or 9d. in London, and the store-keeper, having no change, took half of a dollar-note on a Baltimore bank:-he afterwards found that demi-notes were a common currency. The notes are generally at a discount, which differs, in different towns, from 5 to 40 per cent.: had he suffici ently understood this trade, he says he could nearly have paid his expenses by merely buying, in one town, the notes of that to which he was going. We recommend this account of the currency of the United States to any gentleman who may have occasion to undermine the national credit, or to extol that of America at the expense of England.

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On entering Kentucky, Mr. Fearon tells his friends that a variation of character in the people was evident.' At the first tavern at which he put up, six gentlemen were seated at the diningroom fire, drinking wine, and engaged in varied and rational conversation! an instance of sociality, which, (says he) common as it may appear to you, I had not witnessed in my previous western travels. It is certainly somewhat different from the general practice of each person taking his solitary eye openers,' and 'phlegm

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dispersers,' and swallowing them down at the bar,' the keeper of which is in full employ from sunrise to bed-time.' Another instance of a propensity to sociality, in these frank and affable Kentuckians,' appears to have made less impression on our traveller than it will perhaps on many of his readers. Among the 'Rules to be observed by all gentlemen who choose to dine at the hotel' is this: 5. No gentleman shall take the saddle, bridle or harness of another gentleman without his consent.' p. 242.-We have seldom seen a more delicate periphrasis. Just before Mr. Fearon sat down to table, a kind of interlude was performed, a common mode, it appears, of giving zest to a Kentucky dinner.

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'My attention was excited by the piteous cries of a human voice, accompanied with the loud cracking of a whip. Following the sound, I found that it issued from a log barn, the door of which was fastened. Peeping through the logs, I perceived the bar-keeper, together with a stout man, more than six feet high, who was called Colonel (Mr. Fearon tenderly suppresses the name) and a negro-boy about fourteen years of age, stript naked, receiving the lashes of these monsters, who relieved each other in the use of a horse-whip: the poor boy fell down upon his knees several times, begging and praying that they would not kill him, and that he would do any thing they liked: this produced no cessation in their exercise. At length Mr. Lawes arrived, told the valiant Colonel and his humane employer, the bar-keeper, to desist, and that the boy's refusal to cut wood was in obedience to his (Mr. L.'s) directions. Colonel said, that "he did not know what the niggar had done, but that the bar-keeper requested his assistance to whip Cæsar; of course he lent him a hand, being no more than he should expect Mr. Lawes to do for him under similar circumstances." At table Mr. Lawes said, "that he had not been so vexed for seven years." This expression gave me pleasure, and also afforded me, as I thought, an opportunity to reprobate the general system of slavery; but not one voice joined with mine; each gave vent in the following language to the super-abundant quantity of the milk of human kindness, with which their breasts were overflowing.

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66 I guess he deserved all he got."

"It would have been of small account if the niggar had been whipt to death."

"I always serve my blasted niggars that way; there is nothing else so good for them.”

It appeared that this boy was the property of a regular slave-dealer, who was then absent at Natchez with a cargo. Mr. Lawes's humanity fell lamentably in my estimation when he stated, " that whipping niggars, if they were his own, was perfectly right, and they always deserved it; but what made him mad was, that the boy was left under his care by a friend, and he did not like to have a friend's property injured.” * *As it appears that Mr. of Liverpool, together with Dr. B. and Colonel B.,' were present at this edifying scene, it may be hoped that they will furnish Mr. Roscoe with some important matter for his next panegyric on the free and happy condition of all ranks in North America.

and Mr.

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