Canandaigua, and to this the village owes its superiority in gardens to almost any place in the country. We spent the greater part of the day with a gentleman who was born in Scotland, but had settled at Canandaigua thirty-four years before, when the place was almost a desert. He now sees himself surrounded by handsome dwellings, trim gardens, and a highly-cultivated society, able to command resources of books and other intellectual luxuries, to almost any extent, from the directness and ease of communication with New York. He had just taken possession of a splendid new dwelling, and had presented his old one to the episcopalian church for a parsonage. He showed me, from the top of the house, where this dwelling had stood, where it stood now, and how it had been moved entire in a day and a half. I think the distance could not have been much under a mile.

After our early breakfast we were engaged till church time in receiving and making calls, as there was no time to be lost. We went to the episcopalian church with our friends, and heard a sermon which could not please us,-it was so full of dogmatism and bitterness. Our friends insisted on entertaining the whole of our large party, and invited some agreeable guests in addition, so that we spent a very profitable as well as pleasant afterWe walked over the grounds, enjoyed the

noon.

view of the lake from the house-top, and picked up a good deal of information about the place and neighbourhood, which might seem to the inhabitants scarcely worthy of the name of knowledge, but which is inestimable to the stranger as opening new departments of enquiry, and explaining much which he did not understand before.

The stage was ordered for nine, and we returned to Blossom's for an hour's rest before setting out on our rough night's journey.

We reached Batavia to breakfast, and soon after found ourselves on the first piece of corduroy road we had encountered in the country. I mention this because corduroy roads appear to have made a deep impression on the imaginations of the English, who seem to suppose that American roads are all corduroy. I can assure them that there is a large variety in American roads. There are the excellent lime stone roads which stretch out in three directions from Nashville, Tennessee, and some like them in Kentucky, on which the tourist might sketch almost without difficulty while travelling at a rapid rate. There is quite another sort of limestone road in Virginia, in traversing which the stage is dragged up from shelf to shelf, some of the shelves sloping so as to throw the passengers on one another, on either side alternately. Then there are the rich mud roads of Ohio, through whose deep red sloughs the stage goes slowly sousing after rain,

and gently upsetting when the rut on the one or the other side proves to be of a greater depth than was anticipated. Then there are the sandy roads of the pine-barrens, of an agreeable consistency after rain, but very heavy in dry weather. Then there is the ridge road, running parallel with a part of Lake Ontario, and supposed to be the edge of what was once its basin. The level terrace thus provided by Nature offered the foundation of an admirable road, one of the best in the States. Lastly, there is the corduroy road, happily of rare occurrence, where, if the driver is merciful to his passengers, he drives them so as to give them the association of being on the way to a funeral, their involuntary sobs on each jolt helping the resemblance ;—or, if he be in a hurry, he shakes them like pills in a pill box. But the American drivers are a class of men marked by that merciful temper which naturally accompanies genius. They are men who command admiration equally by their perfection in their art, their fertility of resource, and their patience with their passengers. I was never upset in a stage but once during all my travels; and the worse the roads were, the more I was amused at the variety of devices by which we got on, through difficulties which appeared insurmountable, and the more I was edified at the gentleness with which our drivers treated female fears and fretfulness.

By this time a solitary Indian might be frequently

seen standing on a heap of stones by the road-side, or sleeping under a fence. There is something which rivets the eye of the stranger in the grave gaze, the lank hair, the blanket-wrapped form of the savage, as he stands motionless. We were generally to be seen leaning out of every opening in the stage, as long as the figure remained in sight.

We issued from the corduroy road upon one on which we could easily have performed twelve miles an hour. Houses with porches of Ionic pillars began to be scattered by the road-side. We were obviously approaching Buffalo. Soon the lake was visible, and then we entered the long main street, and stopped at the entrance of the Eagle hotel.

FORT ERIE,

"That night a child might understand
The de'il had business on his hand."

Burns.

ON consulting a good map, a little promontory may be seen jutting out into Lake Erie on the Canada shore, nearly opposite to Black Rock. Perhaps it may be marked Fort Erie, for there Fort Erie stood.

A lady of Buffalo, who happens to be a good walker, proposed that she and I should indulge in a ramble to Fort Erie, one fine day, towards the end of October. She showed me that she was provided with stout boots, in case of our having to cross swampy ground; and she said she believed we might trust to getting some sort of a dinner on the Canada side, and might therefore go unencumbered with provisions.

We set out from Buffalo soon after breakfast, and made our way over a waste, through brush, over fences, along a natural terrace once planted with guns, down to the ferry at Black Rock. On the way I saw one of the less prepossessing abodes of settlers, so frequently described;-its desolate