being kept there. That clumsy and uncomfortable machine, the American stage waggon, cannot be passed over without some attempt at a description. We have already allowed one opportunity to go by: we must not let another. If one of them, horses, harness, and driver, could be brought to London, it would prove a lucrative exhibition. The one into which we have just scrambled, “The Industry” by name, is calculated to hold twelve persons, who all sit on cross benches with their faces towards the horses. The front seat holds three, one of whom is the driver. Door there is none, so the passengers get in over the front wheels, and sprawl across the driver’s seat. The hind places are most in request, since they allow you to rest your shaken frame against the back of the waggon. Women are generally indulged with it, and if they happen to be late, it is a strange sight to see them scramble over the intermediate men. The waggon is open at the sides, but has a roof supported by props, and is provided with curtains which can be buttoned down or rolled up, as the weather is wet or dry. The inside of the vehicle is crowded with trunks and parcels, which not only cramp but bruise our legs. We are very sorry for a gentlemanly Frenchman, whose politeness is severely tested by the inconveniences he suffers. The driver tells us that he is a poor French duke, who has been ruined by the Revolution.
One of our travelling companions is a West of England clothier, a dry and precise man sometimes, but seldom given to exaggeration. We are discussing musquitoes, which trouble us not a little during the first nine miles to Newark, for the country is very marshy. The clothier, with much gravity, refers to his notes, which are to be published on his return to England, and tells us how certain musquitoes continued sucking his blood on one occasion till they swelled to four times their ordinary size, when they absolutely fell off and burst from their fulness!
The distance to Trenton, sixty-six miles, will not be accomplished before night, and all that time the driver will continue to curse and swear as he is doing now. Terrible thought! Nay, he gets worse as the day wears on, and reaches his climax during the last half dozen miles, when the road is at its worst, and the obstructive stumps of trees most numerous. By this time another of our fellow-travellers had joined our conversation. This is an agreeable young Irishman, whose name, he tells us, is Weld. Alarmed at the disturbed state of his native island, he has come to look at America with the view of making it his permanent abode. Like the clothier, he is collecting notes for a book when he returns to Europe. He is communicative, and, after a sense of rolls and jolts such as no vehicle in the Old World could possibly have survived, he tells us we should try the roads in Maryland, which are incomparably the worst in the Union. “So bad are they,” says he, “that while going from Elkton to the Susquehannah ferry, the driver frequently had to call to the passengers in the stage to lean out of the carriage, first at one side, and then at the other, to prevent being overturned in the ruts. ‘Now, gentlemen, to the right!’ and out went the passengers’ bodies halfway on that side. ‘Now, gentlemen, to the left!’ and the other side of the waggon was duly ballasted.”
Stopping at Trenton all night, we start at six the next morning, and are not deposited safely at the Franklin’s Head, in North-Second-street, Philadelphia, until 2 p.m., albeit the distance is only thirty miles. Little do we imagine that, half a century later, railroad cars will be running almost along the same route, and that our successors of the nineteenth century will be able to make, with ease and comfort in three hours, a journey that has cost us the best part of two days.
An embassy from the Cherokee and Creek Indians had arrived a few days before us. Two of these worthies, rejoicing, as we are told, in the names of Flamingo and Double-head, paraded the streets with great dignity, followed by a crowd of little boys. Our weak-minded clothier acquaintance introduced himself to these savages, telling them that he was a subject of the great King George, on the other side of the great waters, and that he wished to smoke a calumet with them, and to beg a belt of wampum. After a few preliminary grunts, that noble savage Flamingo, tall and stout withal, replied, rising to a climax of yells, and flourishing his tomahawk. The interpreter explained, to the clothier’s horror and dismay, that the pale-face was to understand, among other trifling and irrelevant matters, that he, Flamingo, had, in his lifetime, shed enough blood to swim in! No more talk of calumets or wampum belts; our mild friend had ceased to have any other feelings towards the noble savages save those of terror and disgust.
Let us take up a newspaper, for there is no lack of them. What is this?—“Died in Salem, Mass., Master James Verry, aged twelve, a promising youth, whose early death is supposed to have been brought on by excessive smoking of segars.” Gracious goodness!—what juvenile depravity! Here is an opportunity for some dignified but cutting criticism of a republican state of society: “One of the greatest evils of a republican form of government is”—but there are so many evils, and of such magnitude, that we are not quite prepared yet to single out any particular one. The edge has gone from the sharpness of our disgust, by the time we have had that chat with Taylor the segar-maker at Alexandria, near Washington. While conversing with the father, we observe the son, an infant not four years old, smoking a large segar made of the strongest tobacco! The father exultingly tells us that the child contracted the habit a year ago, and that he now smokes three or four daily, which he cries for if not kept regularly supplied! Yet is the child fat and healthy.
Here is a book, lately published (1789), “The American Geography,” by Jedediah Morse, D.D. We open it casually at “North Carolina,” and read as follows:—“The delicate and entertaining diversion, with propriety called gouging, is thus performed. When two boxers are worried (wearied?) with fighting and bruising each other, they come, as it is called, to close quarters, and each endeavours to twist his forefingers in the ear-locks of his antagonist. When these are