have no where seen an agriculture apparently so rich as here. In the permanence of their spacious stone mansions and barns, the Germans seem to have thought more of posterity than themselves; and, with old Cato, to have done all with a view to "posterity and the immortal Gods." To us, West Pennsylvania appeared to be peopled with a tall, hardy, lank-looking race of men. The soil in many places

had the same hard and harsh features of rock and hillock, which characterize our landscape. Except the inhabitants in the immediate vicinity of Pittsburg, or other manufacturing villages, they find indifferent markets for their produce, and their chances for making money are very precarious. In healthiness, in the difficulty of procuring the means of subsistence, in abstemiousness, and in habits of rigid industry, we compared them to our New England people. The intermixture of Irish, Scotch, and Germans, has given them a singular and rather ludicrous dialect, in which the peculiarities of language of these several races are mixed.

I may remark in conclusion, that the only disaster Ι. worth recording, in our long journey to Pittsburg, occurred just before we left the town. On a slight declivity, we came in contact with a carriage rapidly driving from town, and were upset in a moment. But we arose from under the pressure of boxes, bundles, and trunks, alarmed, indeed, but with very little personal injury.

LETTER IV.-PITTSBURG.

MANY travellers and emigrants to this region, view the first samples of the modes of travelling in the western world, on the Allegany at Oleanne point, or the Monongahela at Brownsville. These are but the retail specimens. At Pittsburg, where these rivers unite, you have the thing in gross, and by wholesale. The first thing that strikes a stranger from the Atlantic, arrived at the boat-landing, is the singular, whimsical, and amusing spectacle, of the varieties of water-craft, of all shapes and structures. There is the the stately barge, of the size of a large Atlantic schooner, with its raised and outlandish looking deck. This kind of craft, however, which required twenty-five hands to work it up stream, is almost gone into disuse, and though so common ten years ago, is now scarcely seen. Next there is the keel-boat, of a long, slender, and elegant form, and generally carrying from fifteen to thirty tons. This boat is formed to be easily propelled over shallow waters in the summer season, and in low stages of the water is still much used, and runs on waters not yet frequented by steam-boats. Next in order are the Kentucky flats, or in the vernacular phrase, "broadhorns," a species of ark, very nearly resembling a New England pig-stye. They are fifteen feet wide, and from forty to one hundred feet in length, and carry from twenty to seventy tons. Some of them, that are called family-boats, and used by families in descending the river, are very large and roomy, and have comfortable and separate apartments, fitted up with chairs, beds, tables and stoves. It is no uncommon spectacle to see a large family, old and young, servants, cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, fowls, and animals of all kinds, bringing

to recollection the cargo of the ancient ark, all embarked, and floating down on the same bottom. Then there are what the people call "covered sleds," or ferryflats, and Allegany-skiffs, carrying from eight to twelve tons. In another place are pirogues of from two to four tons burthen, hollowed sometimes from one prodigious tree, or from the trunks of two trees united, and a plank rim fitted to the upper part. There are common skiffs, and other small craft, named, from the manner of making them, "dug-outs," and canoes hollowed from smaller trees. These boats are in great numbers, and these names are specific, and clearly define the boats to which they belong. But besides these, in this land of freedom and invention, with a little aid perhaps, from the influence of the moon, there are monstrous anomalies, reducible to no specific class of boats, and only illustrating the whimsical archetypes of things that have previouslo existed in the brain of inventive men, who reject the slavery of being obliged to build in any received form. You can scarcely imagine an abstract form in which a boat can be built, that in some part of the Ohio or Mississippi you will not see, actually in motion. The New York canal is beginning, indeed, to bring samples of this infinite variety of water-craft nearer to the inspection of the Atlantic people.

This variety of boats, so singular in form, and most of them apparently so frail, is destined in many instances to voyages of from twelve hundred to three thousand miles. Keel-boats, built at this place, start on hunting expeditions for points on the Missouri, Arkansas, and Red River, at such distances from Pittsburg as these. Such are the inland voyages on these long streams, and the terms of the navigation are as novel

as are the forms of the boats. You hear of the danger of "riffles," meaning probably, ripples, and planters, and sawyers, and points, and bends, and shoots, a corruption, I suppose, of the French "chute." You hear the boatmen extolling their prowess in pushing a pole, and you learn the received opinion, that a " Kentuck" is the best man at a pole, and a Frenchman at the oar. A firm push of the iron-pointed pole on a fixed log, is termed a "reverend" set. You are told when you embark, to bring your "plunder" aboard, and you hear about moving "fernenst" the stream; and you gradually become acquainted with a copious vocabulary of this sort. The manners of the boatmen are as strange as their language. Their peculiar way of life has given origin not only to an appropriate dialect, but to new modes of enjoyment, riot, and fighting. Almost every boat, while it lies in the harbour has one or more fiddles scraping continually aboard, to which you often see the boatmen dancing. There is no wonder that the way of life which the boatmen lead, in turn extremely indolent, and extremely laborious; for days together requiring little or no effort, and attended with no danger, and then on a sudden, laborious and hazardous, beyond Atlantic navigation; generally plentiful as it respects food, and always so as it regards whiskey, should always have seductions that prove irresistible to the young people that live near the banks of the river. The boats float by their dwellings on beautiful spring mornings, when the verdant forest, the mild and delicious temperature of the air, the delightful azure of the sky of this country, the fine bottom on the one hand, and the romantic bluff on the other, the broad and smooth stream rolling calmly down the forest, and floating the boat gently

forward, all these circumstances harmonize in the excited youthful imagination. The boatmen are dancing to the violin on the deck of their boat. They scatter their wit among the girls on the shore who come down to the water's edge to see the pageant pass. The boat glides on until it disappears behind a point of wood.. At this moment perhaps, the bugle, with which all the boats are provided, strikes up its note in the distance over the water. These scenes, and these notes, echoing from the bluffs of the beautiful Ohio, have a charm for the imagination, which, although I have heard a thousand times repeated, and at all hours, and in all positions, is even to me always new, and always delightful. No wonder that the young, who are reared in these remote regions, with that restless curiosity which is fostered by solitude and silence, who witness scenes like this so frequently, no wonder that the severe and unremitting labours of agriculture, performed directly in the view of such scenes, should become tasteless and irksome. No wonder that the young along the banks of the great streams, should detest the labours of the field, and embrace every opportunity, either openly, or if minors, covertly, to escape and devote themselves to the pernicious employment of boating. And in this view we may account for the detestation of the inhabitants along these great streams towards steam-boats, which are every day diminishing the number of small boats and boatmen, and which have already withdrawn from the western waters, probably ten thousand from that employment. And yet with all these seductions for the eye and the imagination, no life is so slavish, none so precarious and dangerous. In no employment do the hands so wear out. After the lapse of so very