meadows, or at the base of the picturesque hills....  I am interested in the talk of the passengers, and cannot choose but follow it at times....  One man has been reading the New Yorker, printed by H. Greeley and Company.  I learn that Horace Greeley is his full name, and he comes in for a berating at the hands of a man with one of the characteristic goatees that I first observed at Castle Garden.  The Whigs!  I had always associated this party with latitudinarian principles.  Now I hear it called a centralist party, a monarchist party.  A voluble man, who chews tobacco, curses it as a mask for the old Federalist party, which tried to corrupt America with the British system, after it had failed as a combination of Loyalists to keep America under the dominion of Great Britain....  This is all a maze to me, at least so far as the American application is concerned.  Then the man with the goatee assails New England, and calls her the devotee of the soured gospel of envy which covers its wolf face of hate with the lamb’s decapitated head of universal brotherhood and slavery abolition.  Surely there is much strife in America....  Also again President Jackson, the tariff, and the force bill!  And will South Carolina secede from the Union on account of the unjust and lawless tariff?  New England tried to secede once when the run of affairs did not suit her.  Why not South Carolina, then, if she chooses?  Another man is reading a book of poems and talking at intervals to a companion.  I hear him say that a Mr. Willis is one of the world’s greatest poets.  I glance at the book and see the name Nathaniel Parker Willis.  Also it seems Willis is the editor of one of the world’s greatest literary journals.  It is published in New York and is called the New York Mirror....  It is all so strange.  Is it true that in this country, so far from England, there are men who are the equals of Shelley and Byron, or of Tennyson, whose first book has given me such delight recently?...

We near the journey’s end.  At Lockport we are lifted up the precipice over which the Falls of Niagara pour some miles distant.  We are now on a level with Lake Erie, to which we have climbed by many locks and lifts over the hills since we left Albany.  Soon we travel along the side of the Niagara River; quickly we drift into Buffalo.

CHAPTER V

Buffalo, they told me, had about 15,000 people.  I wished to see something of it before departing for the farther west.  For should I ever come this way again?  I started from the dock, but immediately found myself surrounded by runners and touters lauding the excellences of the boats to which they were attached.  The harbor was full of steamboats competing for trade....  They rang bells, let off steam, whistled.  Bands played.  Negroes ran here and there, carrying freight and baggage.  The air was vibrating with yells and profanity....  But I made my escape and walked