dark, and dirty regions of the luggage-van.  I noticed one important difference between the railway economy of England and that of America.  In the former, as you know, the railway is haughty, exclusive, and aristocratic.  It scorns all fellowship with common roads, and dashes on, either under or over the houses, with arbitrary indifference.  In America, it generally condescends to pass along the public streets to the very centre of the city, the engine being taken off or put to in the suburbs, and its place intra muros, if I may so say, supplied by horses.  In leaving Baltimore, the engine was attached before we got quite out of the city; and we were going for some time along the common road, meeting in one place a horse and cart, in another a man on horseback, in another a pair of oxen fastened to each other, and so on.  Dangerous enough, apparently! yet railway accidents are much less frequent in America than in England.  It is, besides, an immense saving of capital.

In our progress, we had to cross several arms of the Chesapeak Bay.  These arms were from one to two miles wide, and the railway is carried over them upon posts driven into the ground.  It seemed like crossing the sea in a railway carriage.  At Havre de Grace we had to cross the Susquehannah River.  This word Susquehannah is Indian, and means literally, I am told, “the rolling thunder.”  In crossing it, however, we heard no thunder, except that of the luggage-van over our heads, on the top of the steamer.  Here we changed carriages.  We soon got sight of the Delaware, which kept us company nearly all the way to Philadelphia.  Delaware, the smallest of all the States except Rhode Island, we entirely crossed.  A few days before, Delaware had well nigh done herself great honour.  Her House of Representatives carried, by a majority, a vote for the abolition of slavery within her boundaries; but the measure was lost in her Senate by a majority of one or two.  The State legislature will not meet again for two years.  All parties are confident that the measure will then be triumphantly carried through.  In America, however, the abolition of slavery in any State does not always mean freedom to the slaves.  Too often it is a mere transportation of them to the Southern States.  Had Delaware passed a law that all slaves should he free at the expiration of five years, or that all children born after a certain period should he free, the owners of slaves would have had an obvious interest in disposing of their human property to the Southern traders before that period arrived.  Mothers, too, would have been hastened Southward to give birth to their offspring; so that the “peculiar institution” might lose none of its prey.  Measures for the abolition of slavery in any part of America do not arise from sympathy with the negro, and from a wish to improve his condition and promote his happiness, but from aversion to his presence, or perhaps from a conviction that the system of slavery is expensive and impolitic.  Those who feel kindly towards their coloured brother, and act towards him under the impulse of pure and lofty philanthropy, are, I am sorry to say, very few indeed.