will sit and shiver round the stove all day,
rather than put one foot before the other. As to having a window open,
that's not to be thought of.

"We expect to reach Pittsburgh to-night, between eight and nine o'clock;
and there we ardently hope to find your March letters awaiting us. We
have had, with the exception of Friday afternoon, exquisite weather, but
cold. Clear starlight and moonlight nights. The canal has run, for the
most part, by the side of the Susquehanah and Iwanata rivers; and has
been carried through tremendous obstacles. Yesterday we crossed the
mountain. This is done _by railroad_. . . . You dine at an inn upon the
mountain; and, including the half-hour allowed for the meal, are rather
more than five hours performing this strange part of the journey. The
people north and 'down east' have terrible legends of its danger; but
they appear to be exceedingly careful, and don't go to work at all
wildly. There are some queer precipices close to the rails, certainly;
but every precaution is taken, I am inclined to think, that such
difficulties, and such a vast work, will admit of.

"The scenery, before you reach the mountains, and when you are on them,
and after you have left them, is very grand and fine; and the canal
winds its way through some deep, sullen gorges, which, seen by
moonlight, are very impressive: though immeasurably inferior to Glencoe,
to whose terrors I have not seen the smallest _approach_. We have
passed, both in the mountains and elsewhere, a great number of new
settlements and detached log houses. Their utterly forlorn and miserable
appearance baffles all description. I have not seen six cabins out of
six hundred, where the windows have been whole. Old hats, old clothes,
old boards, old fragments of blanket and paper, are stuffed into the
broken glass; and their air is misery and desolation. It pains the eye
to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat;
and never to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of
rotten trunks, of elm and pine and sycamore and logwood, steeped in its
unwholesome water; where the frogs so croak at night that after dark
there is an incessant sound as if millions of phantom teams, with bells,
were traveling through the upper air, at an enormous distance off. It is
quite an oppressive circumstance, too, to _come_ upon great tracks,
where settlers have been burning down the trees; and where their wounded
bodies lie about,