to
tens of miles in America. He says that, in America, travellers will
start on an expedition of three thousand miles, by boats, on horseback,
or on foot, with as little deliberation or anxiety, as an Englishman
would set out on a journey of three hundred.

At Vincennes, the foundation had just been laid of a large establishment
of mills to be worked by steam. Water-mills of great power were building
on the Wabash, near Harmony; and undertakings of similar kind will, no
doubt, be called for and executed, along the banks of this river, and
of its various tributary streams.

On entering Vincennes there is nothing which tends to make a favourable
impression on a stranger; but it improves on acquaintance, for it
contains agreeable people: and there is a spirit of cleanliness, and
even of neatness, in the houses and manner of living. There is also a
strain of politeness in the inhabitants, which marks the origin of this
settlement to be French.

At _Princeton_, a place scarcely three years old, Mr. Birkbeck and his
family went to a log-tavern, where neatness was as well observed as at
many taverns in the cities of England. The people of this town belong to
America in dress and manners; but they would not disgrace old England in
the general decorum of their deportment.

Mr. Birkbeck lamented here, as in other parts of America, the small
account that is had of time. Subsistence is easily secured, and liberal
pursuits are yet too rare to operate as a general stimulus to exertion:
the consequence is, that life is whiled away in a painful state of
yawning lassitude.

Twenty or thirty miles west of this place, in the Illinois territory, is
a large country where settlements were beginning; and where, Mr.
Birkbeck says, there was an abundant choice of unentered lands, of a
description, which, if the statements of travellers and surveyors, even
after great abatements, can be relied on, he imagined would satisfy his
wishes.

Princeton affords a very encouraging situation for a temporary abode. It
stands on an elevated spot, in an uneven country, ten miles from the
river Wabash, and two from the navigable stream of the Patok; but the
country is rich, and the timber is vast in bulk and height.

The small-pox is likely soon to be excluded from this state; for
vaccination is very generally adopted, and inoculation for the small-pox
is prohibited altogether; not by law, but by common consent. If it
should be known that an individ