sounding.

Newark, or, as it is now called, Niagara, but, as it should be named,
Simcoe, is still a pretty, well laid-out town; and, although it has
scarcely had a new house built in it for many years past, is on the
whole a very respectable place, and the capital of the district of
Niagara, celebrated for its apple, peach, and cherry orchards.

It has a good-looking church, and the living is a rectory. A Roman
Catholic church stands close to the English, and a handsome Scots church
is at the other end of the town. There is an ugly jail and Court-House
about a mile in the country, and an excellent market, where every thing
is cheap and good.

Barracks for the Royal Canadian Rifle regiment stand on a large plain.
Old Fort George, the scene of former battling, is in total ruin; and
Fort Mississagua, with its square tower, looks frowningly at Fort
Niagara, on the American side of the estuary of the Great River. I never
see these rival batteries, for it is too magniloquent to style them
fortresses, but they picture to my mind England and the United States.

Mississagua looks careless and confident, with a little bit of a
flag--the flag, however, of a thousand years, displayed, only on
Sundays and holidays, on a staff which looks something like that which
the king-making Warwick tied his heraldic bear to.

The antiquity and warlike renown of England sit equally and visibly
impressed on the crest of the miserable Mississagua as on that of
Gibraltar.

Fort Niagara, an old French Indian stockade, modernized by the American
engineers from time to time, half-lighthouse, half-fortification,
glaring with whitewashed walls, that may be seen almost at Toronto, with
a flag-staff towering to the skies, and a flag which would cover the
deck of a first-rate, displayed from morn to night, speaks of the new
nation, whose pretensions must ever be put in plain view, and constantly
tell the tale that America is a second edition of the best work of
English industry and of British valour--a second edition interwoven,
however, with foreign matter, with French _fierte_ without French
_politesse_, with German mysticism without German learning, with the
restless and rabid democracy of the whole world without the salutary
check of venerable laws, and with that strange mixture of freedom and
slavery, of tolerance and intolerance, which distinguishes America of
the nineteenth century.

But it is, nevertheless, a most extraordinary spectacle,