ing like serpents over the whole
continent from Maine to Mississippi: Binding the cold North to the
ever-flowing streams of Georgia and Alabama, literally, with bonds of
iron, and forming, indeed, the natural roads of a country whose soil and
climate would set at nought all the ingenuity of M'Adam, backed by the
wealth of Croesus and the flint of Derbyshire to boot.

Now, had such a result been prognosticated only a very few years back,
the man whose foresight had led to such a large view of the subject
would have been mouthed at as mad all over the American continent, and
written down knave or ass, or both, in every practical journal of
Europe.

Such great changes constantly agitated, and reduced to practice with a
promptitude of which even England, with her wealth, industry, and
enterprise, has little notion, make discrepancies between the facts and
opinions of rapidly succeeding travellers, for which neither the
veracity nor the judgment of the parties can fairly be impugned.

Action here leaves speculation lagging far behind; the improvement once
conceived is in operation by such time as the opposing theorist has
satisfactorily demonstrated its impracticability; and the dream of
to-day is the reality of to-morrow.

I feel, in fact, a difficulty in describing without seeming hyperbole
the impressions I daily received, and beheld confirmed by facts, of the
extraordinary spirit of movement that appears to impel men and things in
this country; this great hive wherein there be no drones; this field in
which every man finds place for his plough, and where each hand seems
actually employed either "to hold or drive."

For ever wandering about as I was, and visiting, as I frequently did,
the same places at intervals again and again, I had occasion to be much
struck with a state of things of which I was thus afforded constant
evidence: take for instance,

My first journey in Sept. 1833, between New York and Philadelphia, was
by steam-boat and railway, having cars drawn by horses over thirty-five
miles, which thus occupied five hours and a half. In October of the same
year I did the same distance by locomotive in two hours. When first I
visited Boston, the journey was performed in twenty-four hours, by
steamer to Providence, thence to Boston by stage; the same distance now
occupies fifteen hours, a railway having been last spring put in
operation between Providence and Boston.

Again, in 1834, the traveller had but one