mpt. Still
a hundred or even two hundred miles an hour is slow travelling after
all. Do you remember our flight on the railroad across the Kanadaw
continent?--fully three hundred miles the hour--that was travelling.
Nothing to be seen though--nothing to be done but flirt, feast and dance
in the magnificent saloons. Do you remember what an odd sensation was
experienced when, by chance, we caught a glimpse of external objects
while the cars were in full flight? Every thing seemed unique--in one
mass. For my part, I cannot say but that I preferred the travelling by
the slow train of a hundred miles the hour. Here we were permitted
to have glass windows--even to have them open--and something like a
distinct view of the country was attainable.... Pundit says that the
route for the great Kanadaw railroad must have been in some measure
marked out about nine hundred years ago! In fact, he goes so far as
to assert that actual traces of a road are still discernible--traces
referable to a period quite as remote as that mentioned. The track, it
appears was double only; ours, you know, has twelve paths; and three or
four new ones are in preparation. The ancient rails were very slight,
and placed so close together as to be, according to modern notions,
quite frivolous, if not dangerous in the extreme. The present width of
track--fifty feet--is considered, indeed, scarcely secure enough. For
my part, I make no doubt that a track of some sort must have existed in
very remote times, as Pundit asserts; for nothing can be clearer, to
my mind, than that, at some period--not less than seven centuries ago,
certainly--the Northern and Southern Kanadaw continents were united;
the Kanawdians, then, would have been driven, by necessity, to a great
railroad across the continent.

April 5.--I am almost devoured by ennui. Pundit is the only conversible
person on board; and he, poor soul! can speak of nothing but
antiquities. He has been occupied all the day in the attempt to convince
me that the ancient Amriccans governed themselves!--did ever
anybody hear of such an absurdity?--that they existed in a sort of
every-man-for-himself confederacy, after the fashion of the "prairie
dogs" that we read of in fable. He says that they started with
the queerest idea conceivable, viz: that all men are born free and
equal--this in the very teeth of the laws of gradation so visibly
impressed upon all things both in the moral and physical universe.
Every man "v