h. The excursion, however, gave us an
opportunity of seeing the town of Brooklyn, which, though insignificant,
in point of size, as compared with New York, has nearly as many
inhabitants as either Boston or Baltimore, and numbers more than twice
those in the town from which I now write.

We left New York yesterday, end slept at Philadelphia. When we went
there last week, the first thirty miles of our route was across the Bay
of New York, in a steamer, and, on our return, we came the whole way by
rail; but there is a third line, which we took on this occasion, called
the New Jersey Line, by which we went as far as Burlington by rail, and
thence a distance of nineteen miles in a steamboat down the Delaware. It
was splendid moonlight, and the town of Philadelphia, which stretches
along the banks of the river for nearly five miles, was well lighted,
and the river being crowded with ships, the whole effect was very
pretty.

It is marvellous how well they manage these huge steam-boats. They come
noiselessly up to the pier without the least shock in touching it, and
it is almost impossible to know when one has left the boat and reached
_terra firma_, so close do they bring the vessel up to the wharf. The
whole process is directed by a man at the wheel, and regulated by sound
of bell. There is a perfect absence of all yells, and cries, and strong
expressions, so common in a French steamer, and not unfrequent in an
English one.

We arrived too late at Philadelphia to be able to do much that evening,
and this morning, we started early for Baltimore, _en route_ for this
place. We had two very pleasant and communicative fellow-travellers, one
a coal merchant, who resides at Wilmington, the capital of Delaware, the
other a Quaker, a retired merchant from Philadelphia, who gave us a good
deal of information about some of the institutions and charities of that
place. He stood up much for the Girard College, and justified the
enormous cost of the building, by saying it was meant as a monument to
the founder. He made a very good defence of the solitary system, which I
mentioned in my last as existing in the penitentiary, and we were
beginning to think him a very wise "Friend," when he broke out on the
merits of Phonography, which, by his account, seems to have made much
progress in America, and he has asked us to call on Mr. Pitman, their
great authority on that subject, at Cincinnati. The old gentleman's name
was Sharpless, and it d