region. On our journey from Thamesville,
when near Louisville, a neat hamlet by the wayside, in a beautiful
country, settled by old Dutch families, on a fine bend of the Thames,
we passed in the woods a dead horse, and found some friends at
Chatham, who told us that it had dropped down from the intense heat.
Those scavengers of Canada, the pigs, were like certain politic worms
already busily at work on the carcase, in which indeed one had buried
itself.

In this Dutch country, you find the new road to Lake Erie, to the
Rondeau from Chatham _graded_, or ready for planking, for twenty-six
miles, and the new road to Windsor is also nearly finished; so that
Chatham will now have an excellent land route to the Detroit river, as
well as to Lake Erie; and as the Rondeau, a remarkable round littoral
lake, is also converting into an excellent harbour, all this portion
of Canada, the fairest as well as the most fertile, will progress
amazingly.

I saw the chief of the Moravian Indians near Thamesville, and had some
conversation with him. He is a modest, middle-aged man, and rules over
about two hundred and fifty well-behaved people. The government have
given him two hundred acres of land in sight of the Moravian village,
and there he dwells in patriarchal simplicity.

Their spiritual and temporal concerns are under the supervision of the
brethren at Bethlehem, the principal settlement of the Moravian
fraternity in the United States; and they have a neat chapel and
school, conducted with the decorum and good results for which that
sect are noted.

Petrolean springs and mineral oil fountains are frequent near this
village, and the whole country here appears bituminous, the bed of the
Thames being composed of shales highly impregnated with it. Salt is
manufactured in small quantities by the Indians from brine-springs
here.

We saw the remarkable harvest of 1845 in all its glory on this route,
as the Dutch farmers were every where at this early period cutting the
wheat, and heard that on Willett's farm on the Thames it had been cut
as early as the 10th of July.

My _compagnon de voyage_ I had taken up in the morning, on account of
the intelligence which he displayed, and in return for the ride he
gave me much information.

The banks of Young Father Thames, after leaving Chatham, and about it,
are very low and flat, consequently, fever and ague are by no means
rare visitors. He described the ague as being beyond a common Ca