A Canal, They Say, Is But A Ditch; But This Was As Unlike A Ditch As Possible; It Was Rather A Gentle Stream, Winding In The Most Apparently Natural Meanders.

Goldsmith could find no more picturesque epithet for the canals of Holland, than "slow;"

"The slow canal, the yellow blossomed vale - "

but if the canals of that country had been like this, I am sure he would have known how to say something better for them. On the left bank, grassed over to the water's edge, I saw ripe strawberries peeping out among the clover, and shortly afterward a young man belonging to the packet leaped on board from the other side with a large basket of very fine strawberries. "I gathered them," said he "down in the swamp; the swamp is full of them." We had them afterward with our tea.

Proceeding still further, the scenery became more bold. Steep hills rose by the side of the canal, with farm-houses scattered at their feet; we passed close to perpendicular precipices, and rocky shelves sprouting with shrubs, and under impending woods. At length, a steep broad mountain rose before us, its sides shaded with scattered trees and streaked with long horizontal lines of rock, and at its foot a cluster of white houses. This was Whitehall; and here the waters of the canal plunge noisily through a rocky gorge into the deep basin which holds the long and narrow Lake Champlain.

There was a young man on board who spoke English imperfectly, and whose accent I could not with certainty refer to any country or language with which I was acquainted. As we landed, he leaped on shore, and was surrounded at once by half a dozen persons chattering Canadian French. The French population of Canada has scattered itself along the shores of Lake Champlain for a third of the distance between the northern boundary of this state and the city of New York, and since the late troubles in Canada, more numerously than ever. In the hotel where I passed the night, most of the servants seemed to be emigrants from Canada.

Speaking of foreigners reminds me of an incident which occurred on the road between Saratoga Springs and Dunham's Basin. As the public coach stopped at a place called Emerson, our attention was attracted by a wagon-load of persons who had stopped at the inn, and were just resuming their journey. The father was a robust, healthy-looking man of some forty years of age; the mother a buxom dame; the children, some six or seven, of various ages, with flaxen hair, light-blue eyes, and broad ruddy cheeks. "They are Irish," said one of my fellow-passengers. I maintained on the contrary that they were Americans. "Git ap," said the man to his horses, pronouncing the last word very long. "Git ap; go 'lang." My antagonist in the dispute immediately acknowledged that I was right, for "git ap," and "go 'lang" could never have been uttered with such purity of accent by an Irishman.

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