RIVER. SINGULAR BRIDGE.-AMERICAN INNS.-OPEN- CATARACT OF NIAGARA. Niagara, September, 1819. MY DEAR FRIEND, WE left Genesseo on a lovely morning, that breathed the first freshness of Autumn; our conveyance one of those light waggons universal in these states; many a kind parting glance we threw back upon the fair valley, and on the roofs which sheltered so much worth, and seemingly so much happiness. Our route, after some miles, crossed the great western road, and traced the course of the Genessee to within four miles of its discharge into Ontario. Here the river makes three considerable falls. At the head of the first stands the flourishing young town of Rochester, and at the head of the third one of minor fame, hight Carthage. A singular fate seems to pursue the latter colony. A farmer with whom I fell into conversation, in formed me that it had first assumed the more modest appellation of Clyde, from the resemblance that some travelled settler had discovered between the neighbouring fall of the Genessee and that of the Clyde at Stone Byres; which resemblance, by the bye, allowing for the superior dimensions of the American river, is striking enough. After some time the new occupants received information that there existed an older settlement of that name in the same county; and, to rectify the confusion that this occasioned in the post-office, the Scots changed themselves into Punicians; but now, delenda est Carthago; it is discovered that there are two more infant Carthages, claiming the right of primogeniture. There is, it must be confessed, the strangest confusion of names in the western counties of this state that ingenuity could well imagine. In one district, you have all the poets from Homer to Pope, nay, for ought I know, they may come down to Byron; in another, you have a collection of Roman heroes; in a third, all the mighty cities of the world, from the great Assyrian empire downwards; and, scattered among this classic confusion, relics of the Indian vocabulary, which, I must observe, are often not the least elegant, and are indisputably always the most appropriate. For the Roman heroes, bad, good, and indifferent, who in one district are scattered so plentifully, the new population is indebted to a land-surveyor, and a classical dictionary. Being requested, in parcelling out the lots, to affix a name to them, the worthy citizen, more practised in mensuration than baptism, shortly found his ingenuity baffled, and in despair had recourse to the pages of Lempriere. There is something rather amusing in finding Cato or Regulus typified by a cluster of wooden houses; nor, perhaps, are the old worthies so much disgraced as some indignant scholars might imagine. I I met with one name on my route which somewhat surprised me, and which struck me as yet more inappropriate than the sonorous titles of antiquity, nor was I ill pleased to learn that it had occasioned some demur among the settlers. thought that I had left Waterloo, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the streets, bridges, waltzes, ribands, hotels, and fly-coaches of Great Britain and Ireland. When objections were made to the founder of the little town flourishing under this appellation, the story goes, that he called to his aid the stream of water which turned the wheel of his mill, gravely affirming, that he had that in his eye, and not the battle in his thoughts, when he christened the settlement. "The name speaks for itself," said he, with a humourous gravity peculiar to his native district of NewEngland" Water-loo." If the name did not speak for itself, it was impossible not to let him speak for it; and so his neighbours turned away laughing, and the title of Waterloo stands more undisputed than that of poor Carthage. The falls of the Genessee are well worth going fifty miles out of your way to look at. The first is a noble cascade of ninety feet. Seen from the bottom, (to get to which we had to traverse a marsh and a score of mill-streams,) I have since thought it a sort of miniature of Niagara;-but this is woefully comparing small things to great. It is, however, a lovely sheet of water, and truly grand when you have not seen the wonder of nature that is now roaring in my ears. I believe we should have enjoyed the scene more, if the swamp, and the slime, and the mud, had not suggested rattle-snakes to the fancy of my companion. The apprehension was every way groundless; at least we saw no rattle-snakes; and these reptiles, when seen, I believe are seldom seen in mud, but among rocks moist with clear water. The second fall is inconsiderable compared to that either above or below. The third, though not upwards of eighty feet, is the most picturesque of the whole. The effect is, at present, singularly heightened by a stupendous bridge, thrown across the chasm, just below the basin of the fall, in the manner of that over the Wear at Sunderland. The chord of the arch, as I was informed, is upwards of 300 feet; the perpendicular, from the centre to the river, 250. We were desirous of viewing it from the bottom of the chasm; but to do this it seemed necessary to go two miles farther down the river to seek a boat, which even then, we were assured, it would be but a chance if we found. To descend to this spot and wait this chance, day-light would hardly have served us. To see what we could, we scrambled a fourth of the way down, first by means of the wood-work of the bridge, and then by advancing cautiously along the shelving edge of the precipice, resting our weight on one hand, until we reached an acute angle, formed by the roots of a blasted pine, which afforded us a narrow footing, while the broken stem yielded us support. Having assumed this position, which, had we duly considered we should perhaps not have ventured upon, we gazed up and down with a sensation of terror, that I do not remember to have felt in an equal degree more than once in my life. Beneath us, on either hand, the precipice now shelved perpendicularly, or rather we were projected over it, so that a pebble would have dropped into the gulf of water below. To the left, we looked upon the falling river; beneath us, was the basin, broad, deep, and finely circular; opposite, the precipice answering to that we stood upon; on our right, was the bridge, suspended as it were in mid-air. We were on a level with the spring of the arch, and I shuddered to observe that, on the opposite side, projecting over the precipice, the |