Surely this country may be said to spread
rather than to rise.
The Eagle Hotel, an immense wooden fabric, has all the
pretension of a splendid establishment, but its monstrous
corridors, low ceilings, and intricate chambers, gave me the
feeling of a catacomb rather than a house. We arrived after
the _table d'hote_ tea-drinking was over, and supped comfortably
enough with a gentleman, who accompanied us from the Falls: but
the next morning we breakfasted in a long, low, narrow room,
with a hundred persons, and any thing less like comfort can
hardly be imagined.
What can induce so many intellectual citizens to prefer these
long, silent tables, scantily covered with morsels of fried ham,
salt fish and liver, to a comfortable loaf of bread with their
wives and children at home? How greatly should I prefer eating
my daily meals with my family, in an Indian wig-wam, to boarding
at a _table d'hote_ in these capacious hotels; the custom,
however, seems universal through the country, at least we have
met it, without a shadow of variation as to its general features,
from New Orleans to Buffalo.
Lake Erie has no beauty to my eyes; it is not the sea, and it is
not the river, nor has it the beautiful scenery generally found
round smaller lakes. The only interest its unmeaning expanse
gave me, arose from remembering that its waters, there so tame
and tranquil, were destined to leap the gulf of Niagara. A
dreadful road, through forests only beginning to be felled,
brought us to Avon; it is a straggling, ugly little place, and
not any of their "Romes, Carthages, Ithacas, or Athens," ever
provoked me by their name so much.
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