A gallop among American scenery / or, Sketches of American scenes and military adventure

BY AUGUSTUS E. SILLIMAN.
NEW-YORK: D. APPLETON & CO., 200 BROADWAY.
PHILADELPHIA: GEO. S. APPLETON, 148 CHESNUT STREET.
M DCCC XLIII.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1843, BY D. APPLETON AND CO., In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New-York.
H. LUDWIG, PRINTER, 72 Vesey-st., N. Y.
TO BENJAMIN D. SILLIMAN, THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED, BY HIS BROTHER.
A number of the following Sketches have appeared at intervals in the columns of the New-York American.

No.—State-street—(storm without)—apartment strewed with sundry bachelor appurtenances, fronting on the Battery—a gentleman, in dressing-gown and embroidered slippers, measuring the room with hasty strides—exclaimeth impatiently—
North-east by the flags of the shipping in the bay! North-east by the chill rain dashing on the window panes! North-east by the weather-cocks on all the steeples, from St. Paul’s to the dog-vane on the stable end! North-east by the ache of every bone in my body! Eheu! What’s to be done? No going abroad in this torrent. I’ve read all the landlady’s little library. How shall I kill the enemy? I’ll whistle; vulgar. Sing; I can’t. There are the foils and the gloves. Pshaw! I have no friend to pommel or pink; besides, the old lady in the room below, has nerves. Whew! how it pours. I’ll—I’ll—stand and look out into the street. Jupiter! how near the bread-cart came to going over the chimney sweep. Poor Sooty—how he grins! He owes the worm no silk—whatever obligations his rags may be under to the sheep. Poor fellow! Holloa! ho! blackey; catch this quarter, and get you a hot breakfast. There goes that confounded battery gate again! bang—bang—night and day. There’s never a loafer takes his morning promenade, or even siesta on the grass, but must needs follow his dirty face through that particular gate.
Alas! me miserable. What shall I do? The spirit of ennui rides me as thoroughly as did the “old man of the sea” Sinbad the sailor. Eh! they’re the dumb bells. Diminish nervous excitability, by muscular exertion. Good!—humph; and there’s the old lady’s nerves below. How the wind roars and rumbles round the chimney tops. Rain—rain—rain. There! that tin spout is choked, and the gutter is pouring over a young cataract. Oh! that I were a newspaper carrier, or a whale—or the sea serpent, chasing the down East fishermen—or—in short, any thing, so that I need not mind the wet. Hum—hum—what shall I do? I have it. Eureka! I have it. I’ll sit down and give my friend of the American an account of my last ramble.