In mixing with the commercial fashionables and exclusives of the American cities, the European is at once amused and annoyed with the assumption of a social tone and spirit at variance with the whole make of the country. He is told that he is in the best society of the place, and with perfect justice condemns this best society as, probably, the worst he ever saw: a society assuming the airs of separate rank where no rank at all exists, attempting to copy the luxury and splendour of the residents of European capitals, without possessing one tithe of their wealth to excuse the extravagance, or enable them to succeed in the endeavour, and presenting the most incongruous and displeasing mixture possible of pretension, ignorance, affectation, and vulgarity. I have before said, that even in the cities there are circles of a very different order; but yet freer from all these drawbacks is the society formed by the class of people of whom I have spoken above, and whom I should designate as the gentry of this country; using that term in the best sense in which it was once used in England.
Among this large but widely-scattered portion of the community, should the European traveller's good fortune lead him, he will find hospitality without ostentation, purity of morals independent of the dread of opinion, intellectual cultivation unmixed with the desire of display, great simplicity of life and ignorance of the world, originality of mind naturally arising from independence and solitude, and the best, because the most natural, manners. Of such, I know, from the lower shores of the Chesapeake, to the half savage territory around Michilimakinack.
[107] This spot is famous as the scene of the last exploit of a singular individual, known by the name of Sam Patch. An Irishman by birth, I believe, he came over to this country to earn his bread, and hit upon a very ingenious method of doing so, i. e. jumping for large wagers down cataracts; which daring feat he performed successfully more than once. But, like the Sicilian diver of old, poor Sam Patch took one plunge too many; and, after leaping with impunity from the rocks immediately below the Falls of Niagara, he found his death in the Genesee—attempting the leap, it is said, while in a state of intoxication.
[108] Although nobody, I believe, ever travelled a hundred miles by land in this country without being overturned, the drivers deserve infinite credit for the rare occurrence of accidents. How they can carry a coach at all over some of their roads is miraculous; and high praise is due to them both for care and skill, that any body, in any part of this country, ever arrives at the end of a land journey at all. I do not ever remember to have seen six-in-hand driving except in New England, where it is common, and where the stage-drivers are great adepts in their mystery.
Transcriber's Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.