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. We learned on inquiry that they were emigrants from the
neighborhood, proceeding to the Western Canal, to take passage for
Michigan, where the residence of a year or two will probably take somewhat
from the florid ruddiness of their complexions.

I looked down into the basin which contains the waters of the Champlain,
lying considerably below the level on which Whitehall is built, and could
not help thinking that it was scooped to contain a wider and deeper
collection of waters. Craggy mountains, standing one behind the other,
surround it on all sides, from whose feet it seems as if the water had
retired; and here and there, are marshy recesses between the hills, which