ten years ago the traveller came bobbing along in a clattering stage, δανάντα, καταντα, παραντα, upon the rough ribs of the corduroy. A fly sometimes serves, on a picture, to bring out the principal figure a hero or an elephant. So much for the science of grouping. The puddle you see there, at the entrance to the town, so bedecked with agreeable images, is kept up by the Borough for the gratification of the frogs, who, gathering about the margin, gargle out their little souls in a hymn of salutation to the spring. Some theologians think Nature has established a system of compensations throughout all creation, to equalize good and evil; giving to cowards an intense sentiment of courage, and to fools excessive vanity, to compensate their want of brains. It must be on this principle that frogs are so exceedingly happy in their own music. That clumsy bird, halfflying, half-footing, in haste to reach the puddle, is a goose; and that one, with arched neck, stately as the swan -now sitting quiet and meditative, now rowing its way through the stream that, also is a goose, of the other gender. Those are sheep which browse on the hill; and the little ones, frisking or sleeping in the sun, or studying the gamut under their woolly mammas, emblems of innocent country life, those are unweaned lambs. As this is your first visit beyond Broadway, I must be elementary in my descriptions. The girl upon the rail-car, with her tartan what-do-you call it on her shoulder, is Scotch; and that one winding down the hill, in a covered equipage, dragged slowly by a pot-bellied nag, bringing provisions to the market, is Dutch; her name Rosabella. Her butter is sweeter than the breath of Love, and she is nice in eggs as Cæsar was in wives. One goes to market on purpose to study this chef d'œuvre of Nature's gallery, and gossip with her.

The pretty maiden you see there, at Mr. Potts' door, her foremost leg straight to the toe, and the other in an angle, and a basket running over with flowers on her left arm, in her right fingers a rose open, and a bud with three graceful leaves, (look at her through the telescope,) dear little thing! is she not beautiful? The roses borrow blushes, and the lily whiteness, from her cheeks, and a cherub smile lights up her decent teeth, of purest ivory. All the beauties, you would swear, of Schuylkill county were summed up upon her single face. It is Helen, the flower-girl. Shall some clod of earth, alas! feed upon the quintessential ambrosia of her kisses! She sleeps, sweeter than ladies upon the eider down, upon a chaffy cot, far beyond the mountains; and with the blush of morning, tucked up, brings showers of roses to the market, carrolled by the harmless birds. Heaven preserve thee, pretty Helen, as thy own mignionette, fragrant from birth to the withered leaf!

That stately old man, who moves in angles and straight lines, is the cross school-master, with a birch. Now he enters his school, and the apple-munching urchins are squeezed into a nut-shell, each at his task. He scourges the boys as the boys scourge tops. But did you ever see such mobs of children! They seem to come out of the ground, as toads after a summer's rain. The mountain air and mineral streams are so favorable to fœcundity, say the doctors. I knew a lady of the city who had been ten years in holy wedlock, unblessed; and what do you think? She came to Pottsville, and at the end of

seven months had twins! If Rebecca had lived among us, Jacob would have had no need of a resort (so unpleasant) to the Shunamites for an heir.

The old woman who gathers withered sticks by the way-side, is a witch. You will often see her, when the thievish Night broods upon Guinea Hill, walk with printless footsteps upon the cowslips, brush the dew from the mullen leaves, gather poisonous herbs, and turn about like a whirligig on her heel. She pinches the Dutch girl's hips till they are black and blue, and with a wand calls about her the sprites who haunt the mines, (in Wales they call them Knockers,) who kindly discover the veins of ore hidden in the crannies of the earth.

The poor animal with ragged coat and dulled spirits, that stands chained to a log by the cottage-door, is an ass, fatigued with dragging coal from the mines. How askingly he eyes the empty trough, then 'earthward hangs his moveless head.' Dear Sarah! how often I have seen her warm her darling little feet at the grate, (Parlor, No. 11, Fourth-street,) little suspecting the obligations that she-that we owed to this meek child of misery - this poor donkey! Often, too, have I seen at this same grate a clown, his coat-tail under his arm, as little sensible of the obligations one ass owed to another.

That old horse, worn to his ribs upon the tow-path, is battening his last meal upon the commons; turned out by hard-hearted man to die no longer serviceable. There is no resentment in his face: he only looks upon the bare and unshrubbed earth imploringly; he would lick the hand that has abused him. Is there no heaven, alas ! no retributive justice, for the poor quadruped!

But I fear I fatigue you with these unseemly objects. I wish rather I could show you the thousand little glens, and dells, and water-falls, concealed in the recesses of the woods and mountains. The smiling village you see six miles to the south, is Schuylkill-Haven; and the vehicle upon the road, its four wheels in the air, and the passengers making their toilet by the way-side the women gathering up the babies they had thrown out of the window-is the mail-stage, upset. The presumptuous little village, a mile to the east, is Port Carbon: the engine, puffing and suffocating like some dying monster, at the foot of the hill, and busied in melting the rude ore with the native coal, and throwing the ruddy tinge of its hot fires upon the stream, is 'LYMAN'S FURNACE.' The toy-like gentleman at its side, who is making an invisible bow to a lady, (you can see her with the telescope,) is our chief burgess in his natural shapes, the counterpart of Falstaff.

And the little men, in feathered caps, standing still upon the plain, as chess-men upon the board?'

Our National Infantry,' the Invincibles, only seeming to stand still. They are shouldering their fire-locks, right about face! - advancing and retreating, and looking fierce as Napoleons, under the belligerent shouts of their captain, which expire at a mile from our ears — - so near are we to heaven. Listen! you will catch a note of the chiming spheres; music dispensed only to honest maids, say the poets, and denied the gross ears of wicked men.

The sequestered spot, where the sun is westering toward the night; where the villagers love to walk in the soft melancholy of the Indian

Summer evening; where the infant shrubbery is now teeming into life, and the spreading oak, and hemlock, and cypress, are gently crisped by the breeze, is a village grave-yard, without the precincts of the town; where, the pilgrimage of life being run, one may hope the due respect and reverent decencies of the tomb. Honor to those who have set the pious example: rural cemeteries are now springing up, with emulation, on all sides. The Rev. Mr., who has just completed his enclosure, beckoning some one the other day, whispered, with an air of joy: We have got one in already!' In graveyards, as in all things else, rivalship is the soul of business.

The eminence which you see at the foot of the town, on the north, heaving up like a great giant's grave, and covered with a squad of mean houses; where the African, ragged and indolent, and besotted with rum, hides his stupid misery; where loud wranglings, and hallelujahs, and frequent cries of murder, infest the night, made blacker by negroes, is GUINEA HILL. The sable procession winding slowly toward the little church on the summit, is a negro burying; the only event by which the inhabitants of this Hill seem to assert their common humanity.

When the eye-lids of the day have closed, Chaos and Night sit here together, on their leaden stools, introduced by a mulatto brat, in a gray hood, begotten by the voluptuous Day upon the ravished nymph Darkness, and called Twilight. Revelry, with her tipsy sisters, keeps tavern here, and Intemperance sits blear-eyed upon the doorsill; and Sloth, and Filth, and Lewdness, the express resemblance of their shabby little mother, Smut, creep about the doors and gutters. Night's steeds of iron-gray, champing their bridles, stand ready yoked to her car of jet, by her colored grooms the Hours, frizzled in woolly locks. Black Bill, (who knows not Bill?) and his mother, guilty of the same offence, are styed here with the pigs - principal citizens. If you look in, the night half spent, when Hecate rides on the storm, and Wantonness skulks about in quest of such loves as grow upon this Hill, you will see Bill's mother, in Methodist devotion, praying success to her son, out upon feats of burglary in the village. And lame Justice comes limping up in the morning, when the thief has fled. There! if you like John Bunyan.

The sprightly village at our feet, with its air of freshness; its garden fences glowing with the white-wash; its scattered dwellings covering a mile of surface; the churches of its twenty religions lifting up their spires; proud especially of its Catholic church, itself the ornament of a town, ensconced on the side of the hill, sheltering its devotion from the winds; and of its Town-Hall, and two mammoth hotels, SHOEMAKER'S and the NATIONAL, where the virtuosi of anthracite gather around the sparkling grate, of a winter's night, and tell of ores hidden in the veins of the earth; of toll, and freight, and prices of the season; proud too of its Centre-street, pointing to the poles, and of its Market; Mahantongo, Norwegian, and other streets, diverging at right angles, east and west; and of its detached towns in clusters upon the flanks; Greenwood, without a green spot; Morris' Addition, as the neck is addition to the head and shoulders; and Mount Carbon, built in a low valley; this village, which I must now describe to you with a brevity very disagreeable to those who

1

love; this central figure of the piece, to which all the rest is but drapery; this metropolis of Schuylkill county — but it deserves a separate chapter to itself — is

POTTSVILLE.

I MUST breathe a little after this long sentence. Is it not delightful to have society in one's enjoyments? Pleasure, overturning all the rules of sound arithmetic, is doubled by dividing it. And then such society allowing me to talk right on, without a word of interruption or contradiction! I will send all my family to New-York to be brought up. And don't you feel how much enjoyment is enhanced by the exhilaration of spirits incident to these high places? The air is purer; there is a pleasurable sense of elevation above one's species; and the thoughts, in approaching the celestial intelligences, seem to lose their earthly affinities, and become instinct with a diviner spirit. Men love their country better, who are born and bred upon mountains. All original sects have worshipped upon lofty places. The Greek placed his altar of Jove upon Olympus, and Moses held converse with the Deity upon a mountain. I have had myself divine thoughts here, but lack the pretty accomplishment of phrases to recommend them to the world. Why, Nature! bestowing sweet and ravishing speech upon so many, hast thou made me mute and ineloquent, and unable to transfuse into others' bosoms what so charms my own! I often sit in the midst of these abstracted sublimities, in mere sensual enjoyment; listening to the boatman's horn winding in the distance, or wandering by the brow of the cliff, (one likes to venture to the extreme edge of hazard,) to look over the giddy precipice, where the tall tree, dishevelled in the breeze, throws its chequered shadow on the stream; or among the shelvy rocks, where once the Indian roamed, savage, free, and native lord of these mountains; gathering the flinty arrows, sole vestige of these obliterated worshippers of the Holy Spirit. Even now that you are here to dispute heaven with me, I cannot think of whispering to you a word of earthly interests. No, I will just sit innocently by you; see the vine shoot out its little arms to grapple with the trellis of oaken branches, and listen while the wood-pigeon from the neighboring rock pours out, now and then, its melancholy moan. I will not even supplicate a kiss of that rubied lip; content, alas! with Plato's immaterial loves.

Pottsville is named from its founder, of the very ancient family of the Potts; whether of Delft, or Sevres,' or Staffordshire, I stop not to inquire; nor is it granted mortals to know all things. I only know that all of the name, any where scattered upon the earth, from the charm, no doubt, of analogical sounds, have gathered themselves into this village. You would swear there were no Potts any where else. In the newspapers it is the eminent prefix of half the advertising columns. In Centre-street, there it is again, in five calligraphic letters, a foot long, in convenient Christian abbreviations, upon half the signs of the village: A. POTT, U. POTT, T. POTT, and P. POTT. It became, a few years ago, a common designation of nearly all the vil lage beaux. One was Miss Hamilton's Pott, another Miss Slaymaker's, anotherM iss Schiff's, another Miss Pott's Pott; and so they ran on; as embarrassing it became, at last, as Smith or Thompson, in some

other towns. Some tried to disguise it, by orthographical changes and quaint pronunciations; one calling herself Miss Putt, another adding an 8; another, again, for no earthly purpose but to get rid of the cacophony of this inharmonious monosyllable, got married. And the unhappy mistakes, too! Why, I know a girl who went the other day into a store, and asking timidly for Mrs. Pott, the clerk hastened up stairs, and came down directly with a tea-pot in each hand!

I feel some degree of confidence in becoming historiographer to this village, having grown up with it from its remotest antiquity, and having had a share in its most important events, if one can be said to have a share, who only looks on; events, I am aware, sufficiently known to the present race of men; but is there not something due to those dear little creatures yet unborn, and who always love so tenderly their ancestors our posterity? There is an inquisitive desire in the human mind of knowing the beginnings of things; and it is no hyperbolical fancy to suppose that at least a million of beings, yet sleeping, I don't know where, in antiquity, and not yet furnished with human shapes, will be one day turning over the pages of the KNICKERBOCKER, for the details I have now the honor most affectionately.

'Do n't!'

I beg pardon, a thousand times! Indeed, I was absent.
I did not perceive it.'

Pottsville

'See how you have rumpled my handkerchief!'

Pottsville is a growth of little more than twelve years. The population at first so increased beyond the supply of lodgings, that the beds of the one hotel soon running over, the surplus was stowed away, its head upon its own luggage, compactly around the margins of the bar-room; each day bringing fresh supplies, and more violent struggles for the places. Many a one have I seen, of a nice daintiness of limbs, and complexion, and person, who had walked out daily, white-gloved, making ladies' hearts quail, upon Chestnut-street, laid out here with this indiscriminate humanity, pillowed upon his portmanteau, and under the influence of that god who levels all inequalities, and reconciles to all sorts of bed-fellows, sleeping more soundly and happily than in his downy city accommodations. Persons, to secure places, as at the theatre, would often retire at three of the afternoon, or friends would sleep in succession, as they ride and tie on a journey; and in the upper rooms, of a rainy night, it was usual to go to bed with an umbrella, the town not yet having arrived at the luxury of water-tight roofs. It is, however, a town-building population, that of America, and it does not put its two feet in one sock, or sit sucking its thumbs, and waiting for Providence to do the work. Boarding-houses soon sprang up. I recollect one, occupied by two families, eight by ten feet; bed and table taking turns outside; and at such a price, that I have heard the landlord, a conscientious man, say: By Cot! I used to shut my eyes in asking the rent!'

The inconveniences of the times, and tricks of speculation, brought their usual accompaniments, wrangling and law-suits. For the edification of the long robe, I will notice briefly a few cases not reported in Sergeant and Rawle. The one, the defendant having proved