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.

This Avon flows sweetly with nothing but whiskey and tobacco juice.
The next day's journey was much more interesting, for it showed us the lake of Canandaigua.