LIFE OF WILSON. Ixxi 



with civility, passed some good-natured compliments on the volumes, and 

 readily added his name to my list. He seems an active man, of plain good 

 sense, and little ceremony. By Mr. L. I was introduced to many members of 

 both houses, but I found them, in general, such a pitiful, squabbling, political 

 mob; so split up, and justling about the mere formalities of legislation, with- 

 out knowing anything of its realities, that I abandoned them in disgust. I 

 must, however, except from this censure a few intelligent individuals, friends 

 to science, and possessed of taste, who treated me with great kindness. On 

 Friday evening I set out for Columbia, where I spent one day in vain. I 

 crossed the Susquehanna on Sunday forenoon, with some dif&culty, having to 

 cut our way through the ice for several hundred yards ; and passing on to York, 

 paid my respects to all the literati of that place without success. Five miles 

 north of this town lives a very extraordinary character, between eighty and 

 ninety years of age, who has lived by trapping birds and quadrupeds these 

 thirty years. Dr. F. carried me out in a sleigh to see him, and presented me 

 with a tolerably good full length figure of him ; he has also promised to trans- 

 mit to me such a collection of fiicts relative to this singular original, as will 

 enable me to draw up an interesting narrative of him for the Port Folio. I 

 carried him half a pound of snuff, of which he is insatiably fond, taking it by 

 handfuls. I was much diverted with the astonishment he expressed on looking 

 at the plates of my work — he could tell me anecdotes of the greater part of the 

 subjects of the first volume, and some of the second. One of his traps, which 

 he says he invented himself, is remarkable for ingenuity, and extremely simple. 

 Having a letter from Dr. Muhlenberg to a clergyman in Hanover, I passed on 

 through a well cultivated country, chiefly inhabited by Germans, to that place, 

 where a certain judge took upon himself to say, that such a book as mine 

 ought not to he encouraged, as it teas not within the reach o/ the commonaliti/ j 

 and therefore inconsistent with our rej)nlilican iiistitntions ! By the same mode 

 of reasoning, which I did not dispute, I undertook to prove him a greater 

 culprit than myself, in erecting a large, elegant, three-story brick house, so 

 much beyond the reach of the commonality^ as he called them, and conse- 

 quently grossly contrary to our republican institutions. I harangued this 

 Solomon of the Bench more seriously afterwards, pointing out to him the great 

 influence of science on a young rising nation like ours, and particularly the 

 science of Natural History, till he began to show such symptoms oi intellect, as 

 to seem ashamed of what he had said. 



" From Hanover I passed through a thinly inhabited country ; and crossing 

 the North Mountain, at a pass called Newman's Gap, arrived at Chambersburg, 

 whence I next morning returned to Carlisle, to visit the reverend doctors of 

 the college. * * * * 



'* The towns of Chambersburg and Shippensburg produced me nothing. On 

 Sunday, the 11th, I left the former of these places in the stage-coach ; and in 

 fifteen miles began to ascend the Alpine regions of the Alleghany mountains, 

 where above, around, and below us, nothing appeared but prodigious declivities, 

 covered with woods ; and, the weather being fine, such a profound silence 

 prevailed among these aerial solitudes, as impressed the soul with awe, and a 

 kind of fearful sublimity Something of this arose from my being alone, hav 



