402 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



horses down the long hill, to the steamboat landing on 

 the Niagara. A most charming agricultural scene opens 

 to view, while descending this hill. The farms upon the 

 great Lewiston plain of alluvial lands, are spread out as 

 it were, like a picture at our feet. Good farm houses, 

 barns, orchards, stubble, and oat fields of golden hue, 

 contrasting with the dark green of maize and grass, and 

 all interspersed with groves of forest trees, and flanked 

 by the village and river, and opposite shore, and town, 

 and heights of Queenston, form a whole that is delight- 

 ful, and never fails to gratify the eye of every traveller 

 who has a taste for rural scenes. 



The time required to make this trip upon these rail- 

 roads from Buffalo, is upwards of three hours — a little 

 over ten miles an hour — which is rather slow railroad 

 travelling, but decidedly better than staging over the 

 same route thirty years ago. 



The steamboat for Hamilton, left the Lewiston wharf 

 at one, crossed over and touched at Queenston, and then 

 down the river, stopping at Youngstown, on the Yankee 

 side, and Niagara opposite, where the decaying wharves 

 and warehouses bear witness that the spirit of enterprise 

 and improvement, which animates the people of one side 

 of this river, does not, for some unknown cause, affect 

 the other side in the same way. 



Directly after leaving these towns, we pass between 

 the British and American monuments of wickedness and 

 folly that disfigure the mouth of this beautiful river, 

 bearing bristling cannon pointed at each other, where 

 nothing but emblems of peace and productiveness of a 

 rich soil and healthy clime should, of right, ever be seen 

 to divide brethren from the same hearth stone, into two 

 belligerent nations. A few miles after entering Lake 

 Ontario, and turning north along the west shore, we run 

 along side of the piers of the mouth of the Welland Canal, 

 a work of monumental form to the mind that can conceive 

 the project of lifting fleets out of Lake Ontario and send- 

 ing them over the mountains, into the upper lakes, and 



