BEM AND KOSSUTH IMMORTALISED. 221 



and, after a time, a nice refreshing dinner, invigorated 

 me for the remainder of my journey to Bangor. 



All my fellow-travellers left me here to join the steam 

 boat at Bucksport, twelve or fifteen miles below Bangor, 

 and so much nearer the mouth of the Penobscot, from 

 which place there was still a clear passage by sea to 

 Portland in Maine. I clung to the land, however, and 

 went a solitary passenger in a comfortable what I now 

 looked upon as a luxurious covered sleigh to Bangor, 

 where I arrived about 5 P.M. 



What a confounding of all his old geography is the 

 unhappy Englishman doomed to undergo in a new 

 country like this, where names are wanted faster than 

 they can be coined, and where a new well of previously 

 unappropriated appellations is a kind of bounteous god 

 send. It was among the benefits of the Hungarian war 

 that it furnished a supply of previously unheard-of 

 names, which were eagerly grasped at in all the back- 

 settlements of the American Union. &quot; We rejoice,&quot; I 

 read one morning in a popular daily paper, &quot; we rejoice 

 to see among the new post-offices which have been 

 established, the names of Bern and Kossuth. These 

 glorious men have now a chance of being immortalised.&quot; 

 Immortalised in a wilderness post-office ! 



But it is the old names that puzzle the travelling 

 Englishman. At the mouth of the Penobscot stands 

 the town of Belfast, a little higher up Frankfort, 

 above that Bangor, some miles inland Exeter, and still 

 further, Dover ! What a jumbling he finds here. And 

 the perplexity which this causes to the traveller, is one 

 which will be perpetuated among the rising New Eng- 

 landers, whose lessons in geography must be all the 

 more difficult, since scarcely a single name will recall the 

 position of a definite place, and future history must find 

 itself similarly perplexed. 



Bangor built on the low intervale and on the 



