LIFE OF WILSON. cxxi 



bited; for, though only a plain square brick building, it has all 

 the gloom of the Gothic, so much admired of late, by our mo- 

 dern architects. The exterior walls, having, on experiment, 

 been found too feeble for the superincumbent honours of the 

 roof and steeple, it was found necessary to erect, from the floor, 

 a number of large, circular, and unplastered brick pillars, in a 

 new order of architecture, (the thick end uppermost,) which, 

 while they serve to impress the spectators with the perpetual 

 dread that they will tumble about their ears, contribute also, 

 by their number and bulk, to shut out the light, and to spread 

 around a reverential gloom, producing a melancholy and chill- 

 ing effect; a very good disposition of mind, certainly, for a 

 man to enter a court of justice in. One or two solitary indivi- 

 duals stole along the damp and silent floor; and I could just de- 

 scry, elevated at the opposite extremity of the building, the 

 judges sitting, like spiders in a window corner, dimly distin- 

 guishable through the intermediate gloom. The market place, 

 which stands a little to the westward of this, and stretches over 

 the whole breadth of the square, is built of brick, something 

 like that of Philadelphia, but is unpaved and unfinished. In 

 wet weather you sink over the shoes in mud at every step; and 

 here again the wisdom of the police is manifest; as nobody at 

 such times will wade in there unless forced by business or 

 absolute necessity; by which means a great number of idle 

 loungers are, very properly, kept out of the way of the market 

 folks. 



" I shall say nothing of the nature or quantity of the commo- 

 dities which I saw exhibited there for sale, as the season was 

 unfavourable to a display of their productions; otherwise some- 

 thing better than a few cakes of black maple sugar, wrapt up 

 in greasy saddle-bags, some cabbage, chewing tobacco, catmint 

 and turnip tops, a few bags of meal, sassafras-roots, and skin- 

 ned squirrels cut up into quarters something better than all 

 this, I say, in the proper season, certainly covers the stalls of 



VOL. i. o 



