ALEXANDER WILSON. 
lxvii 
adventures since we parted. On arriving at Lancaster, I waited 
on the governor, secretary of state, and such other great folks as 
were likely to be useful to me. The governor received me 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, without knowing 
any thing of its realities, — that I abandoned them in disgust. I 
must, however, except from this censure a few intelligent indi- 
viduals, friends to science, and possessed of taste, who treated me 
with great kindness. I crossed the Susquehannah on Sunday fore- 
noon with some difficulty, 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 ; he has also promised to transmit to me 
such a collection of facts relating to this singular original, as will 
enable me to draw up an interesting narrative of him for the 
Portfolio. I carried him half a pound of snuff, of which he is 
insatiabty 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 clergy- 
man 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 be 
encouraged, as it was not within the reach of the commonalty, and 
therefore inconsistent with our republican institutions I 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 
