Mrs. IV rights Travels in the United States, 
hushed to repose, all their hopes, and 
tears, and sorrows, and ambitions, 
steeped in forgetfulness, unconscious 
and unapprehensive of the checks and 
the crosses, and the pains and the weari¬ 
ness, which the big eventful day is to 
bring forth. 
The projecting point, whose curve 
forms one side of the little harbour in 
which we were moored, lined with 
wharfs and quays, was the seat of the 
pestilence of which such fearful and ex¬ 
aggerated accounts were spread last 
autumn; but the evil here, if less than 
report made it, was sufficiently alarm¬ 
ing. The malignant nature of* the dis¬ 
ease, the silent enlargement of the seat 
of its contagion, the suddenness of its 
seizure, the rapidity of its progress, 
and the loathsomeness of its last stage, 
which renders the wretched object sink¬ 
ing beneath its virulence, a sight of 
disgust even to the eye of affection, and 
the uncertainty which has hitherto ex¬ 
isted regarding the cause of its appear¬ 
ance, and the manner in which its pro¬ 
gress might be arrested, all this well 
explains the terror which its very name 
excites in those cities, which have only 
been subjected to the visitation at long 
intervals, and where tradition hands 
down the tale of its former ravages, and 
the horrors with which they were 
fraught. 
In this city, though the seat of con¬ 
tagion was of much greater extent than 
in that of New York, yet its limits 
were equally defined. A line might 
have been drawn across the streets, on 
the verge of which you might stand 
with impunity, and beyond which it 
was death to pass. Had this line been 
drawn, and drawn too at the first ap¬ 
pearance of tlie disease, before time had 
been afforded it for the enlargement of 
its precincts, (for the infected atmos¬ 
phere slowly eating its way onwards, 
where it may be safe for you to breathe 
to-day, you may inhale poison to-mor- 
row,) and had the inhabitants, both 
the sick and the well, been removed 
from the seat of contagion, as was done 
in New York, the fever would have 
died in the birth, instead of ranklino- 
and spreading as it did, until it was 
killed by the winter’s frost. 
The nest of the fever here, as in New 
York, lay in the stagnant waters of the 
wharfs; into which the neighbour¬ 
ing inhabitants are in the habit of 
throwing vegetables and other refuse. 
The intense and unusually prolonged 
heats of the summer could not fail to 
render them so many reservoirs of pu¬ 
trefaction. These wharfs too, and many 
of. the houses adjoining, have been 
raised upon forced ground, into which 
the water oozing, prepares against the 
hot months a rank bed, fatally propi¬ 
tious, to the nurture of disease, if not 
sufficient for its conception. While the 
infected air was gradually spreading 
along Fells Point, and the low streets in 
its immediate vicinity, the higher parts 
of the town were perfectly healthy ; and 
though the sick were removed into it, 
no infection was there received; nor, 
after the first wild alarm had subsided, 
was it so much as apprehended. 
Baltimore is not the least wonderful 
evidence of the amazing and almost in¬ 
conceivable growth of thiscouutry. At 
the time ot the revolution, but forty- 
five years since, this city, which now 
contains a population of sixty-five 
thousand, and has all the appearance 
ot an opulent and beautiful metropolis, 
comprised some thirty houses of painted 
or unpainted frame, with perhaps as 
many of logs scattered in their vicinity. 
Baltimore, is spread over threegentle 
hills; the streets, without sharing the 
fatiguing regularity and unvarying si¬ 
milarity of those of Philadelphia, are 
equally clean, cheerful, and pleasingly 
ornamented with trees; the poplar, 
which in the country is offensive, not 
merely to the eye, but to the under¬ 
standing, being there destitute alike of 
beauty and utility, has a singularly 
pleasing effect in a city where its archi¬ 
tect ural form is in unison with the re¬ 
gularity and neatness which should 
every where prevail. 
You see here, as in Philadelphia, the 
same neat houses of Avell-made and 
well-painted brick ; the same delicately 
white doors, with their shining knock¬ 
ers and handles, and their steps of clean 
white marble, and windows with their 
green Venetian shutters. Considerable 
attention and expence have also been 
bestowed upon the public edifices, 
which, how ever, are chiefly remarkable 
for neatness and convenience, seldom 
making pretentions to architectural 
beauty. 
I regret that we have not more time 
to bestow" on this city, wdiich is interest¬ 
ing not only from the amazing rapidity 
of its grow th, its neatness and beauty, 
but from the character of its citizens— 
peculiarly marked for courtesy, as well 
as for high spirit and daring enterprise. 
1 o these last qualities, indeed, must be 
attributed all the wonderful creations 
•• -of 
