I forgot to mention that in the background can be detected glimpses of the great State of California.
What emotions arise in the breast as you approach this remarkable spot! Tour mind naturally reverts to your English ancestry, to those early settlers, the noble forefathers of this colony, who forsook their old homes and braved the perils of the deep till they reached these distant shores. They came not from a feverish thirst for gold, nor with ambitious visions of a new and powerful empire. They came rather from a _conviction_, that here was where they were wanted.
This crowded canvas gives you some faint idea of what has been the result of that generous, patriotic pilgrimage.
Burglar's Hall,--a fine public building,--Headman's Block, The College of Forgery, Counterfeiter's Exchange, The Cracksman's Crib, (a new and elegant hotel), Mutiny Row, and many other prominent buildings are to be seen.
Such are the natural beauties of the place that persons who come here feel compelled to stay a good while. (The melodeon will evolve "Home, sweet home.")
Next to Mount Vernon, the Libby Prison at Richmond, and John Brown's Engine House at Harper's Ferry, this is to the stranger the most interesting piece of scenery in the Old Dominion. So firm and substantial is the masonry that it is supposed to have been standing long before the English settlement of the country. Some learned writers think that those stately abutments are too massive for the red man of the forest to have constructed. Besides, what did he know about engineering? I'm sure I can't say how this is; but I had always supposed that there never was a camp of these savages without an Indian near.
At all events the effect is very natural, and it only needs a toll-house to render it completely so.
This dizzy elevation has been scaled by daring adventurers who cut their names in the soft, yielding rock; not so many, it is true, of late years. They have rather fallen off.
There is food for contemplation in this beautiful object; also in the hotel which you perceive not far off.
This represents a very dark night, with no moon, exceedingly cloudy, and all the fires out. You will be struck with the interesting fact that a night on the prairie, under such circumstances, looks very much like a similar night elsewhere.