Personal narrative and adventure has, of late years, become so interesting a subject in the mind of the British public, that the author feels he is not called upon to apologize for the production of the following pages. It was his almost unremitting practice, during the four years he resided on the North American continent, to keep a record of what he considered of interest around him; not with a view to publishing the matter thus collected, for this was far from his thoughts at the time, but th

"Adieu, adieu! my native shore Fades o'er the waters blue, The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar, And shrieks the wild sea-mew. Yon sun that sets upon the sea We follow in his flight; Farewell awhile to him and thee, My native Land—Good night!"—BYRON. Late in the fall of the year 18—, I embarked on board the ship Cosmo , bound from the port of Bristol to that of New York. The season was unpropitious, the lingering effects of the autumnal equinox rendering it more than probable that the passage

"See how yon flaming herald treads The ridged and rolling waves, As, crashing o'er their crested heads, She bows her surly slaves; With foam before and fire behind, She rends the clinging sea, That flies before the roaring wind, Beneath her hissing lea." HOLMES— The Steam Boat . My first stage, in proceeding to the interior of the country, was to Albany, 160 miles north of New York. To effect this, I took passage, on board a splendidly-equipped steamer, called the Narraganset , and esteemed at t

"Then blame mo not that I should seek, although I know not thee, To waken in thy heart its chords of holiest sympathy, It is for woman's bleeding heart, for woman's humbled form, O'er which the reeking lash is swung, with life's red current warm." E M CHANDLER On a fine morning in June, I took my departure from Buffalo, in the lake steamer Governor Porter , for the port of Cleveland in the state of Ohio. The sun was shining on the silvery bosom of the lake, which in a dead calm gave it a refulge

"Where Will-o'-the-wisps and glow-worms shine, In bulrush and in brake; Where waving mosses shroud the pine, And the cedar grows, and the poisonous vine Is spotted like the snake."—LONGFELLOW. From St. Louis, on the Missouri river, I took passage to New Orleans, in one of those magnificent steamers that crowd the inland waters of the American continent, and which, sumptuously furnished as they are, have not inaptly been termed "floating palaces." We had a prosperous passage as far as the junctio

"The fragrant birch above him hung Her tassels in the sky, And many a vernal blossom sprung, And nodded careless by. But there was weeping far away; And gentle eyes for him, With watching many an anxious day, Were sorrowful and dim."—BRYANT. Florida, in which state I now found myself, is divided into East, West, and Middle. It is a wild extent of country, about 300 miles from north to south. The king of Spain held possession of the territory in 1810, but it was afterwards ceded by treaty to the

"Before us visions come Of slave-ships on Virginia's coast, Of mothers in their childless home, Like Rachel, sorrowing o'er the lost; The slave-gang scourged upon its way. The bloodhound and his human prey."—WHITTIER. Florida produces oranges, peaches, plums, a species of cocoa-nut, and musk and water-melons in abundance. The more open portions of the country are dotted over with clumps of gnarled pines, of a very resinous nature, white and red oak, hiccory, cedar, and cypress, and is in general

"Woe worth the hour when it is crime To plead the poor dumb bondman's cause, When all that makes the heart sublime, The glorious throbs that conquer time, Are traitors to our cruel laws."—LOWELL The general appearance of the majority of the coloured people in the streets of Charleston denoted abject fear and timidity, some of them as I passed looking with servile dread at me (as they did at almost every one who happened to pass), so that I could read in many of their looks a suspicion of interfe