We returned to Utica to dinner, and found that we must either wait till the next day for the Rochester coach, or again submit to the packet-boat.  Our impatience induced us to prefer the latter, not very wisely, I think, for every annoyance seemed to increase upon us.  The Oneida and the Genesee country are both extremely beautiful, but had we not returned by another route we should have known little about it.  From the canal nothing is seen to advantage, and very little is seen at all.  My chief amusement, I think, was derived from names.  One town, consisting of a whiskey store and a warehouse, is called Port Byron.  At Rome, the first name I saw over a store was Remus, doing infinite honour, I thought, to the classic lore of his godfathers and godmothers; but it would be endless to record all the drolleries of this kind which we met with.  We arrived at Rochester, a distance of a hundred and forty miles, on the second morning after leaving Utica, fully determined never to enter a canal boat again, at least, not in America.

Rochester is one of the most famous of the cities built on the Jack and Bean-stalk principle.  There are many splendid edifices in wood; and certainly more houses, warehouses, factories, and steam-engines than ever were collected together in the same space of time; but I was told by a fellow-traveller that the stumps of the forest are still to be found firmly rooted in the cellars.

The fall of the Genesee is close to the town, and in the course of a few months will, perhaps, be in the middle of it.  It is a noble sheet of water, of a hundred and sixty feet perpendicular fall; but I looked at it through the window of a factory, and as I did not like that, I was obligingly handed to the door-way of a sawing-mill; in short, “the great water privilege” has been so ingeniously taken advantage of, that no point can be found where its voice and its movement are not mixed and confounded with those of the “admirable machinery of this flourishing city.”

The Genesee fall is renowned as being the last and fatal leap of the adventurous madman, Sam Patch; he had leaped it once before, and rose to the surface of the river in perfect safety, but the last time he was seen to falter as he took the leap, and was never heard of more.  It seems that he had some misgivings of his fate, for a pet bear, which he had always taken with him on his former break-neck adventures, and which had constantly leaped after him without injury, he on this occasion left behind, in the care of a friend, to whom he bequeathed him “in case of his not returning.”  We saw the bear, which is kept at the principal hotel; he is a noble creature, and more completely tame than I ever saw any animal of the species.