I have often confessed my conscious incapacity for description, but I must repeat it here to apologize for my passing so dully through this matchless valley of the Mohawk.  I would that some British artist, strong in youthful daring, would take my word for it, and pass over, for a summer pilgrimage through the State of New York.  In very earnest, he would wisely, for I question if the world could furnish within the same space, and with equal facility of access, so many subjects for his pencil.  Mountains, forests, rocks, lakes, rivers, cataracts, all in perfection.  But he must be bold as a lion in colouring, or he will make nothing of it.  There is a clearness of atmosphere, a strength of chiaro oscuro, a massiveness in the foliage, and a brilliance of contrast, that must make a colourist of any one who has an eye.  He must have courage to dip his pencil in shadows black as night, and light that might blind an eagle.  As I presume my young artist to be an enthusiast, he must first go direct to Niagara, or even in the Mohawk valley his pinioned wing may droop.  If his fever run very high, he may slake his thirst at Trenton, and while there, he will not dream of any thing beyond it.  Should my advice be taken, I will ask the young adventurer on his return (when he shall have made a prodigious quantity of money by my hint), to reward me by two sketches.  One shall be the lake of Canandaigua; the other the Indians’ Senate Grove of Butternuts.

During our journey, I forget on which day of it, a particular spot in the forest, at some distance from the road, was pointed out to us as the scene of a true, but very romantic story.  During the great and the terrible French revolution (1792), a young nobleman escaped from the scene of horror, having with difficulty saved his head, and without the possibility of saving any thing else.  He arrived at New York nearly destitute; and after passing his life, not only in splendour, but in the splendour of the court of France, he found himself jostled by the busy population of the New World, without a dollar between him and starvation.  In such a situation one might almost sigh for the guillotine.  The young noble strove to labour; but who would purchase the trembling efforts of his white hands, while the sturdy strength of many a black Hercules was in the market?  He abandoned the vain attempt to sustain himself by the aid of his fellow-men, and determined to seek a refuge in the forest.  A few shillings only remained to him; he purchased an axe, and reached the Oneida territory.  He felled a few of the slenderest trees, and made himself a shelter that Robinson Crusoe would have laughed at, for it did not keep out the rain.  Want of food, exposure to the weather, and unwonted toil, produced the natural result; the unfortunate young man fell sick, and stretched upon the reeking earth, stifled, rather than sheltered, by the withering boughs which hung over him; he lay parched with thirst, and shivering in ague, with the one last earthly hope, that each heavy moment would prove the last.