Letter XVI.

An Excursion to Vermont and New Hampshire.

Addison County, Vermont, July 10, 1843.

I do not recollect that I ever heard the canal connecting the Hudson with Lake Champlain praised for its beauty, yet it is actually beautiful—­that part of it at least which lies between Dunham’s Basin and the lake, a distance of twenty-one miles, for of the rest I can not speak.  To form the canal, two or three streams have been diverted a little from their original course, and led along a certain level in the valley through which they flowed to pour themselves into Champlain.  In order to keep this level, a perpetually winding course has been taken, never, even for a few rods, approaching a straight line.  On one side is the path beaten by the feet of the horses who drag the boats, but the other is an irregular bank, covered sometimes with grass and sometimes with shrubs or trees, and sometimes steep with rocks.  I was delighted, on my journey to this place, to exchange a seat in a stage-coach, driven over the sandy and dusty road north of Saratoga by a sulky and careless driver, for a station on the top of the canal-packet.  The weather was the finest imaginable; the air that blew over the fields was sweet with the odor of clover blossoms, and of shrubs in flower.  A canal, they say, is but a ditch; but this was as unlike a ditch as possible; it was rather a gentle stream, winding in the most apparently natural meanders.  Goldsmith could find no more picturesque epithet for the canals of Holland, than “slow;”

  “The slow canal, the yellow blossomed vale—­”

but if the canals of that country had been like this, I am sure he would have known how to say something better for them.  On the left bank, grassed over to the water’s edge, I saw ripe strawberries peeping out among the clover, and shortly afterward a young man belonging to the packet leaped on board from the other side with a large basket of very fine strawberries.  “I gathered them,” said he “down in the swamp; the swamp is full of them.”  We had them afterward with our tea.

Proceeding still further, the scenery became more bold.  Steep hills rose by the side of the canal, with farm-houses scattered at their feet; we passed close to perpendicular precipices, and rocky shelves sprouting with shrubs, and under impending woods.  At length, a steep broad mountain rose before us, its sides shaded with scattered trees and streaked with long horizontal lines of rock, and at its foot a cluster of white houses.  This was Whitehall; and here the waters of the canal plunge noisily through a rocky gorge into the deep basin which holds the long and narrow Lake Champlain.

There was a young man on board who spoke English imperfectly, and whose accent I could not with certainty refer to any country or language with which I was acquainted.  As we landed, he leaped on shore, and was surrounded at once by half a dozen persons chattering Canadian French.  The French population of Canada has scattered itself along the shores of Lake Champlain for a third of the distance between the northern boundary of this state and the city of New York, and since the late troubles in Canada, more numerously than ever.  In the hotel where I passed the night, most of the servants seemed to be emigrants from Canada.