Speaking of foreigners reminds me of an incident which occurred on the road between Saratoga Springs and Dunham’s Basin.  As the public coach stopped at a place called Emerson, our attention was attracted by a wagon-load of persons who had stopped at the inn, and were just resuming their journey.  The father was a robust, healthy-looking man of some forty years of age; the mother a buxom dame; the children, some six or seven, of various ages, with flaxen hair, light-blue eyes, and broad ruddy cheeks.  “They are Irish,” said one of my fellow-passengers.  I maintained on the contrary that they were Americans.  “Git ap,” said the man to his horses, pronouncing the last word very long.  “Git ap; go ’lang.”  My antagonist in the dispute immediately acknowledged that I was right, for “git ap,” and “go ’lang” could never have been uttered with such purity of accent by an Irishman.  We learned on inquiry that they were emigrants from the neighborhood, proceeding to the Western Canal, to take passage for Michigan, where the residence of a year or two will probably take somewhat from the florid ruddiness of their complexions.

I looked down into the basin which contains the waters of the Champlain, lying considerably below the level on which Whitehall is built, and could not help thinking that it was scooped to contain a wider and deeper collection of waters.  Craggy mountains, standing one behind the other, surround it on all sides, from whose feet it seems as if the water had retired; and here and there, are marshy recesses between the hills, which might once have been the bays of the lake.  The Burlington, one of the model steamboats for the whole world, which navigates the Champlain, was lying moored below.  My journey, however, was to be by land.

At seven o’clock in the morning we set out from Whitehall, in a strong wagon, to cross the mountainous country lying east of the lake.  “Git ap,” said our good-natured driver to his cattle, and we climbed and descended one rugged hill after another, passing by cottages which we were told were inhabited by Canadian French.  We had a passenger from Essex county, on the west side of the lake, a lady who, in her enthusiastic love of a mountainous country, seemed to wish that the hills were higher; and another from the prairies of the western states, who, accustomed for many years to the easy and noiseless gliding of carriages over the smooth summer roads of that region, could hardly restrain herself from exclaiming at every step against the ruggedness of the country, and the roughness of the ways.  A third passenger was an emigrant from Vermont to Chatauque county, in the state of New York, who was now returning on a visit to his native county, the hills of Vermont, and who entertained us by singing some stanzas of what he called the Michigan song, much in vogue, as he said, in these parts before he emigrated, eight years ago.  Here is a sample: 

  “They talk about Vermont,
    They say no state’s like that: 
  ’Tis true the girls are handsome,
    The cattle too are fat. 
  But who amongst its mountains
    Of cold and ice would stay,
  When he can buy paraira
    In Michigan-i-a?”