3d.  I was compelled to break off my notes yesterday suddenly.  A storm came on which drove us forward with great swiftness, and put us in some peril.  We made the land about three o’clock, after much exertion and very considerable wetting.  After the storm had passed over, a calm succeeded, when we again put out, and kept the lake till eight o’clock.  We had a very bad encampment—­loose rough stones to lie on, and scarcely wood enough to make a fire.  To finish our misery, it soon began to rain, but ceased before ten.  At four o’clock this morning we arose, the weather being quite cold.  At an early hour, after getting afloat, we reached and passed a noted landing for canoes and boats, called Choishwa (Smooth-rock.) This shelter, is formed by a ledge of rock running into the lake.  On the inner, or perpendicular face, hundreds of names are cut or scratched upon the rock.  This cacoethes scribendi is the pest of every local curiosity or public watering-place.  Even here, in the wilderness, it is developed.

     Wise men ne’er cut their names on doors or rock-heads,
     But leave the task to scribblers and to blockheads;
     Pert, trifling folks, who, bent on being witty,
     Scrawl on each post some fag-end of a ditty,
     Spinning, with spider’s web, their shallow brains,
     O’er wainscots, borrowed books, or window panes.

At one o’clock the wind became decidedly fair, and the men, relieved from their paddles, are nearly all asleep, in the bottom of the canoe.  While the wind drives us forward beautifully I embrace the time to resume my narrative of early journeyings, dropt yesterday.

In the year 1808, my father removed from Albany to Oneida County.  I remained at the old homestead in Guilderland, in charge of his affairs, until the following year, when I also came to the west.  The next spring I was offered handsome inducements to go to the Genesee country, by a manufacturing company, who contemplated the saving of a heavy land transportation from Albany on the article of window-glass, if the rude materials employed in it could be found in that area of country.  I visited it with that view; found its native resources ample, and was still more delighted with the flourishing appearance of this part of the Western country than I had been with Utica and its environs.  Auburn, Geneva, Canandaigua, and other incipient towns, seemed to me the germs of a land “flowing with milk and honey.”

In 1811, I went on a second trip to Philadelphia, and executed the object of it with a success equal to my initial visit.  On this trip I had letters to some gentlemen at Philadelphia, who received me in a most clever spirit, and I visited the Academy of Arts, Peale’s Museum, the Water Works, Navy Yard, &c.  I here received my first definite ideas of painting and sculpture.  I returned with new stores of information and new ideas of the world, but I had lost little or nothing of my primitive simplicity of feeling or rustic notions of human perfection.  And, as I began to see something of the iniquities of men, I clung more firmly to my native opinions.