what an odd sensation was experienced when, by chance, we caught a glimpse of external objects while the cars were in full flight?  Every thing seemed unique —­ in one mass.  For my part, I cannot say but that I preferred the travelling by the slow train of a hundred miles the hour.  Here we were permitted to have glass windows —­ even to have them open —­ and something like a distinct view of the country was attainable....  Pundit says that the route for the great Kanadaw railroad must have been in some measure marked out about nine hundred years ago!  In fact, he goes so far as to assert that actual traces of a road are still discernible —­ traces referable to a period quite as remote as that mentioned.  The track, it appears was double only; ours, you know, has twelve paths; and three or four new ones are in preparation.  The ancient rails were very slight, and placed so close together as to be, according to modern notions, quite frivolous, if not dangerous in the extreme.  The present width of track —­ fifty feet —­ is considered, indeed, scarcely secure enough.  For my part, I make no doubt that a track of some sort must have existed in very remote times, as Pundit asserts; for nothing can be clearer, to my mind, than that, at some period —­ not less than seven centuries ago, certainly —­ the Northern and Southern Kanadaw continents were united; the Kanawdians, then, would have been driven, by necessity, to a great railroad across the continent.

April 5. —­ I am almost devoured by ennui.  Pundit is the only conversible person on board; and he, poor soul! can speak of nothing but antiquities.  He has been occupied all the day in the attempt to convince me that the ancient Amriccans governed themselves! —­ did ever anybody hear of such an absurdity? —­ that they existed in a sort of every-man-for-himself confederacy, after the fashion of the “prairie dogs” that we read of in fable.  He says that they started with the queerest idea conceivable, viz:  that all men are born free and equal —­ this in the very teeth of the laws of gradation so visibly impressed upon all things both in the moral and physical universe.  Every man “voted,” as they called it —­ that is to say meddled with public affairs —­ until at length, it was discovered that what is everybody’s business is nobody’s, and that the “Republic” (so the absurd thing was called) was without a government at all.  It is related, however, that the first circumstance which disturbed, very particularly, the self-complacency of the philosophers who constructed this “Republic,” was the startling discovery that universal suffrage gave opportunity for fraudulent schemes, by means of which any desired number of votes might at any time be polled, without the possibility of prevention or even detection, by any party which should be merely villainous enough not to be ashamed of the fraud.  A little reflection upon this discovery sufficed to render evident the consequences, which were that rascality must predominate —­