“I remember when a boy to have visited the cabin of one of the passenger packets of the Erie Canal at nightfall. It reminded me of the buttery of my grandmother in the country on the farm, which was a long room with pans of milk placed on shelves on either side, with a narrow passage between. In this cabin, instead of glistening pans of milk, the passengers were laid to sleep upon the shelves. Outside, three horses on the towpath drew the boat, and upon the horses were boys to guide them. Soon after nightfall the boys were asleep, the horses were asleep, and if the boat had been called “Somnambula,” every thing would have been in harmony with the name! The passengers were three weeks making the journey from New York to Chicago by canal and the lakes. If there was a storm upon the lakes there was danger that they might never reach their destination! Yet our fathers rejoiced over even this small improvement in their means of transportation. “Within a few months, chiefly by the employment of Eastern as well as Western Capital, perfect lines of railroad have been built and recent improvements have been made, which have so shortened the distance between Chicago and New York that a breakfast can be taken in New York and upon the following day repeated in the city of Chicago. Yet so blasé have we become that this perfect system of transportation has gone into effect almost without public acknowledgment. “The East and the West then have reason to love the beautiful Hudson, with its Palisades, its Catskill, its West Point, and its ‘Villages strewn like jewels on a chain All its bright length.’ The Mohawk Valley beyond, excels even the Hudson in pastoral beauty. ‘Whole miles of level grain, With leagues of meadow-land and pasture-field, Cover its surface; gray roads wind about, O’er which the farmer’s wagon clattering rolls, And the red mail-coach. Bridges cross the streams, Roofed, with great spider-webs of beams within. Homesteads to homesteads flash their window-gleams, Like friends that talk by language of the eye. Upon its iron strips the engine shoots, That half-tamed savage with its boiling heart And flaming veins, its warwhoop and its plume. Swift as the swallow skims that engine fleets Through all the streaming landscape of green field And lovely village. On their pillared lines, Distances flash to distances their thoughts, And all is one abode of all the joy And happiness that civilization yields!’