Before the completion of the Rail-road, when travellers to the West were contented with the philosophic pace of the canal-boat, one might take up a novel at Little Falls, and come fairly to the sequel by the time the steersman cried out “Bridge!” at Utica. There were fifteen miles between them in those days; but now (to a man of indistinct ideas of geography, at least, and a traveller on the Rail-road) they are as nearly run together as two drops on the window-pane. The intermediate distance is, by all the usual measurements of wear and time, annihilated. All this is very pleasant to people in a hurry; and as most people in our busy country come under that category, it is a very pleasant thing for the white man altogether. There is a class of inhabitants of the long valley of the Mohawk, however, of whose sufferings, by the advance of the white man’s enterprise, this is not the first, though it may be the least, and last. The poor half-naked Oneida, who ran by the side of the once crowded canal-boat for charity, has not time, while the rail-car passes, even to hold out his hand! The Oneidas have not long been beggars by the road side. They were one of the five tribes confederated under the name of the Iroquois, who gloried in having fought their way into the country of the Mohawks, and kept their place and possessions in the midst of them; the latter tribe enjoying the undisputed honour of being an original people on the soil. Though merged in a confederacy, however, the Oneidas had their own chiefs; and a mythology of their own, which is not a little curious. It will not be _mal-apropos_, accompanying drawings of the towns that have usurped their ancient seat, to give some account of their ideas upon the origin of the earth and the human race. According to the Oneida, an unlimited expanse of water once filled the space now occupied by the world which we inhabit. At this time the human family dwelt in a country situated in the upper regions of the air, abounding in every thing conducive to the comfort and pleasure of life. The inhabitants were strangers to death, and its harbingers, pain and disease; whilst their minds were free from the corroding passions of jealousy, hatred, and revenge.