Our delay at Whitehall was owing to a blunder of Freke’s. He had assured us that we would certainly arrive in time to take the steamer down the lake to St John’s; but it had been several hours on its way when we arrived at the inn. Since the burning of a steamer several years before, there had been but one on these waters; and as it was now on its downward trip, it could not again leave Whitehall for several days. Here was a pretty mess for some half-dozen of us! There was nothing for us but bedtime; and poor enough beds it brought us. I was up before the sun had found a chance to send a squint into the town over its rocky eastern wall; and I wonder not that the sun is slow to visit it, for it is altogether a disagreeable hole. For this I was unprepared. Whitehall hath a royal prestige, and the notion of the head of a lake had given me the pleasing expectation of a picturesque little harbour, and a romantic water view. There is nothing of the sort. The harbour is well called the basin; and Wood-creek, the canal, and the lake, just here, are all ditches together. Vessels of different sorts and sizes lie huddled and crowded at their confluence, and the waters are precisely of the colour of _café-au-lait_! Shade of merry Charles, how came they to change Skenesborough into Whitehall? I have compared the ditch-water to _café-au-lait_; but all I can say of my breakfast is, that its coffee was not comparable to ditch-water. Freke was despatched to look us out a vessel willing to take us any where, for staying here was out of the question. He had given us the Indian name of the place as _Kaw-ko-kaw-na_, assuring us that this euphonious polysyllable was good Iroquois for _the place where they catch fish_. This little item of knowledge proved to us a dangerous thing, for it suggested a fishing excursion to fill up the hours of Freke’s anticipated absence. We rowed ourselves for some distance along a narrow channel, with marshes on both sides, which looked like the stronghold of that cohort of agues and fevers which, since the days of Prometheus, have delighted in burning and shaking the race of mortals. Wood-creek throws itself into the basin with a foaming cataract of waters; and beyond the marshes are precipitous walls of rocks, that confine the view. These rocks they call the Heights; and I doubt not they would look well at a distance, but the mischief is, there is no viewing them in so favourable a way. They rise like a natural Bastile, and so near your nose, that your only prospect is perpendicular; and you are consequently obliged to think more of your nose than the prospect. In the moonlight, the evening before, I did think there was something magnificent about the Heights; but this impression, like other visions of the night, did not survive the daybreak. I should think a geologist or a stone-mason might find them interesting; and an unprincipled inhabitant of Whitehall, out of patience with life in such a place, or