From the city of St. John's, which is contiguous to the falls, up to Fredericton (the seat of government), ninety miles distant, there is much to admire in the bays and beautiful islands which dot its limpid waters. A great portion of the land skirting its banks is alluvial, running back to beautiful ridges which swell up in the distance, and "the result is a luxuriant landscape." "For one hundred and thirty miles further the river flows through a fertile wooded country." "Sixty-three miles above Fredericton are the towns of Northampton and Woodstock. The next conspicuous place we reach is Mars Hill, about five miles and a half west of the River St. John's, and one hundred from Fredericton. This town has considerable interest attached to it from the circumstance of its being the point fixed on by the British commissioners as the commencement of the range of highlands forming the boundary of the United States. The mountain is about three miles in length, with a base upward of four miles, an elevation of two thousand feet above the sea, and twelve hundred above the source of the St. Croix. Near the summit it is almost perpendicular. As it is the highest point in its vicinity, the prospect commands a great extent of territory. Immediately beneath stretch the vast forests of which the adjacent country is composed, whose undulatory swells, 'clothed with the somber evergreen of the Fir, Spruce, Hemlock, and Pine, and the lighter green of the Beech, the Birch, and Maple, resembling, while they exceed, the stupendous waves of the ocean.' About twenty-five miles north, on the St. John's, we come to the Grand Falls, where the river passes, greatly contracted, between rugged cliffs, overhung with trees, sweeping along a descent of several feet with fearful impetuosity, until the interruption of a ridge of rocks changes the hitherto unbroken volume into one vast body of turbulent foam, which thunders over a perpendicular precipice, about fifty feet in height, into a deep vortex among huge black rocks, when the St. John's rolls out impetuously through a channel still more confined in width over a succession of falls for about a mile, the cliffs here overhanging the river so much as to conceal it." "When the sun's rays fall upon the mists and spray perpetually rising from the cataract, a gorgeous _iris_ is seen floating in the air, waving its rich colors over the white foam, and forming a beautiful contrast with the somber rocks, covered with dark cedars and pines, which overhang the abyss."