[12] The fish of these waters may be excellent in the water; but owing to the want of care and niceness with which they are kept after being caught, they are very seldom worth eating when brought to table. They have no turbot or soles, a great national misfortune: their best fish are rock-fish, bass, shad (an excellent herring, as big as a small salmon), and sheep's-head. Cod and salmon I have eaten; but from the above cause they were never comparable to the same fish at an English table. The lobsters, crabs, and oysters are all gigantic, frightful to behold, and not particularly well-flavoured: their size makes them tough and coarse. [13] My friend was entertaining himself, at the expense of my credulity, in making this assertion. The rattle-snakes and red Indians have fled together before the approach of civilisation; and it would be as difficult to find the one as the other in the vicinity of any of the large cities of the northern states. [14] It is two years since I visited Hoboken for the first time; it is now more beautiful than ever. The good taste of the proprietor has made it one of the most picturesque and delightful places imaginable; it wants but a good carriage-road along the water's edge (for which the ground lies very favourably) to make it as perfect a public promenade as any European city can boast, with the advantage of such a river, for its principal object, as none of them possess. I think the European traveller, in order to form a just estimate both of the evils and advantages deriving from the institutions of this country, should spend one day in the streets of New York, and the next in the walks of Hoboken. If in the one, the toil, the care, the labour of mind and body, the outward and visible signs of the debasing pursuit of wealth, are marked in melancholy characters upon every man he meets, and bear witness to the great curse of the country; in the other, the crowds of happy, cheerful, enjoying beings of that order, which, in the old world, are condemned to ceaseless and ill-requited labour, will testify to the blessings which counterbalance that curse. I never was so forcibly struck with the prosperity and happiness of the lower orders of society in this country as yesterday returning from Hoboken. The walks along the river and through the woods, the steamers crossing from the city, were absolutely thronged with a cheerful well-dressed population abroad, merely for the purpose of pleasure and exercise. Journeymen, labourers, handicraftsmen, tradespeople, with their families, bearing all in their dress and looks evident signs of well-being and contentment, were all flocking from their confined avocations, into the pure air, the bright sunshine, and beautiful shade of this lovely place. I do not know any spectacle which could give a foreigner, especially an Englishman, a better illustration of that peculiar excellence of the American government--the freedom and happiness of the lower classes.