The next morning found us with the southern shore of Lake Erie in sight—a long line of woods, with here and there a cluster of habitations on the shore. "That village where you see the light-house," said one of the passengers, who came from the hills of Maine, "is Grand River, and from that place to Cleveland, which is thirty miles distant, you have the most beautiful country under the sun—perfectly beautiful, sir; not a hill the whole way, and the finest farms that were ever seen; you can buy a good farm there for two thousand dollars." In two or three hours afterward we were at Cleveland, and I hastened on shore. It is situated beyond a steep bank of the lake, nearly as elevated as the shore at Brooklyn, which we call Brooklyn Heights. As I stood on the edge of this bank and looked over the broad lake below me, stretching beyond the sight and quivering in the summer wind, I was reminded of the lines of Southey: —"Along the bending line of shore Such hue is thrown as when the peacock's neck Assumes its proudest tint of amethyst, Embathed in emerald glory." But it was not only along the line of the shore that these hues prevailed; the whole lake glowed with soft amethystine and emerald tinges, in irregular masses, like the shades of watered silk. Cleveland stands in that beautiful country without a hill, of which my fellow-passenger spoke—a thriving village yet to grow into a proud city of the lake country. It is built upon broad dusty ways, in which not a pebble is seen in the fat dark earth of the lake shore, and which are shaded with locust-trees, the variety called seed-locust, with crowded twigs and clustered foliage—a tree chosen, doubtless, for its rapid growth, as the best means of getting up a shade at the shortest notice. Here and there were gardens filled with young fruit-trees; among the largest and hardiest in appearance was the peach-tree, which here spreads broad and sturdy branches, escapes the diseases that make it a short-lived tree in the Atlantic states, and produces fruit of great size and richness. One of my fellow-passengers could hardly find adequate expressions to signify his high sense of the deliciousness of the Cleveland peaches.