We took in at Chatham a large cargo of the usual articles of exportation from Canada to the United States, viz. barrels of flour, sacks of grain, and emigrants proceeding to Michigan and the Illinois. There are on board, in the steerage, a great number of poor Scotch and Irish of the lowest grade, and also one large family of American emigrants, who have taken up their station on the deck, and whose operations amuse me exceedingly. I wish I could place before you this very original ménage, even as it is before me now while I write. Such a group could be encountered nowhere on earth, methinks, but here in the west, or among the migratory Tartar hordes of the east. They are from Vermont, and on their way to the Illinois, having been already eleven weeks travelling through New York and Upper Canada. They have two waggons covered in with canvass, a yoke of oxen, and a pair of horses. The chief or patriarch of the set is an old Vermont farmer, upwards of sixty at least, whose thin shrewd face has been burnt to a deep brick-dust colour by the sun and travel, and wrinkled by age or care into a texture like that of tanned sail-canvass--(the simile nearest to me at this moment). The sinews of his neck and hands are like knotted whipcord; his turned-up nose, with large nostrils, snuffs the wind, and his small light blue eyes have a most keen, cunning expression. He wears a smockfrock over a flannel shirt, blue woollen stockings, and a broken pipe stuck in his straw hat, and all day long he smokes or chews tobacco. He has with him fifteen children of different ages by three wives. The present wife, a delicate, intelligent, care-worn woman, seems about thirty years younger than her helpmate. She sits on the shaft of one of the waggons I have mentioned, a baby in her lap, and two of the three younger children crawling about her feet. Her time and attention are completely taken up in dispensing to the whole brood, young and old, rations of food, consisting of lard, bread of Indian corn, and pieces of sassafras root. The appearance of all (except the poor anxious mother) is equally robust and cheerful, half-civilised, coarse, and by no means clean: all are barefooted except the two eldest girls, who are uncommonly handsome, with fine dark eyes. The eldest son, a very young man, has been recently married to a very young wife, and these two recline together all day, hand in hand, under the shade of a sail, neither noticing the rest nor conversing with each other, but, as it seems to me, in silent contentment with their lot. I found these people, most unlike others of their class I have met with before, neither curious nor communicative, answering to all my questions and advances with cautious monosyllables, and the old man with even laconic rudeness. The contrast which the gentle anxious wife and her baby presented to all the others, interested me; but she looked so overpowered by fatigue, and so disinclined to converse, that I found no