The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844: Volume 23, Number 4Various
History
The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844: Volume 23, Number 4
Various
Periodicals
It is not often indeed that they admit the existence of these objects in
set terms; nor introduce into their works a paragraph upon the subject:
nor would any one who had never visited America be expressly informed
perhaps by them, that our part of the world contained within its compass
any thing at all comparable in the way of Rivers to the Thames or the
Tweed; or to the ponds of Cumberland in the way of Lakes; or to the Pisse
Vache in Switzerland in the way of a fall of water: but yet they have not
deprived us of them; and, incidentally, when they sometimes mention their
having been shockingly annoyed and incommoded by a scrub, who spat several
times upon the floor of the steamer in their presence, during a trip of
three hundred, five hundred or a thousand miles that they have had the
mishap to make with him, (instead of using his stomach like a true born
Englishman, or his parti-coloured flag of abomination like a continental
personage,) they give the reader some idea of the scope of a River or of a
Lake in America. Or, when they note down that a parcel of knaves, with
sterling money of the realm of Great Britain, borrowed doubtless for the
purpose and, as they verily believe, never repaid to this hour, bought a
merchant ship; loaded her with every variety of live animals like an ark,
and then cruelly and nefariously precipitated her over the Falls of
Niagara, in order to gratify that national tendency for a great SPLASH,
which exists universally in every form throughout the whole of that
wretched experiment at self-government called the United States--they then
give the untravelled reader some conception of an American Fall of Water.
One may therefore with confidence write down in a grave Essay like this,
and expect it to be believed even by those who have not Morse's Geography
before their eyes, that there still is, and long has been, a fall of Water
by common courtesy distinguished as The Cataract of Niagara; and a river
in the State of Connecticut, called, without any of our 'usual'
cisatlantic inflation, Connecticut River.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account