scarcely secure enough. For my part, I make no doubt that a track of some sort must have existed in very remote times, as Pundit asserts; for nothing can be clearer, to my mind, than that, at some period--not less than seven centuries ago, certainly--the Northern and Southern Kanadaw continents were _united_; the Kanawdians, then, would have been driven, by necessity, to a great railroad across the continent. _April 5th._--I am almost devoured by _ennui_. Pundit is the only conversible person on board; and he, poor soul, can speak of nothing but antiquities. He has been occupied all the day in the attempt to convince me that ancient Americans _governed themselves_! Did ever anybody hear of such an absurdity? That they existed in a sort of every-man-for-himself confederacy, after the fashion of the "prairie dogs" that we read of in fable. He says that they started with the queerest ideas conceivable, viz: that all men are born free and equal--this in the very teeth of the laws of _gradation_ so visibly impressed upon all things both in the moral and physical universe. Every man "voted," as they called it--that is to say, meddled with public affairs--until at length, it was discovered that what is everybody's business is nobody's, and that the "Republic" (so the absurd thing was called) was without a government at all. It is related, however, that the first circumstance which disturbed, very particularly, the self-complacency of the philosophers who constructed this "Republic" was the startling discovery that universal suffrage gave opportunity for fraudulent schemes, by means of which any desired number of votes might at any time be polled, without the possibility of prevention or even detection, by any party which should be merely villainous enough not to be ashamed of the fraud. A little reflection upon this discovery sufficed to render evident the consequences, which were that rascality _must_ predominate--in a word, that a republican government _could_ never be anything but a rascally one. While the philosophers, however, were busied in blushing at their stupidity in not having foreseen these inevitable evils, and intent upon the invention of new theories, the matter was put to an abrupt issue by a fellow of the name of _Mob_, who took everything into his own hands and set up a despotism, in comparison with which those of the fabulous Zeros and Hellofagabaluses were respectable and delectable. This Mob (a foreigner, by the by) is said to have been the most odious of all men that ever encumbered the earth. He was a giant in stature--insolent, rapacious, filthy; had the gall of a bullock with the heart of a hyena and the brains of a peacock. He died, at length, by dint of his own energies, which exhausted him. Nevertheless, he had his uses, as everything has, however vile, and taught mankind a lesson which to this day it is in no danger of forgetting--never to run directly contrary to the natural analogies.