University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

Reader, do you feel like gwine on a jurny to the
north! If you do, jest take a seat with me, and I'll
carry you from Pineville to Quebeck, and back agin in
a little or no time. I don't know as I can offer quite
sich inducements to travelers, as is offered by some of
the pop'lar writers of the day; but if I can't promise
you sich elegant style nor sich instructive and entertainin
gossip by the way, I can carry you over the
route as cheap as most of 'em, and with as little danger
to your morals.

We will travel in steamboats, ralerodes, stage-coaches,
and canal-boats, over rivers, lakes and mountains. We
will visit cities, towns, and country, and see every kind
of scenery, and make the acquaintance of all sorts of
people; but if the trip should prove dull and uninterestin
to you, you can sleep over the long stretches, and
if you should git cumpletely out of patience with your
auther, you can stop on the way and git aboard of the
next book that cums along.

But in sober yearnest: this little sketch of my perrygrinations
among the big cities of the northern states,
was rit with no higher aim than to amuse the idle hours
of my frends, and if it fails to do that, its a spilt job.
If I had made a bigger book, I'd tuck up too much of

the reader's time with sich unprofitable nonsense, and
the strait jacket imposed on me by the limits of my
volume, made it difficult for me to accomplish what I
sot out to do. To git over so much ground even by
the shortest route I could find, tuck a good deal of room,
and if I stopped to introduce a incident or describe a
interestin scene now and then, I found my letters gittin
so long that my book wouldn't hold 'em.

I don't want to be understood, though, as makin a
apology for my book—not by no means. Sich as it is,
I'm responsible for it. But with this brief explanation,
them what waste the time to read what I have rit about
my travels, will understand why these pages aint no
more deservin the compliment they thus pay to