SKETCHES OF TRAVEL: COMPRISING THE Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures, IN HIS TOUR FROM GEORGIA TO CANADA. BY THE AUTHOR OF "MAJOR JONES'S COURTSHIP," ETC., ETC. WITH EIGHT ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS, FROM DESIGNS BY DARLEY PHILADELPHIA: T. B. PETERSON, 102 CHESTNUT STREET. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1848, by CAREY AND HART, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Printed by T. K. & P. G. Collins. 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 Ther frend til deth, Pineville, Ga., July, 1847. Jos. JONES. MAJOR JONES'S SKETCHES OF TRAVEL Through the United States. LETTER I. Pineville, Geo., May 5, 1845. TO MR. THOMPSON :-Dear Sir-I have almost gin up writin intirely, sense you quit editin the Southern Miscellany; but I spose I'm like other peeple what's got the kakoethis skribendy, as they call it, and never will git cumpletely cured of it as long as I live. Dr. Mountgomery ses it depends a grate deal how peeple take it, whether they ever git over it or not; sumtimes, he ses, when they catch it at school they git cured of it, when it comes out, by a few doses of judishus kriticism. But he ses he thinks it's a constitootional disease with me, and I better jest let it take its course. Well, sense my book* has been printed and so many thousand copies of it has been sold all over the country, I've felt a monstrous curiosity to see a little more of the world and the peeple in it, than what a body can see out here in the piny-woods; and as the crap is pretty well laid by now, and things is considerable easy with me, I've made up my mind to make a tower of travel to the big North this summer, jest for greens, as we say in Georgia, when we hain't got no very pertickeler reason for any thing, or hain't got time to tell the real • Major Jones's Courtship, with 13 Engravings. Price 50 cts. |