Page:Camperdown - Griffith - 1836.djvu/64

 fourteen persons; consequently, there had to be heavy iron work to keep these large machines together. Now, you perceive, the cars are made of different sizes, to accommodate either two or four persons, and they run of themselves. We have only to turn this little crank, and the machine stops. This is Bristol. It was a very small town in your day, but by connecting it to Burlington, which lies slantingly opposite, the town soon rose to its present eminence. Burlington, too, is a large city—look at the green bank yonder; it is a paradise: and look at that large tree—it is a buttonwood or sycamore; we cannot see it very distinctly; take this pocket glass. Well, you see it now at the foot of the beautiful green slope in front of the largest marble building on this bank. That tree is upwards of four hundred years old, but the house was built within the last century."

"What a change," said Hastings, as they returned to their car,—"all is altered. New Jersey, the meanest and the poorest state in the union, is now in appearance equal to the other inland states. It was in my time a mere thoroughfare. What has thus changed the whole face of nature."

"Why canals and rail roads in the first place, and rail roads now; for in a few years canals were entirely abandoned. That is, as soon as the new propelling power came into use, it was found far more economical to travel on rail roads. The track of canals through four of the principal states is no longer to be seen."

At Princeton, the first thing to be seen was the college; not the same that existed in Hastings's day, but a long, deep range of stone buildings, six in number, with work shops attached to them, after the mode so happily begun by Fellenberg. In these work shops the young men worked during leisure hours, every one learning some trade or