Portage Sentinel

Descriptive Eloquence.
"Our country, 'tis of thee!"
"Ma'am," said a free-spoken, warm hearted, enthusiastic, and a rather quizzical son of old Kentucky, while paying his devoirs to one of the famous lady tourists of America, "ma'am, you should have been born in America, the greatest country in the known world. Nature has clustered all her stupendous and dazzling works upon this land, and you should be among them! We have got the greatest men, the finest women, the broadest lakes, the highest water-falls, and the biggest hearts in all creation.
"Ma'am, go and see the falls of Niagara.-My dear ma'am, if I didn't think I'd waked up in futurity, when I first seed that big slantendicular puddle! (slantendicular's an algebra word, ma'am--you mayn't know it.) Why, ma'am I could tell you something about them falls-but you musn't put it in your book, 'cos nobody will ever believe it. The people that live around about there will lose their speech, and never hear each other speak for years, with the noise of the cataract! Fact, true as that's a pencil and a note-book you are taking out of your pocket. Why, there was a man lived there ten years, and he got so deaf he never knew a man was speaking to him till a pail of water was poured down the back of his neck! When you go to see the falls, ma'am, you must do all the talking you want to before you get within twenty five miles of them: for after that not a word of any kind can be heard!
"Then ma'am, you should go and see the great cave in Kentucky, where the bats hibernate in countless millions. There is not such another hole in the ground to be found upon the face of the earth. Ma'am if you go back to England without seeing our mammoth cave, you'll put your foot in it--no, beg your pardon excuse me-that's quite unpossible; but you'll leave a big hole in the book you are going to write. There was no more end ever known to it, ma'am: and there is a salt water lake in the middle of it, twenty-five miles broad. One of the rooms is called the antipodean chamber,' from the unpronounceable fact that a man can walk just as easy on the ceiling as upon the floor: and in this apartment, there's a natural fountain of pure brandy! The same cave, too, is a cure for consumption!
"You haint been south, yet, have you ma'am? You haint seen the Mississippi river, and the city of New Orleans? Well ma'am New Orleans is a hundred and twenty-five feet below the level of the sea, and the Mississippi runs through a canal bridge right over the city!-- The inhabitants are chiefly alligators and screech owls, the last words have been vulgarly perverted into Creole. The food is chiefly gum, produced from trees in the swamp and which they call gumbo. There is a paper called the Picaroon, the name being well chosen, significant of its professed piracies upon Hunt's Philosophy, Baron Munchausen, the Pilgrim's Progress, Joe Miller, Washington Irving, and Bell's Life in London. It is a violent and stupendous political print, and the government of the country has endeavored in vain to suppress it. One of the peculiar marks about this extraordinary city, is the entire absence of those small quadrupeds of genius most commonly known as rats. One was seen many years ago, by a citizen who brutally murdered the unknown creature, but was immediately tried and sentenced to be hung for the enormity.
"You will hear, ma'am, a great deal about the floating population of New Orleans," a phrase which you will understand when I tell you that the town is half the year under inundation from the Mississippi! You should have been born in America, dear ma'am but as you were not you may possibly die here, and that is some consolation to you."