As I know that Sir Edward has given you a meeting at Rome, I shall presume you acquainted with the change in my plans, no less than with the new travelling companion with whom accident has made me acquainted. Of all our associates I could gladly have chosen you, my dear baron; for a co-adventurer in this distant excursion. There is so much of the true maritime spirit in the people I am about to visit, that your experience and observation would have proved both useful and pleasant assistants to my own comparative ignorance. Still, I flatter myself that a life of adventure, and fifty voyages by sea, furnish some few of the qualifications necessary for the task I have assumed.

Cadwallader took the direction of all our arrangements into his own hands; and well has he discharged the trust. But the individual enterprise of the Americans has left very little of this nature to be performed by the traveller. Capacious, beautiful, and excellent ships, sail, on stated days, between many of the European ports and their own country. This system of arrangement, so important to commercial interests, and so creditable to the efforts of a young state, is said to be extended still further. Lines of packets, as they are termed, also exist between New York and the West Indies, South America, and between most of the larger havens of their own sea-board.