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176 No one without having seen the thing himself - & the jolting will impress it on his memory - can form any proper conception of the holes, the mud, & the pools of water which not unfrequently constitute what is called in America a road. At Augusta I had seen axles disappear in the main streets. But the most advanced specimen of this kind of means of communication I ever passed over was in going to the station of the Mississippi & Tennessee railway at New Orleans. I could not see, or hear that any attempt had ever been made to form a road. The traffic was great; & was of course confined by the houses to a narrow street. It was a natural swamp. & there had been lately a great deal of rain. My reflections on arriving at last at the station were, that American horses were wonderful animals; & that in nothing did the Americans themselves show their inventive prowess so triumphantly as in constructing carriages which could carry heavy loads day after day through such difficulties; I do not [[ ]] through such roads, because there was nothing but a collection of the hindrances to travelling which a road is made to remedy. This is a subject on which the Americans are very tolerant & easily satisfied. "Sir," said a gentleman to me, on the top of Well's & Fargo's Coach, as we were passing over the Plains to Denver, "Sir, this is the finest piece of road in the world." As nothing had been said previously about roads, & what we were passing along was merely...