es. The huge, clumsy craft, which must have been upwards of four
hundred tons burden, was manned by the usual crew of twenty-five or
thirty rowdy, drunken rivermen, whose ribaldry and rude jests were
unfitted for the ears of a gentlewoman.

By adroit steering and an occasional return to my sculling, we were
fortunate enough to keep our distance from these other boats, and for
the greater part of the day I had the pleasure of pointing out to
Alisanda the beauties of the river scenery. Rightful in fact, and most
appropriate in truth, is the interpretation which tells us that "Ohio"
means "the beautiful river."

A day of clear, warm sunshine, marred by only one shower, gave us our
first chance to share the ever-shifting views of headlands and rolling,
wooded hills. Though the forest was as yet only half in leaf, and the
height of the flood covered all other than the highest of the bottoms,
the nature of the scene was an unending wonder to my companions, who in
turn compared it with the sterile mountains of Old Spain and the deserts
of New Spain. They could not liken it to the tamed woodlands of England;
for, notwithstanding a generation of settlement, with the river long
since the main artery of a great commerce, these banks were as yet in
many places unbroken wilderness, the abode of elk and deer and wolf, of
tigerish panther and lumbering bear.

High above us soared eagles and turkey buzzards, spying for carrion and
live prey, each according to his nature, as they had soared and spied in
the late sixties and early seventies, when Gist and Boone and the great
Washington first threaded the untraced wilderness and skimmed downstream
in their bark canoes to the dark and bloody hunting-grounds of the
hostile tribes. Since then what vast changes had come over the land!
What thousands of homesteads hewn out of the gloomy depths of beech and
oak, walnut and maple forest! What scores of settlements and towns,
ranging in size up to Cincinnati, with its three hundred and more
houses, many of brick and stone, its fifteen hundred whites and thousand
slaves, its genteel coaches and chariots, and its educational
institutions!

Yet, aside from the slaughtered buffalo and the backward-driven savage,
how small the change in the forest life! Along the rocky banks the
deadly rattlesnake and copperhead still lay coiled in wait; the deer
came timidly down to the water along old game traces where the panther
still lurked; and flocks of scr