oked. Everything seems romantic and dreamlike.

We went by a southerly route, on account of starting so early in the
season there was snow on the ground the day we left. On the second day,
after a moonlight night on Long Island Sound, we were floating down the
Delaware, between shores misty-green with budding willows; then (most
of us seasick, though I was not) we were tossed across Chesapeake Bay;
then there was a railway ride to the Alleghanies, which gave us
glimpses of the Potomac and the Blue Ridge, and of the lovely scenery
around Harper's Ferry; then followed a stifling night on the mountains,
when we were packed like sardines into a stagecoach, without a breath
of air, and the passengers were cross because the baby cried, while I
felt inwardly glad that one voice among us could give utterance to the
general discomfort, my own part of which I could have borne if I could
only have had an occasional peep out at the mountain-side. After that
it was all river-voyaging, down the Monongahela into the Ohio, and up
the Mississippi.

As I recall this part of it, I should say that it was the perfection of
a Western journey to travel in early spring by an Ohio River
steamboat,--such steamboats as they had forty years ago, comfortable,
roomy, and well ordered. The company was social, as Western emigrants
were wont to be when there were not so very many of them, and the
shores of the river, then only thinly populated, were a constantly
shifting panorama of wilderness beauty. I have never since seen a
combination of spring colors so delicate as those shown by the uplifted
forests of the Ohio, where the pure white of the dogwood and the
peach-bloom tint of the red-bud (Judas tree) were contrasted with soft
shades of green, almost endlessly various, on the unfolding leafage.

Contrasted with the Ohio, the Mississippi had nothing to show but
breadth and muddiness. More than one of us glanced at its level shores,
edged with a monotonous growth of cottonwood, and sent back a sigh
towards the banks of the Merrimack. But we did not let each other know
what the sigh was for, until long after. The breaking-up of our little
company when the steamboat landed at Saint Louis was like the ending of
a pleasant dream. We had to wake up to the fact that by striking due
east thirty or forty miles across that monotonous Greenness, we should
reach our destination, and must accept whatever we should find there,
with such grace as we could.

Wh