ment of the once-despised savage;" "the
crystal clearness of the beautiful rivers, the lovely, fertile plains,
framed by the Mozark Mountains, the balmy, delightful climate, and the
brutality and wicked greed of an American of the lower class," who had
told him that "the country was a million times too good for redskins,
who ought all to be exterminated, as 'Indians was p'ison wherever
found.'" And then, while the glow of this interest still flushed his
mind, he took up the Mississippi River, which was a career in itself and
beckoned him on to fresh conquests. He went up to the Falls of St.
Anthony, which, after Niagara and the Yosemite, was accounted "tame and
overrated" by Mrs. Sykes, but over which he pondered deeply. Before he
left there the river had got a strong hold on his imagination that grew
ever greater and greater. He spent all his time on the boat studying it.
He talked to the pilot about it,--or rather made the pilot talk, and
listened with all his ears; he took up the methods now practised for
preventing the banks from caving in and forcing the Great Father to lie
in the bed he has made, instead of driving honest folk out of theirs by
scurvy turns and bends that break up thousands of homes. He drew
diagrams of the pile-driving and wattling and willow mattrasses in the
diary, with the improvements he thought advisable, and some very
scientific suggestions by which the river could be made to checkmate
itself, like an automaton chess-player. He hung over the guards
continually, observing all that was to be observed, and recorded the
same under separate headings, such as "currents," "velocity,"
"flood-rises," with statistics without end showing that the
carrying-trade of the great water highway would amount in 1950 to
something so colossal that there is no room for it here, while a future
for the cities that stud its banks was predicted that would satisfy
their most ambitious citizens.

His heart was not in Louisville nor in the Mammoth Cave, though he went
over the first religiously and examined the latter carefully, collected
specimens, and even thrilled faintly over an eyeless fish, which aroused
considerable enthusiasm in Mr. Heathcote. He was not really himself
until he was again on the river, doing a little dredging and sounding on
his own account. At Cairo he expanded almost as much as his subject, and
for a long while afterward was never weary of tracing the blue and
yellow currents that fuse so reluc