-Pushing up stream for two miles this
morning, the commissary department replenished the day's stores at
Parkersburg. Forepaugh's circus was in town, and crowds of rustics
were coming in by wagon road, railway trains, and steamers and ferries
on both rivers. The streets of the quaint, dingy Southern town were
teeming with humanity, mainly negroes and poor whites. Among the
latter, flat, pallid faces, either flabby or too lean, were under
the swarms of blue, white, and yellow sunbonnets--sad faces, with
lack-luster eyes, coarse hair of undecided hue, and coarser
speech. These Audreys of Dixie-land are the product of centuries of
ill-treatment on our soil; indented white servants to the early coast
colonists were in the main their ancestors; with slave competition,
the white laborer in the South lost caste until even the negro
despised him; and ill-nurture has done the rest. Then, too, in these
bottoms, malaria has wrought its work, especially among the underfed;
you see it in the yellow skin and nerveless tone of these lanky
rustics, who are in town to enjoy the one bright holiday of their
weary year.

Across the river, in Ohio, is Belpre (short for Belle Prairie, and now
locally pronounced Bel'pry), settled by Revolutionary soldiers, on
the Marietta grant, in 1789-90. I always think well of Belpre, because
here was established the first circulating library in the Northwest.
Old Israel Putnam, he of the wolf-den and Bunker Hill, amassed
many books. His son Israel, on moving to Belpre in 1796, carried a
considerable part of the collection with him--no small undertaking
this, at a time when goods had to be carted all the way from
Connecticut, over rivers and mountains to the Ohio, and then floated
down river by flatboat, with a high tariff for every pound of freight.
Young Israel was public-spirited, and, having been at so great cost
and trouble to get this library out to the wilderness, desired his
fellow-colonists to enjoy it with him. It would have been unfair not
to distribute the expense, so a stock company was formed, and shares
were sold at ten dollars each. Of the blessings wrought in this rude
frontier community by the books which the elder Israel had collected
for his Connecticut fireside, there can be no more eloquent testimony
than that borne by an old settler, who, in 1802, writes to an Eastern
friend: "In order to make the long winter evenings pass more smoothly,
by great exertion I purchased a share in the