setting for all the world like an Alpine chalet,
lacking only stones on the roof to complete the picture. I took a
kodak shot at this, also at a group of tousle-headed children at
the door of a decrepit shanty built entirely within a crevice of the
rock--their Hibernian mother, with one hand holding an apron over
her head, and the other shielding her eyes, shrilly crying to a
neighboring cliff-dweller: "Miss McCarthy! Miss McCarthy! There's
a feller here, a photergraph'n' all the people in the Bottom! Come,
quick!" Then they eagerly pressed around me, Germans and Irish,
big and little, women and children mostly, asking for a view of
the picture, which I gave all in turn by letting them peep into the
ground-glass "finder"--a pretty picture, they said it was, with the
colors all in, and "wonderfully like," though a wee bit small.

Speaking of color, we are daily struck with the brilliant hues in
the workaday dresses of women and children seen along the river. Red
calico predominates, but blues and yellows, and even greens, are seen,
brightly splashing the somber landscape.

After Long Bottom, we enter upon the south-sweeping Pomeroy Bend of
the Ohio, commencing at Murraysville (208 miles) and ending at Pomeroy
(247 miles). It is of itself a series of smaller bends, and, as we
twist about upon our course, the wind strikes us successively on all
quarters; sometimes giving the Doctor a chance to try his sail, which
he raises on the slightest provocation,--but at all times agreeably
ruffling the surface that would otherwise reflect the glowing sun like
a mirror.

The sloping margins of the rich bottoms are now often cultivated
almost to the very edge of the stream, with a line of willow trees
left as a protecting fringe. Farmers doing this take a gambling risk
of a summer rise. Where the margins have been left untouched by the
plow, there is a dense mass of vegetation--sycamores, big of girth and
towering to a hundred feet or more, abound on every hand; the willows
are phenomenally-rapid growers; and in all available space is the
rank, thick-standing growth of an annual locally styled "horse-weed,"
which rears a cane-like stalk full eighteen or twenty feet high--it
has now attained but four or five feet, but the dry stalks of last
year's growth are everywhere about, showing what a formidable barrier
to landing these giant weeds must be in midsummer.

We chose for a camping place Letart's Island (232 miles), on the West