The second year of my residence in Missouri, we were called to the Mine district, regularly to induct into office a young gentleman wfjo had been trained to the ministry under the Rev. Gideon Blackburn. The gentleman, though sick of the measles at the time of his ordination, was inducted into office, apparently with happy auspices. To the place of ordination was a journey of eighty miles. I performed it in company with the Rev. Mr. Mathews, a Presbyterian minister, formerly of Pennsylvania, an Irishman by birth, a gentlemen of great strictness of principle and character, whose occasional facetiousness and pleasantry had infinitely more force, as they beamed from a countenance naturally hard and austere, and from whom, judging by his tenets or his manner, no such things could have been expected.

This long journey had many circumstances of interest, and is very pleasant to me in the recollection. We made our way among the high hills, and flint knobs, and desolate vallies of the Maramec, cutting short the way with anecdote and narrative, mutually relating the scenes and events of our youth. As 1 shall attempt a description of the Mine district in another place, I shall only remark here, that the Maramec, where we crossed it, fifty miles from its mouth, is a wide, rapid, and shallow river, running among high hills, and having all the characteristics of a clear, cool, and mountain stream. It had narrow, but very pleasant bottoms, along which a few settlers were fixed. In looking from the high and lonely hills upon the river, foaming along among its woods, and often meandering many miles in advancing one in a direct course, we saw some cabins, so secluded, so shut in by hills on every side, that they seemed to have no neighbours

but rocks and mountains, and to be left alone with nature- I have seen no situations which brought to my mind such strong images of solitude as these.

The second day we missed our way, and wandered about among the hills, until after midnight. We had calculated to pass the night " sub dio," under the open sky. We finally heard the barking of dogs, by which we were directed to a house. We suffered not a little peril in making our approaches to the place? from a pack of fierce dogs, which had been taught to fly upon Indians, who had been occasionally lurking about during the war that had just closed. Seeing us approach at that unseasonable hour, they probably took us for the same kind of enemy, and we had fearful evidence that thej' considered their master's house as his castle, and that they meant to defend it with all their force. We ascended a little building and took ourselves out of their way until we raised the master. Although it was but a cabin, and the hour so unseasonable, we were most hospitably received and entertained. Indeed I have very pleasing recollections of hospitality from all the inhabitants of these remote regions, wrhere we called.

On this journey, for the first time since I left New England, I passed through a long tract of pines. You who are so deeply affected with the same grand and simple music, will easily conjecture what were my meditations, as the solemn and funereal hum of the winds died away in the tops of these forests. You will not doubt that remembrances of distant friends, and of our early years, when this music was almost daily heard, rushed upon me. I could not satiate my eyes in gazing upon the trees of my native hills. I returned by the way of St. Genevieve, Herculaneum, and St. Louis, to St. Charles.

The next summer, in company with a couple of friends, I made a journey up the Illinois. This river enters the upper Mississippi something more than twenty miles above the mouth of the Missouri. In ascending the Mississippi on the Illinois side, we passed a village of the Illinois Indians. The Illinois brings in a clear and broad stream, four hundred and fifty yards wide, in a channel as strait and regular as a canal. Near the mouth, it seems almost destitute of current. A short distance above the mouth, opens the prairie, that skirts the river. It is beautiful, being from two to three miles in width, of the same fertility with that I have attempted to describe already. Beyond this prairie is a skirt of open w oods, and the whole is bounded by a lime-stone bluff, smooth and perpendicular, and generally from two to three hundred feet high. A natural wall, so grand, regular, and continued, I have seen no where else. It is many miles in extent; and would look down upon the famed walls of Baby- Ion or China. On the opposite shore, was a deep and tangled bottom, full of a most luxuriant vegetation, but subject to be overflowed. Beyond the bottom, was a long series, league after league, of those siugular and regular-shaped hills called " Mamelles." As has been remarked on the Ohio, we observed that when the prairie and stone bluffs shifted to the opposite shore, the wooded bottom and the Mamelles were found on the side on which we were travelling.

This was a district of the military lands. Some of the soldiers were here to examine the value of their acquisitions. Others had already fixed themselves on their lands. The settlers were generally in the timbered land, that skirted the edge of the prairie. Were I to remark here upon the astonishing fertility of this

prairie and bottom, it would only seem like repetition of what has been remarked upon the first prairie of the Missouri. For a considerable distance up the Illinois it is still near the Mississippi. After ascending it two days, we were told that river was only three miles distant. A very rough and elevated bluff interposes between the prairies of the two rivers. As we stood on its summit, we could observe the course of each river for a great distance, and could trace the beautiful prairie on each, in configuration and sinuosities, conforming to the meanders of its river. We concluded that from the point where we were, when the ground was covered with ice or snow, a sledge, started from this summit either way, would reach the banks of either river by its own descending force. We descended from the bluff to the upper Mississippi, and rode up another rich and charming prairie, with the grass sometimes as high as onr heads, on our horses. We went up to examine the site of a new town, that had been advertised with great eclat in the papers. In effect, for pleasantness and fertility nothing could exceed it. But we were obliged to imagine the bustle of population, the blocks of buildings, the wealth and splendour, that we were told would one day be here. At present all was solitude and silence. Not a single dwelling was any where in view. But deer and wild fowl were in sufficient abundance.

At a considerable distance up the Illinois, and directly on its banks, we came, as we returned, upon the cabins of three families of Pottawatomie Indians. The water of the river, — at this season of the year warm and of a marshy taste, — wastheir drink; and their cabins were more smoky and dirty, and their fare apparently more scanty and wretched, than falls to the lot of

savages in general. They were of that class, which form the intermediate link between the social and savage state. In a tall, meagre, and sallow woman with the dirt and smoke worn into her complexion, my companion recognised a young French woman of unmixed blood, with whom, as he said, he had often danced as a partner at the balls, at Portage des Sioux. He declared that she had formerly been considered the belle of that village, and the queen of the wake, and that against \ the remonstrances of her parents, she had yoked herself with the tall and dirty savage, with whom she now lived. The third night of our journey we were benighted in a storm of thunder and rain, and were glad to take shelter in a wigwam. The order of things was here reversed. The husband was a Frenchman and the wife a squaw. No words can reach the description of the filthiness and apparent misery of this wretched place. The man persisted in declaring himself happy in his condition and in his wife. For supper the husband had a terrapin, the squaw an opossum ; and we had biscuit and uncooked mackerel, which we carried with us. This taste for association between these two races is exemplified in this way in all directions up the Illinois, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and especially at Prairie du Chien, up that river, where three quarters of the inhabitants are the mixed descendants of this union. In short, whercever the French have come in contact with the savages, these unions have been the result.

The object of this excursion had been to examine into the moral condition and wants of the new settlers on the Illinois. It was taken in the month of August. I had suffered much from heat, bad food, and exposure, and had breathed the air of the Illinois, charged at

this sultry season with miasma. The week after my return, I was taken down with a severe bilious fever. Emigrants generally suffer some kind of sickness, which is called " seasoning," implying that it is the summit of the gradual process of acclimation. This sickness commonly attacks them the first, second, or third year, and is generally the more severe, the longer it is delayed. This came in my third year's residence in the country. I am aware that every sufferer in this way, is apt to think his own case extraordinary. My physicians agreed with all who saw me, that my case was so. As very few live to record the issue of a sickness like mine, and as you have requested me and as I have promised to be particular, I will relate some of the circumstances of this disease. And it is, in ny view, desirable in the bitter agony of such diseases, that more of the symptoms, sensations, and sufferings should be recorded than have been, that others in similar predicaments, may know that some before them have had sufferings like theirs and have survived them. I had had a fever before, and had risen and been dressed every day. But in this, with the first day I was prostrated to infantine weakness, and felt with its first attack, that it was a thing very different from what I had yet experienced. Paroxysms of derangement occurred the third day, and this was to me a new state of mind. That state of disease in which partial derangement is mixed with a consciousness generally sound, and a sensibility preternaturally excited, I should suppose the most distressing of all its forms. At the same time that I was unable to recognise my friends, I am informed that my memory was more than ordinarily exact and retentive, and that I repeated whole passages in the different languages

which I knew, with entire accuracy. I recited, without losing or misplacing a word, a passage of poetry, which I could not so repeat, after I had recovered my health. Sometimes imaginations the most delightful, and at other times the most terrible, took possession of of my mind. But at that hour in the evening, when my family had been used to sing before prayers, I constantly supposed that I heard two flutes playing harmonies in the most exquisite and delightful airs. So strong was this impression, that it was difficult to persuade me, on the recovery of sanity, that it had not been so. As my strength sank, and as the painful process of blistering, and emetics, and other distressing operations, was laid aside as of no farther use, I remember well that every person, who came into my room, seemed to come with an insufferable glare of light about his head, like a dazzling glory, and that every one about me seemed to walk in the air, and in eccentric ellipses. Then there were continual flashes from my own eyes, like those when we receive the concussion of a violent blow in the head. When the paroxysm came upon me, a kind of awful curiosity, not unmixed with delight, — for at that time I was not afraid to die, — dwelt on my mind ; a straining of its powers to imagine the scenes, that would burst upon me, when I should shut my eyes upon time, and open them in the light of eternity. I passed the greater part of two days in such extreme weakness, as to be unable to close my eyes, and yet during this period when I was supposed unconscious, I was possessed of consciousness in such a degree as to hear and to know all that was passing about me. I expected every moment to have done with the earth ; and of one thing I am sure, that I was then perfectly willing to lay down