I Very Soon Abandoned Any Attempt At Drawing A Word From These Ancient Mothers Of Families; But Not The Less Did I Ponder In My Mind Over The Circumstances Of Their Lives.

Had things gone with them so sadly - was the struggle for independence so hard - that all the softness of existence had been trodden out of them?

In the cities, too, it was much the same. It seemed to me that a future mother of a family, in those parts, had left all laughter behind her when she put out her finger for the wedding ring.

For these reasons I must say that life on board these steamboats was not as pleasant as I had hoped to find it; but for our discomfort in this respect we found great atonement in the scenery through which we passed. I protest that of all the river scenery that I know that of the Upper Mississippi is by far the finest and the most continued. One thinks, of course, of the Rhine; but, according to my idea of beauty, the Rhine is nothing to the Upper Mississippi. For miles upon miles - for hundreds of miles - the course of the river runs through low hills, which are there called bluffs. These bluffs rise in every imaginable form, looking sometimes like large, straggling, unwieldy castles, and then throwing themselves into sloping lawns which stretch back away from the river till the eye is lost in their twists and turnings. Landscape beauty, as I take it, consists mainly in four attributes - in water; in broken land; in scattered timber, timber scattered as opposed to continuous forest timber; and in the accident of color. In all these particulars the banks of the Upper Mississippi can hardly be beaten.

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