were assembled about a hundred men; and, upon inquiry, learned that they had come together for the purpose of "shooting a beeve," as the marksmen have it. The regulations I found to be chiefly these: A bull's-eye, with a centre nail, stands at a distance variously of from forty to seventy yards; and those five who, at the close of the contest, have most frequently driven the nail, are entitled to a fat ox divided into five portions. Many of the marksmen in the vicinity, I was informed, could drive the nail twice out of every three trials. Reluctantly I was forced to decline a civil invitation to join the party, and to leave before the sport commenced; but, jogging leisurely along through a beautiful region of prairie and woodland interspersed, I reached near nightfall the village of Salem. This place, with its dark, weather-beaten edifices, forcibly recalled to my mind one of those gloomy little seaports sprinkled along the iron-bound coast of NewEngland, over some of which the ocean-storm has roared and the ocean-eagle shrieked for more than two centuries. The town is situated on the eastern border of the Grand Prairie, upon the stageroute from St. Louis to Vincennes; and, as approached from one quarter, is completely concealed by a bold promontory of timber springing into the plain. It is a quiet, innocent, gossipping little place as ever was, no doubt; never did any harm in all its life, and probably never will do any. This sage conclusion is predicated upon certain items gathered at the village singing-school; at which, ever-notable place, the traveller, agreeable to invi* Or "beef."

tation, attended, and carolled away most vehemently with about a dozen others of either sex, under the cognizance of a certain worthy personage styled the Major, whose vocation seemed to be to wander over these parts for the purpose of "building up” the good people in psalmody. To say that I was not more surprised than delighted with the fruits of the honest songster's efforts in Salem, and that I was, moreover, marvellously edified by the brisk airs of the "Missouri Harmony," from whose cheerful pages operations were performed, surely need not be done; therefore, prithee, reader, question me not.

Mt. Vernon, Ill.

XXXII.

"After we are exhausted by a long course of application to business, how delightful are the first moments of indolence and repose! O che bella coza di far niente !"-STEWART.

"Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn!"

Falstaff.

THAT distinguished metaphysician Dugald Stewart, in his treatise upon the "Active and Moral Powers," has, in the language of my motto, somewhere observed, that leisure after continued exertion is a source of happiness perfect in its kind; and

* Philosophy, b. i., chap. 1.

surely, at the moment I am now writing, my own feelings abundantly testify to the force of the remark. For more than one month past have I been urging myself onward from village to village and from hamlet to hamlet, through woodland, and over prairie, river, and rivulet, with almost the celerity of an avant courier, and hardly with closer regard to passing scenes and events. My purpose, reader, for I may as well tell you, has been to accomplish, within a portion of time to some degree limited, a "tour over the prairies" previously laid out. This, within the prescribed period, I am now quite certain of fulfilling; and here am I, at length, "taking mine ease in mine inn" at the ancient and venerable French village Kaskaskia.

It is evening now. The long summer sunset is dying away in beauty from the heavens; and alone in my chamber am I gathering up the fragments of events scattered along the pathway of the week that is gone. Last evening at this hour I was entering the town of Pinkneyville, and my last number left me soberly regaling myself upon the harmonious vocalities of the sombre little village of Salem. Here, then, may I well enough resume "the thread of my discourse."

During my wanderings in Illinois I have more than once referred to the frequency and violence of the thunder-gusts by which it is visited. I had travelled not many miles the morning after leaving Salem when I was assailed by one of the most terrific storms I remember to have yet encountered. All the morning the atmosphere had been most op

pressive, the sultriness completely prostrating, and the livid exhalations quivered along the parched-up soil of the prairies, as if over the mouth of an enormous furnace. A gauzy mist of silvery whiteness at length diffused itself over the landscape; an inky cloud came heaving up in the northern horizon, and soon the thunder-peal began to bellow and reverberate along the darkened prairie, and the great raindrops came tumbling to the ground. Fortunately, a shelter was at hand; but hardly had the traveller availed himself of its liberal hospitality, when the heavens were again lighted up by the sunbeams; the sable cloud rolled off to the east, and all was beautiful and calm, as if the angel of desolation in his hurried flight had but for a moment stopped the shade of his dusky wing, and had then swept onward to accomplish elsewhere his terrible bidding. With a reflection like this I was about remounting to pursue my way, when a prolonged, deafening, terrible crash-as if the wild idea of heathen mythology was indeed about to be realized, and the thundercar of Olympian Jove was dashing through the concave above-caused me to falter with foot in stirrup, and almost involuntarily to turn my eye in the direction from which the bolt seemed to have burst. A few hundred yards from the spot on which I stood a huge elm had been blasted by the lightning; and its enormous shaft towering aloft, torn, mangled, shattered from the very summit to its base, was streaming its long ghastly fragments on the blast. The scene was one startlingly impressive; one of those few scenes in a man's life the remembrance

of which years cannot wholly efface; which he never forgets. As I gazed upon this giant forest-son, which the lapse of centuries had perhaps hardly sufficed to rear to perfection, now, even though a ruin, noble, that celebrated passage of the poet Gray, when describing his bard, recurred with some force to my mind in this description Gray is supposed to have had the painting of Raphael at Florence, representing Deity in the vision of Ezekiel, before him :

"Loose his beard and hoary hair

Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air," &c.

A ride of a few hours, after the storm had died away, brought me to the pleasant little town of Mt. Vernon. This place is the seat of justice for Jefferson county, and has a courthouse of brick, decent enough to the eye, to be sure, but said to have been so miserably constructed that it is a perilous feat for his honour here to poise the scales. The town itself is an inconsiderable place, but pleasantly situated, in the edge of a prairie, if I forget not, and in every other respect is exactly what every traveller has seen a dozen times elsewhere in Illinois. Like Shelbyville, it is chiefly noted for a remarkable spring in its vicinity, said to be highly medicinal. How this latter item may stand I know not, but I am quite sure that all of the pure element it was my own disagreeable necessity to partake of during my brief tarry savoured mightily of medicine or of something akin. Epsom salts and alum seemed the chief substances in solution; and with these minerals all the water in the region appeared heavily charged.