ng to reason."

"And do you then believe," said the Doctor a little provoked by
the dogmatism of his stubborn adversary, and perhaps, secretly, too
confident in his own more liberal, though scarcely as profitable,
attainments,--"do you then believe that all these beasts were literally
collected in a garden, to be enrolled in the nomenclature of the first
man?"

"Why not? I understand your meaning; for it is not needful to live in
towns to hear all the devilish devices, that the conceit of man can
invent to upset his own happiness. What does it prove, except indeed it
may be said to prove that the garden He made was not after the miserable
fashions of our times, thereby directly giving the lie to what the world
calls its civilising? No, no, the garden of the Lord was the forest
then, and is the forest now, where the fruits do grow, and the birds
do sing, according to his own wise ordering. Now, lady, you may see
the mystery of the vultures! There come the buffaloes themselves, and a
noble herd it is! I warrant me, that Pawnee has a troop of his people in
some of the hollows, nigh by; and as he has gone scampering after
them, you are about to see a glorious chase. It will serve to keep the
squatter and his brood under cover, and for ourselves there is little
reason to fear. A Pawnee is not apt to be a malicious savage."

Every eye was now drawn to the striking spectacle that succeeded. Even
the timid Inez hastened to the side of Middleton to gaze at the sight,
and Paul summoned Ellen from her culinary labours, to become a witness
of the lively scene.

Throughout the whole of those moving events, which it has been our duty
to record, the prairies had lain in the majesty of perfect solitude. The
heavens had been blackened with the passage of the migratory birds, it
is true, but the dogs of the party, and the ass of the doctor, were
the only quadrupeds that had enlivened the broad surface of the waste
beneath. There was now a sudden exhibition of animal life, which changed
the scene, as it were, by magic, to the very opposite extreme.

A few enormous bison bulls were first observed, scouring along the most
distant roll of the prairie, and then succeeded long files of single
beasts, which, in their turns, were followed by a dark mass of bodies,
until the dun-coloured herbage of the plain was entirely lost, in the
deeper hue of their shaggy coats. The herd, as the column spread and
thickened, was like the endless flocks o