he country is a desert, and but for a mighty
river all would be so."

"Yes; rivers are rare gifts to such as till the ground, as any one may
see who journeys far atween the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi. But
how do you account for these changes on the face of the 'arth itself,
and for this downfall of nations, you men of the schools?"

"It is to be ascribed to moral cau--"

"You're right--it is their morals; their wickedness and their pride,
and chiefly their waste that has done it all! Now listen to what the
experience of an old man teaches him. I have lived long, as these grey
hairs and wrinkled hands will show, even though my tongue should fail
in the wisdom of my years. And I have seen much of the folly of man; for
his natur' is the same, be he born in the wilderness, or be he born in
the towns. To my weak judgment it hath ever seemed that his gifts are
not equal to his wishes. That he would mount into the heavens, with
all his deformities about him, if he only knew the road, no one will
gainsay, that witnesses his bitter strivings upon 'arth. If his power
is not equal to his will, it is because the wisdom of the Lord hath set
bounds to his evil workings."

"It is much too certain that certain facts will warrant a theory, which
teaches the natural depravity of the genus; but if science could
be fairly brought to bear on a whole species at once, for instance,
education might eradicate the evil principle."

"That, for your education! The time has been when I have thought it
possible to make a companion of a beast. Many are the cubs, and many are
the speckled fawns that I have reared with these old hands, until I have
even fancied them rational and altered beings--but what did it amount
to? the bear would bite, and the deer would run, notwithstanding my
wicked conceit in fancying I could change a temper that the Lord himself
had seen fit to bestow. Now if man is so blinded in his folly as to
go on, ages on ages, doing harm chiefly to himself, there is the same
reason to think that he has wrought his evil here as in the countries
you call so old. Look about you, man; where are the multitudes that once
peopled these prairies; the kings and the palaces; the riches and the
mightinesses of this desert?"

"Where are the monuments that would prove the truth of so vague a
theory?"

"I know not what you call a monument."

"The works of man! The glories of Thebes and Balbec--columns, catacombs,
and pyramids! stan