rpose that one of our party went to inquire
the fate of some Unitarian tracts left among the woodcutters a year or
two before. But the old Manitou, though, daunted like his children by
the approach of the fire-ships which he probably considered demons of a
new dynasty, he had suffered his woods to be felled to feed their pride,
had been less patient of an encroachment, which did not to him seem so
authorized by the law of the strongest, and had scattered those leaves
as carelessly as the others of that year.

But S. and I, like other emigrants, went not to give, but to get, to
rifle the wood of flowers for the service of the fire-ship. We returned
with a rich booty, among which was the uva ursi, whose leaves the
Indians smoke, with the kinnick-kinnick, and which had then just put
forth its highly-finished little blossoms, as pretty as those of the
blueberry.

Passing along still further, I thought it would be well if the crowds
assembled to stare from the various landings were still confined to the
kinnick-kinnick, for almost all had tobacco written on their faces,
their cheeks rounded with plugs, their eyes dull with its fumes. We
reached Chicago on the evening of the sixth day, having been out five
days and a half, a rather longer passage than usual at a favorable
season of the year.

Chicago, June 20.

There can be no two places in the world more completely thoroughfares
than this place and Buffalo. They are the two correspondent valves that
open and shut all the time, as the life-blood rushes from east to west,
and back again from west to east.

Since it is their office thus to be the doors, and let in and out, it
would be unfair to expect from them much character of their own. To make
the best provisions for the transmission of produce is their office, and
the people who live there are such as are suited for this; active,
complaisant, inventive, business people. There are no provisions for the
student or idler; to know what the place can give, you should be at work
with the rest, the mere traveller will not find it profitable to loiter
there as I did.

Since circumstances made it necessary for me so to do, I read all the
books I could find about the new region, which now began to become real
to me. All the books about the Indians, a paltry collection, truly, yet
which furnished material for many thoughts. The most narrow-minded and
awkward recital, still bea