and the western tea plant. Of some of the
brightest flowers an Indian girl afterwards told me the medicinal
virtues. I doubt not those students of the soil knew a use to every fair
emblem, on which we could only look to admire its hues and shape.

After noon we were ferried by a girl, (unfortunately not of the most
picturesque appearance) across the Kishwaukie, the most graceful stream,
and on whose bosom rested many full-blown water-lilies, twice as large
as any of ours. I was told that, _en revanche_, they were scentless, but
I still regret that I could not get at one of them to try.

Query, did the lilied fragrance which, in the miraculous times,
accompanied visions of saints and angels, proceed from water or garden
lilies?

Kishwaukie is, according to tradition, the scene of a famous battle, and
its many grassy mounds contain the bones of the valiant. On these waved
thickly the mysterious purple flower, of which I have spoken before. I
think it springs from the blood of the Indians, as the hyacinth did from
that of Apollo's darling.

The ladies of our host's family at Oregon, when they first went there,
after all the pains and plagues of building and settling, found their
first pastime in opening one of these mounds, in which they found, I
think, three of the departed, seated in the Indian fashion.

One of these same ladies, as she was making bread one winter morning,
saw from the window a deer directly before the house. She ran out, with
her hands covered with dough, calling the others, and they caught him
bodily before he had time to escape.

Here (at Kishwaukie) we received a visit from a ragged and barefoot, but
bright-eyed gentleman, who seemed to be the intellectual loafer, the
walking Will's coffeehouse of the place. He told us many charming snake
stories; among others, of himself having seen seventeen young ones
reenter the mother snake, on the intrusion of a visiter.

This night we reached Belvidere, a flourishing town in Boon county,
where was the tomb, now despoiled, of Big Thunder. In this later day we
felt happy to find a really good hotel.

From this place, by two days of very leisurely and devious journeying,
we reached Chicago, and thus ended a journey, which one at least of the
party might have wished unending.

I have not been particularly anxious to give the geography of the
scene, inasmuch as it seemed to me no route, nor series of stations, but
a garden interspersed with cottages, grov