te which Davy describes when he went down the river with him.
Monsieur Gratiot and Colonel Auguste Chouteau and Madame Chouteau are
names so well known in St. Louis that it is superfluous to say that such
persons existed and were the foremost citizens of the community.

Among the many to whom my apologies and thanks are due is Mr. Pierre
Chouteau of St. Louis, whose unremitting labors have preserved and
perpetuated the history and traditions of the country of his ancestors.
I would that I had been better able to picture the character, the
courage, the ability, and patriotism of the French who settled Louisiana.
The Republic owes them much, and their descendants are to-day among the
stanchest preservers of her ideals.

WINSTON CHURCHILL.

THE DWELLING-PLACE OF LIGHT

By WINSTON CHURCHILL

1917

CHAPTER I

In this modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont to
boast, a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The bewildered,
the helpless--and there are many--are torn from the parent rock, crushed,
rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus was Edward
Bumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from the firm granite
of seemingly stable and lasting things, into shifting shale; surrounded
by fragments of cliffs from distant lands he had never seen. Thus, at
five and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper of the leviathan Chippering
Mill in the city of Hampton.

That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of an
historic river should be a part of his native New England seemed at times
to be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happened to him,
and to the world of order and standards and religious sanctions into
which he had been born. His had been a life of relinquishments. For a
long time he had clung to the institution he had been taught to believe
was the rock of ages, the Congregational Church, finally to abandon it;
even that assuming a form fantastic and unreal, as embodied in the
edifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which he had attended
for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival in Hampton.
The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewildered
Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, to
compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley of
rounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained shingles. And the
minister was sensational and dramati