re conjunctures.... Without being very clear-seeing, I
can still perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly
pocketed a quarter.

_Wednesday._--A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on
board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio. This had early been
a favourite home of my imagination; I have played at being in Ohio by
the week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my
person being still unbreeched. My preference was founded on a work which
appeared in _Cassell's Family Paper_, and was read aloud to me by my
nurse. It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in
the last chapter, very obligingly washed the paint off his face and
became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him. The
idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a
baronet, was one which my mind rejected. It offended verisimilitude,
like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape from
uninhabited islands.

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. We were now on those great
plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The country was
flat like Holland, but far from being dull. All through Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw of them from the train and
in my waking moments, it was rich and various, and breathed an elegance
peculiar to itself. The tall corn pleased the eye; the trees were
graceful in themselves, and framed the plain into long, aerial vistas;
and the clean, bright, gardened townships spoke of country fare and
pleasant summer evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise;
but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil. That morning dawned
with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not
perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the heart
and seemed to travel with the blood. Day came in with a shudder. White
mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as we see them more
often on a lake; and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them
up, leaving an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from
horizon to horizon, the mists had still been there, and we knew that
this paradise was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria. The fences
along the line bore but two descriptions of advertisement; one to
recommend tobaccos, and the other to vaunt remedies against the ague. At
the point of day, and while we were all in t