hat first trip, which lasted eleven months.

The animals had not yet been scared out of the wilderness; water was
found twice every day; the vine grew luxuriantly in the forests, and the
caravans of the white men had not yet destroyed the patches of plums and
nuts which grew wild in the prairies.

Finn says he listened to the songs of the birds, and watched the sport
of the deer, the buffaloes, and wild horses, in a sort of dreaming
existence, fancying that he heard voices in the streams, in the foliage
of the trees, in the caverns of the mountains; his wild imagination
sometimes conjuring up strange and beautiful spirits of another world,
who were his guardians, and who lulled him asleep every evening with
music and perfumes.

I have related this pretty nearly in the very terms of our host, and
many of his listeners have remarked, at different times, that when he
was dwelling upon that particular portion of his life, he became gloomy
and abstracted, as if still under the influence of former indelible
impressions. Undoubtedly Captain Finn is of a strong poetical
temperament, and any one on hearing him narrate would say the same; but
it is supposed that, when the captain performed this first solitary
excursion, his brain was affected by an excited and highly poetical
imagination. After eleven months of solitude, he reached the Pacific
Ocean, and awoke from his long illusion in the middle of a people whose
language he could not understand; yet they were men of his colour, kind
and hospitable; they gave him jewels and gold, and sent him back east of
the mountains, under the protection of some simple and mild-hearted
savages. The spot where Finn had arrived was at one of the missions, and
those who released him and sent him back were the good monks of one of
the settlements in Upper California.

When Finn returned to the Mississippi, his narrative was so much blended
with strange and marvellous stories that it was not credited; but when
he showed and produced his stock of gold dust in bladders, and some
precious stones, fifty different proposals were made to him to guide a
band of greedy adventurers to the new western Eldorado. Finn, like
Boone, could not bear the society of his own countrymen; he dreaded to
hear the noise of their axes felling the beautiful trees; he feared
still more to introduce them, like so many hungry wolves, among the good
people who knew so well the sacred rites of hospitality.

After a short r