pleasant.
The many rivers that watered it cleared their space to the sky where
they ran, and here and there the meadows or prairies smiled to the sun
in grass and flowers. But everywhere else there was the gloom of forests
unbroken since the Mound Builders left the land. The long levels that
bordered the great lake at the north, the noble hills that followed the
course of the Beautiful River, the gently varied surfaces of the center,
and the southwest, the swamps and morasses of the northwest, were nearly
everywhere densely wooded. Our land was a woodland, and its life, when
it first became known to the white man, was the stealthy and cruel life
of the forest. Where the busy Mound Builders once swarmed, scanty
tribes of savages lurked in the leafy twilight, hunting and fishing, and
warring upon one another. They came and went upon their errands of death
and rapine by trails unseen to other eyes, till the keen traders of
Pennsylvania and Virginia began to find their way over them to their
villages, and to traffic with the savages for the furs which formed
their sole wealth.

All is dim and vague in any picture of the time and place that we
can bring before us. There are the fathomless forests, broken by the
prairies and rivers; there are the Indian towns widely scattered along
the larger streams throughout the whole region; there are the French
posts on the northern border, with each a priest and a file of soldiers,
and a few Canadian farmers and traders. Under the cover of peace between
the French king and the English king, there is a constant grapple
between the French soldiers and the English settlers for the possession
of the wilds which shall one day be the most magnificent empire under
the sun; there are the war parties of Indians falling stealthily upon
the English borders to the eastward; there is the steady pressure of the
backwoodsman westward, in spite of every hardship and danger, in
spite of treaties, in spite of rights and promises. These are the main
features of the picture whose details the imagination strives to supply,
with a teasing sense of the obscurity resting upon the whole. It is all
much farther off than ancient Rome, much stranger than Greece; but it is
the beginning of a mighty history, which it rests with the children
of this day, and their children after them, to make the happiest and
noblest chapter in the history of the world. It is a part of that
greater history, and I should like my youn