in sight of which we shall almost continually float, all the
way down to Cairo, nearly eleven hundred miles away. At each tipple
is a miners' hamlet; a row of cottages or huts, cast in a common mold,
either unpainted, or bedaubed with that cheap, ugly red with which one
is familiar in railway bridges and rural barns. Sometimes these huts,
though in the mass dreary enough, are kept in neat repair; but often
are they sadly out of elbows--pigs and children promiscuously at
their doors, paneless sash stuffed with rags, unsightly litter strewn
around, misery stamped on every feature of the homeless tenements.
Dreariest of all is a deserted mining village, and there are
many such--the shaft having been worked out, or an unquenchable
subterranean fire left to smolder in neglect. Here the tipple has
fallen into creaking decrepitude; the cabins are without windows or
doors--these having been taken to some newer hamlet; ridge-poles are
sunken, chimneys tottering; soot covers the gaunt bones, which for all
the world are like a row of skeletons, perched high, and grinning down
at you in their misery; while the black offal of the pit, covering
deep the original beauty of the once green slope, is in its turn being
veiled with climbing weeds--such is Nature's haste, when untrammeled,
to heal the scars wrought by man.

A mile or two below Charleroi is Lock No. 4, the first of the quartet
of obstructions between Brownsville and Pittsburg. We are encamped a
mile below the dam, in a cozy little willowed nook; a rod behind
our ample tent rises the face of an alluvial terrace, occupied by a
grain-field, running back for an hundred yards to the hills, at the
base of which is a railway track. Across the river, here some two
hundred and fifty yards wide, the dark, rocky bluffs, slashed with
numerous ravines, ascend sharply from the flood; at the quarried base,
a wagon road and the customary railway; and upon the stony beach, two
or three rough shelter-tents, housing the Black Diamond Brass Band, of
Monongahela City, out on a week's picnic to while away the period of
the strike.

It was seven o'clock when we struck camp, and our frugal repast was
finished by lantern-light. The sun sets early in this narrow trough
through the foothills of the Laurel range.

* * * * *

McKeesport, Pa., Saturday, May 5th.--Out there on the beach, near
Charleroi, with the sail for an awning, Pilgrim had been converted
into a boudoir for t