ms or maybe dense tangles of forest.

In the midst of this world of shade, nestle the whitewashed cabins
of the small tillers; but though they swarm with children, it is not
often that the inhabitants appear by the riverside. We catch a glimpse
of them when landing on our petty errands, we now and then see a
houseboater at his nets, and in the villages a few lackadaisical folk
are lounging by the wharf; but as a rule, in these closing days of
our pilgrimage, we glide through what is almost a solitude. The
imagination has not to go far afield, to rehabilitate the river as it
appeared to the earliest voyagers.

Late in the afternoon, as usual wishing water and milk, we put ashore
in Indiana, where a rustic landing indicated a settlement of some
sort, although our view was confined to a pretty, wooded bank, and an
unpainted warehouse at the top of the path. It was a fertile bottom,
a half-mile wide, and stretching a mile or two along the river. Three
neat houses, one of them of logs, constituted the village, and all
about were grain-fields rippled into waves by the northwest breeze.

The first house, a quarter of a mile inland, I reached by a country
roadway; it proved to be the postoffice of Point Sandy. Chickens
clucked around me, a spaniel came fawning for attention, a tethered
cow mooed plaintively, but no human being was visible. At last I
discovered a penciled notice pinned to the horse-block, to the effect
that the postmaster had gone into Alton (five miles distant) for the
day; and should William Askins call in his absence, the said Askins
was to remember that he promised to call yesterday, but never came;
and now would he be kind enough to come without fail to-morrow before
sundown, or the postmaster would be obliged to write that letter they
had spoken about. It was quite evident that Askins had not called; for
he surely would not have left that mysterious notice sticking there,
for all Point Sandy to read and gossip over. It is to be hoped that
there will be no bloodshed over this affair; across the way, in
Kentucky, there would be no doubt as to the outcome.

I looked at Boss, and wondered whether in Indiana it were felony to
milk another man's cow in his absence, with no ginger jar at hand,
into which to drop a compensatory dime. Then I saw that she was dry,
and concluded that to attempt it might be thought a violation of
ethics. The postmaster's well, too, proved to be a cistern,--pardon
the Hibernicism,-