With us was a ’young lady who showed herself to have been bathed in the Britannic fluid, wittily described by a late French writer, by the impossibility she experienced of accommodating herself to the indecorums of the scene.  We ladies were to sleep in the bar-room, from which its drinking visitors could be ejected only at a late hour.  The outer door had no fastening to prevent their return.  However, our host kindly requested we would call him, if they did, as he had “conquered them for us,” and would do so again.  We had also rather hard couches; (mine was the supper table,) but we yankees, born to rove, were altogether too much fatigued to stand upon trifles, and slept as sweetly as we would in the “bigly bower” of any baroness.  But I think England sat up all night, wrapped in her blanket shawl, and with a neat lace cap upon her head; so that she would have looked perfectly the lady, if any one had come in; shuddering and listening.  I know that she was very ill next day, in requital.  She watched, as her parent country watches the seas, that nobody may do wrong in any case, and deserved to have met some interruption, she was so well prepared.  However, there was none, other than from the nearness of some twenty sets of powerful lungs, which would not leave the night to a deadly stillness.  In this house we had, if not good beds, yet good tea, good bread, and wild strawberries, and were entertained with most free communications of opinion and history from our hosts.  Neither shall any of us have a right to say again that we cannot find any who may be willing to hear all we may have to say.  “A’s fish that comes to the net,” should be painted on the sign at Papaw grove.

CHAPTER III.

In the afternoon of this day we reached the Rock river, in whose neighborhood we proposed to make some stay, and crossed at Dixon’s ferry.

This beautiful stream flows full and wide over a bed of rocks, traversing a distance of near two hundred miles, to reach the Mississippi.  Great part of the country along its banks is the finest region of Illinois, and the scene of some of the latest romance of Indian warfare.  To these beautiful regions Black Hawk returned with his band “to pass the summer,” when he drew upon himself the warfare in which he was finally vanquished.  No wonder he could not resist the longing, unwise though its indulgence might be, to return in summer to this home of beauty.

Of Illinois, in general, it has often been remarked that it bears the character of country which has been inhabited by a nation skilled like the English in all the ornamental arts of life, especially in landscape gardening.  That the villas and castles seem to have been burnt, the enclosures taken down, but the velvet lawns, the flower gardens, the stately parks, scattered at graceful intervals by the decorous hand of art, the frequent deer, and the peaceful herd of cattle that make picture of the plain, all suggest