“’The river was up, the channel was deep, the wind was steady
     and strong,
     The waves they dashed from shore to shore as we went sailing along—­

     “’Down the river, O down the river, O down the river we go-o-o;
     Down the river, O down the river, O down the Ohio-o-o!’”

“I think you learned a good deal—­for one day,” said Mrs. Thorndyke, coming in.  “How do you do, Jacob?  I’m glad to see you.”

Thus she again put forth her theory that Virginia and I had been together only one day.  It is what N.V.  Creede called, when I told him of it years afterward, “a legal fiction which for purposes of pleading was incontrovertible.”

The river of immigration was still flowing west over the Ridge Road, quite as strong as earlier in the season, and swollen by the stream of traffic setting to and from the settlements for freight.  People I met told me that the railroad was building into Dubuque—­or at least to the river at Dunlieth.  I met loads of lumber which were going out for Buck Gowdy’s big house away out in the middle of his great estate; and other loads for Lithopolis, where Judge Stone was making his struggle to build up a rival to Monterey Centre.  I reached Dubuque on the seventeenth of July, and put up at a tavern down near the river, where they had room for my stock; and learned that the next day the first train would arrive at Dunlieth, and there was to be a great celebration.

It was the greatest day Dubuque had ever seen, they told me, with cannon fired from the bluff at sunrise, a long parade, much speech-making, and a lot of wild drunkenness.  The boatmen from the river boats started in to lick every railroad man they met, and as far as I could see, did so in ninety per cent. of the cases; but in the midst of a fight in which all my canal experiences were in a fair way to be outdone, a woman came into the crowd leading four little crying children.  She asked our attention while she explained that their father had had his hand blown off when the salute was fired in the morning, and asked us if we felt like giving something to him to enable him to keep a roof over these little ones.  The fight stopped, and we all threw money on the ground in the ring.

There were bridges connecting the main island with the business part of the city, and lines of hacks and carts running from the main part of the town to deep water.  There were from four to six boats a day on the river.  Lead was the main item of freight, although the first tricklings of the great flood of Iowa and Illinois wheat were beginning to run the metal a close second.  To show what an event it was, I need only say that there were delegates at the celebration from as far east as Cleveland; and folks said that a ferry was to be built to bring the railway trains into Dubuque.  And the best of all these dreams was, that they came true; and we were before many years freed of the great burden of coming so far to market.