In due time these Chicago sufferers were landed at Montrose, a miserable little village in Iowa, at the head of the Keokuk Rapids.  Just across the wonderful river lay the historical Nauvoo, fair and beautiful as a poet’s dream, though the wooded slopes retained but shreds of their autumn-dyed raiment.  Mrs. Lively was pleased, the doctor was enthusiastic.  They forgot that “over the river” is always beautiful.  They crossed in a skiff at a rapturous rate, but when they had made the landing the disenchantment began.  A two-horse wagon was waiting for passengers, and in this our friends embarked.  The driver had heard they were coming, and knew the house that had been engaged for them—­the Woodruff house, built by one of the old Mormon elders.  The streets through which they drove were silent, with scarcely a sound or sight of human life.  It all looked strange and queer, unlike anything they had ever seen.  It was neither city nor village.  The houses, city-like, all opened on the street, or had little front yards of city proportions, and to almost every one was attached the inevitable vineyard.  It was indeed a city, with nineteen out of every twenty houses lifted out of it, and vineyards established in their places; and all the houses had an old-fashioned look, for almost without exception they antedated the Mormon exodus.

The Livelies were set down in a street where the sand was over the instep, before a stiff, graceless brick building, standing close up in one corner of an acre lot.  On one side, in view from the front gate, was a dilapidated hen-house—­on the other, a more unsightly stable with a pig-sty attached.  All the space between the house and vineyard, in every direction, was strewn with corncobs and remnants of haystacks, while straw and manure were banked against the house to keep the cellar warm.  In front was a walled sewer, through which the town on the hill was drained, for the Livelies’ new home was on “the Flat,” as the lower town is called.  The view from the front took in only a dreary hillside covered with decaying cornstalks.

The doctor moved a barrel-hoop which fastened the gate, and it tottered over, and clung by one hinge to the worm-eaten post, from which the decaying fence had fallen away.  A hall ran through the house, and on either side were two rooms.  The second floor was a duplicate of the first, so that the house contained eight small rooms, nine by eleven feet, exactly alike, each with a huge fireplace.  There was not a pantry, a closet, a clothes-press, a shelf in the house.  Not a room was papered:  all were covered with a coarse whitewash, smoked, fly-specked and momently falling in great scales.  The floors were rough, knotty and warped; the wash-boards were rat-gnawed in every direction; all the woodwork was unpainted and gray with age.