The weather grew so cold, and the times so dull, we did not halt again until we reached St. Louis, where we both had relatives and friends who helped us to while away the holiday hours.  While there we visited the Institution for the Blind, our pleasure being much enhanced by the rare music we heard and the polite attention of Professor Workman, the Superintendent.

The Superintendent of the Iron Mountain Railway presented us with a pass, jocularly remarking that it was equal to an eighty dollar New Year’s gift.

Mr. C.C.  Anderson, of Adams’ express, upon the strength of our old Baltimore acquaintance, gave me letters of introduction, which afterward proved of infinite value.

CHAPTER XXXV.

    “With the fingers of the blind
    We are groping here to find
    What the hieroglyphics mean
    Of the unseen in the seen. 
    What the thought which underlies
    Nature’s masking and disguise,
    What it is that hides beneath
    Blight and bloom, and birth and death.”

We left St. Louis with its noble depot and stupendous bridge, and reaching Iron Mountain we seemed to have emerged from dense darkness into dazzling light.  Going to the clean, elegant hotel, our faces, covered with St. Louis soot, were in such grim contrast with our sunny surroundings, that we had to go through an elaborate course of ablution before we could feel ourselves presentable.  Iron Mountain is a monster mass of iron, one of the largest and purest of the kind in the world.  In 1836 it was bought for the insignificant sum of six hundred dollars, and now its worth is incalculable.

Being unwilling to brave mud and small towns, we made no stops until we reached Little Rock, Arkansas, where, at the untimely hour of three o’clock in the morning, we went to the Central House, the only hotel which had survived their recent fires, and which we found so crowded that even the doors were closed against us.

Our party of five went out in quest of shelter, the night pervaded by “the blackness of darkness,” and the rain pouring in torrents.  One of the gentlemen was a member of the Legislature, and quite an invalid.  Growing faint from exhaustion, he fell into a mud hole, and was fairly immersed in its slimy depths.  After a long search we finally found a poor refuge and an execrable bed, but in the morning were favored in securing comfortable private accommodations.

While at Little Rock we visited all the State institutions, and among them that for the blind.  After ten days of business success, we went to all the towns on the Arkansas River, and were charmed with its scenery, for while the classical meander, it winds in graceful beauty through forests which, although too low and ragged to please the eye, clothe a country otherwise picturesque in character.  A strange peculiarity of the Arkansas River is that of the emerald green color which deeply tinges its crystal clearness, a fact which I found no one able to explain satisfactorily.