This June weather in Illinois!  Such glorious white clouds floating in the boundless hemisphere of fresh blue!  The warmth and the vitality of the air!  The glistening leaves of the forest trees!  The deep green shading into purples and blues of the distant woodlands!  The sweet winds, bending the prairie grasses for miles and miles!  Glimpses of cool water in little ponds, in small lakes, in the brook!  The whispering of rushes and the song of thrushes, so varied, so melodious!  The call of the plowman far afield, urging the horses ahead in the great work of bringing forth the corn!  The great moon at night, and the spectacle of the stars in the hush of my forest hut!

I was superbly well.  And for diversion went farther into the woods to hear a fiddler and to have him teach me the art which fled my dull fingers and the unwieldy bow.  And this fiddler!  His curly hair, always wet from his lustrations for the evening meal; his cud of tobacco; his racy locutions; his happy and contented spirit; and his merry wife and the many children, wild like woodland creatures, with sparkling eyes and overflowing vitality!  Many evenings I spent at this fiddler’s hut.  And such humbleness!  Only the earth for a floor!  Only one room where all his family ate and slept and lived!

In going to St. Louis I took the same stage that had brought me to Jacksonville.  This time I rode on the City of Alton, a better boat than the one that had brought me from La Salle to Bath; but all the conditions were the same.  There was the same roistering and sprawling crowd; the same loudness and profanity; the same abundance of whisky and its intemperate indulgence; the same barbaric hilarity of negroes, driven and cursed.  And now many goatees, and much talk of politics, of Whigs and Democrats.

St. Louis was languid, weary and old.  The buildings had an air of decay.  The stream of life moved sluggishly, not swiftly as in New York or Buffalo, or even in the village of Chicago.  There were luxury here and wealth.  There were slaves and a slave market.  I went to it, saw the business of selling these creatures, saw a woman of thirty, no darker than Zoe, sold to a man with a goatee, evidently from further south, who took her and led her away submissively.  Whatever the institution might be of necessity and even of gentleness in good hands, here no less was the vile business of the sale.  What would become of Zoe, was constantly in my thought.  I turned away from the slave market to continue my shopping; but I could not drive Zoe from my thoughts.

Here was I in St. Louis and necessarily withdrawn from care of Zoe.  I could not always watch over her.  Even if I did, what was her life to be?  How could she establish herself?  With whom, and where?  I was glad that I had not left her at the hut during my absence, that I had taken her to Sarah.  Nothing could happen to her while she was with Sarah.  Sarah had need of her too.  Sarah’s baby was soon to be born.  Dorothy Clayton, Reverdy’s sister, was coming to Jacksonville from Nashville to be a part of Reverdy’s household for a time; and the house had to be set in order for her arrival.  Turning Zoe over to Sarah was, therefore, a great help to her at this time.