as ardent, but not so selfish, as that of Macbeth, to call up the apparitions of future kings from the strange ingredients of the witch’s caldron.  Thus I will not grieve that all the noble trees are gone already from this island to feed this caldron, but believe it will have Medea’s virtue, and reproduce them in the form of new intellectual growths, since centuries cannot again adorn the land with such as have been removed.

On this most beautiful beach of smooth white pebbles, interspersed with agates and cornelians for those who know how to find them, we stepped, not like the Indian, with some humble offering, which, if no better than an arrow-head or a little parched corn, would, he judged, please the Manitou, who looks only at the spirit in which it is offered.  Our visit was so far for a religious purpose that one of our party went to inquire the fate of some Unitarian tracts left among the wood-cutters a year or two before.  But the old Manitou, though, daunted like his children by the approach of the fire-ships, which he probably considered demons of a new dynasty, he had suffered his woods to be felled to feed their pride, had been less patient of an encroachment which did not to him seem so authorized by the law of the strongest, and had scattered those leaves as carelessly as the others of that year.

But S. and I, like other emigrants, went, not to give, but to get, to rifle the wood of flowers for the service of the fire-ship.  We returned with a rich booty, among which was the Uva-ursi, whose leaves the Indians smoke, with the Kinnikinnik, and which had then just put forth its highly finished little blossoms, as pretty as those of the blueberry.

Passing along still further, I thought it would be well if the crowds assembled to stare from the various landings were still confined to the Kinnikinnik, for almost all had tobacco written on their faces, their cheeks rounded with plugs, their eyes dull with its fumes.  We reached Chicago on the evening of the sixth day, having been out five days and a half, a rather longer passage than usual at a favorable season of the year.

Chicago, June 20.

There can be no two places in the world more completely thoroughfares than this place and Buffalo.  They are the two correspondent valves that open and shut all the time, as the life-blood rushes from east to west, and back again from west to east.

Since it is their office thus to be the doors, and let in and out, it would be unfair to expect from them much character of their own.  To make the best provisions for the transmission of produce is their office, and the people who live there are such as are suited for this,—­active, complaisant, inventive, business people.  There are no provisions for the student or idler; to know what the place can give, you should be at work with the rest; the mere traveller will not find it profitable to loiter there as I did.