In another cabin I found women and children only, and one of the children was in the last stage of illness.  But nevertheless the woman of the house seemed glad to see me, and talked cheerfully as long as I would remain.  She inquired what had happened to the vessel, but it had never occurred to her to go out and see.  Her cabin was neat and well furnished, and there also I saw newspapers and Harper’s everlasting magazine.  She said it was a coarse, desolate place for living, but that she could raise almost anything in her garden.

I could not then understand, nor can I now understand, why none of the numerous passengers out of the boat should have entered those cabins except myself, and why the inmates of the cabins should not have come out to speak to any one.  Had they been surly, morose people, made silent by the specialties of their life, it would have been explicable; but they were delighted to talk and to listen.  The fact, I take it, is that the people are all harsh to each other.  They do not care to go out of their way to speak to any one unless something is to be gained.  They say that two Englishmen meeting in the desert would not speak unless they were introduced.  The farther I travel the less true do I find this of Englishmen, and the more true of other people.

CHAPTER XI.

CERES AMERICANA.

We stopped at the Julien House, Dubuque.  Dubuque is a city in Iowa, on the western shore of the Mississippi, and as the names both of the town and of the hotel sounded French in my ears, I asked for an explanation.  I was then told that Julien Dubuque, a Canadian Frenchman, had been buried on one of the bluffs of the river within the precincts of the present town; that he had been the first white settler in Iowa, and had been the only man who had ever prevailed upon the Indians to work.  Among them he had become a great “Medicine,” and seems for awhile to have had absolute power over them.  He died, I think, in 1800, and was buried on one of the hills over the river.  “He was a bold, bad man,” my informant told me, “and committed every sin under heaven.  But he made the Indians work.”

Lead mines are the glory of Dubuque, and very large sums of money have been made from them.  I was taken out to see one of them, and to go down it; but we found, not altogether to my sorrow, that the works had been stopped on account of the water.  No effort has been made in any of these mines to subdue the water, nor has steam been applied to the working of them.  The lodes have been so rich with lead that the speculators have been content to take out the metal that was easily reached, and to go off in search of fresh ground when disturbed by water.  “And are wages here paid pretty punctually?” I asked.  “Well, a man has to be smart, you know.”  And then my friend went on to acknowledge that it would be better for the country if smartness were not so essential.