“Fellow citizens:  It gives me great pleasure to thus meet and mingle with you, to lay aside for a moment the heavy duties of an official and burdensome station, and confer in familiar converse with my friends in your great state.  The good opinion of my fellow citizens of all sections is the sweetest solace in all my anxieties.  I look forward with longing to the time when I can lay aside the cares of office—­” ["dam sight,” shouted a tipsy fellow near the door.  Cries of “put him out.”]

“My friends, do not remove him.  Let the misguided man stay.  I see that he is a victim of that evil which is swallowing up public virtue and sapping the foundation of society.  As I was saying, when I can lay down the cares of office and retire to the sweets of private life in some such sweet, peaceful, intelligent, wide-awake and patriotic place as Hawkeye (applause).  I have traveled much, I have seen all parts of our glorious union, but I have never seen a lovelier village than yours, or one that has more signs of commercial and industrial and religious prosperity —­(more applause).”

The Senator then launched into a sketch of our great country, and dwelt for an hour or more upon its prosperity and the dangers which threatened it.

He then touched reverently upon the institutions of religion, and upon the necessity of private purity, if we were to have any public morality.  “I trust,” he said, “that there are children within the sound of my voice,” and after some remarks to them, the Senator closed with an apostrophe to “the genius of American Liberty, walking with the Sunday School in one hand and Temperance in the other up the glorified steps of the National Capitol.”

Col.  Sellers did not of course lose the opportunity to impress upon so influential a person as the Senator the desirability of improving the navigation of Columbus river.  He and Mr. Brierly took the Senator over to Napoleon and opened to him their plan.  It was a plan that the Senator could understand without a great deal of explanation, for he seemed to be familiar with the like improvements elsewhere.  When, however, they reached Stone’s Landing the Senator looked about him and inquired,

“Is this Napoleon?”

“This is the nucleus, the nucleus,” said the Colonel, unrolling his map.  “Here is the deepo, the church, the City Hall and so on.”

“Ah, I see.  How far from here is Columbus River?  Does that stream empty——­”

“That, why, that’s Goose Run.  Thar ain’t no Columbus, thout’n it’s over to Hawkeye,” interrupted one of the citizens, who had come out to stare at the strangers.  “A railroad come here last summer, but it haint been here no mo’.”

“Yes, sir,” the Colonel hastened to explain, “in the old records Columbus River is called Goose Run.  You see how it sweeps round the town—­forty-nine miles to the Missouri; sloop navigation all the way pretty much, drains this whole country; when it’s improved steamboats will run right up here.  It’s got to be enlarged, deepened.  You see by the map.  Columbus River.  This country must have water communication!”