with autumn-colored foliage, was enough to commend the old fashioned system of stages to more general use.  Call it poetry or what you please, yet the man who can contemplate with indifference the wonderful profusion of nature, undeveloped by art—­ inviting, yet never touched by the plough—­ must lack some one of the senses.  Indeed, this picture, so characteristic of the new lands of the West, seems to call into existence a new sense.  The view takes in a broad expanse which has never produced a stock of grain; and which has been traversed for ages past by a race whose greatest and most frequent calamity was hunger.  If we turn to its past there is no object to call back our thoughts.  All is oblivion.  There are no ruins to awaken curious images of former life—­ no vestige of humanity—­ nothing but the present generation of nature.  And yet there are traces of the past generations of nature to be seen.  The depressions of the soil here and there to be observed, covered with a thick meadow grass, are unmistakeable indications of lakes which have now “vanished into thin air.”  That these gentle hollows were once filled with water is the more certain from the appearance of the shores of the present lakes, where the low water mark seems to have grown lower and lower every year.  But if the past is blank, these scenes are suggestive of happy reflections as to the future.  The long perspective is radiant with busy life and cheerful husbandry.  New forms spring into being.  Villages and towns spring up as if by magic, along whose streets throngs of men are passing.  And thus, as “coming events cast their shadows before,” does the mind wander from the real to the probable.  An hour and a half of this sort of revery, and we had come to the Fort Ripley ferry, over which we were to go for the mail.  That ferry (and I have seen others on the river like it) is a marvellous invention.  It is a flat-boat which is quickly propelled either way across the river by means of the resistance which it offers to the current.  Its machinery is so simple I will try to describe it.  In the first place a rope is stretched across the river from elevated objects on either side.  Each end of the boat is made fast to this line by pullies, which can be taken up or let out at the fastenings on the boat.  All that is required to start the boat is to bring the bow, by means of the pully, to an acute angle with the current.  The after part of the boat presents the principal resistance to the current by sliding a thick board into the water from the upper side.  As the water strikes against this, the boat is constantly attempting to describe a circle, which it is of course prevented from doing by the current, and so keeps on—­ for it must move somewhere—­ in a direction where the obstruction is less.  It certainly belongs to the science of hydraulics, for it is not such a boat as can be propelled by steam or wind.  I had occasion recently to cross the Mississippi on a similar ferry, early in the morning,