As we neared the Mississippi we got into less wild country.  I remember the first hotel where the host said to me, “You have come just in good time.  You’ll have something out of the common for dinner.  We have been killing a sheep.”  Since leaving Green Bay we had been living exclusively on venison and prairie hens and wild duck.  A sheep was a great rarity.  We came upon the Mississippi at Galena in Illinois, so called on account of its lead mines.  When I say mines, I use an expression which was quite inappropriate at the time of my visit, for the galena, or lead-ore, lay on the surface of the soil.  You saw its metallic brightness shining out everywhere, and so rich was the ore, that it yielded seventy-five per cent. of lead, even under the most summary of processes.  Added to this fact, the expense of transport being infinitesimal, as the huge artery of the Mississippi River ran a few paces from the beds, the working of them was so profitable that nobody took the trouble to extract the silver from it.  But the result of this mineral wealth was that everything one eat and drank at Galena was impregnated with lead, so much so, indeed, that one of my companions had a fainting fit, caused by the sediment which the eau de Botot he used for his toilet deposited in his glass.  He thought he had been poisoned.  I had not time, when I got to the Mississippi, to go down it to New Orleans, like our soldiers and explorers, when they made their first journey across this splendid country, and by it united a French Canada with a French Louisiana.  The journey I had just taken had lasted longer than I had thought for, and as my duty as a sailor recalled me imperiously to my ship, my only thought was to rejoin her as soon as possible.  But means of communication in the West were few and far between—­railroads were unknown, roads hardly laid out.  We were fain to go down the Mississippi to where the Ohio falls into it, go up that river to Cincinnati, and thence get by mail-coach to the railroads in the older Atlantic States.  This return journey was not altogether uneventful.  Our boat, ran aground several times during the descent of the Upper Mississippi.  On one of these occasions we were delayed for some time near the confluence of that stream with the DesMoines River, flowing through an exquisite country called Iowa, which in those days had not yet been annexed by the Union.  It swarmed with game.  I remember one shooting expedition I made with the ship’s engineer, a young Kentuckian of colossal stature.  We flushed thousands of prairie hens and other creatures, on whom we poured a hot but harmless fire.  In our own justification I must add that the Kentuckian was shooting with a bullet, using a huge carbine, so heavy that it took him half a minute to aim with it, and I with a single-barrelled gun, lent me by a bar-keeper, with this information, “The barrel is all twisted.  You must aim three or four yards to the right, if you want to hit anything!”