CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

RETURN TO CINCINNATI. A STAGE-COACH RIDE FROM THAT CITY TO COLUMBUS, AND THENCE TO SANDUSKY. SO, BY LAKE ERIE, TO THE FALLS OF NIAGARA.

As I had a desire to travel through the interior of the state of Ohio, and to "strike the lakes," as the phrase is, at a small town called Sandusky, to which that route would conduct us on our way to Niagara, we had to return from St. Louis by the way we had come, and to retrace our former track as far as Cincinnati.

The day on which we were to take leave of St. Louis being very fine; and the steamboat, which was to have started I don't know how early in the morning, postponing, for the third or fourth time, her departure until the afternoon; we rode forward to an old French village on the river, called

properly Carondelet, and nicknamed Vide Po and arranged that the packet should call for there.

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The place consisted of a few poor cottages, two or three public-houses; the state of wh larders certainly seemed to justify the second signation of the village, for there was nothing eat in any of them. At length, however, by goi back some half a mile or so, we found a solita house where ham and coffee were procurable; a there we tarried to await the advent of the boa which would come in sight from the green befo the door, a long way off.

It was a neat, unpretending village tavern, an we took our repast in a quaint little room with bed in it, decorated with some old oil painting which in their time had probably done duty i a Catholic chapel or monastery. The fare wa very good, and served with great cleanliness The house was kept by a characteristic old couple with whom we had a long talk, and who wer perhaps a very good sample of that kind of people in the West.

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The landlord was a dry, tough, hard-faced old fellow (not so very old either, for he was but just turned sixty, I should think), who had been out with the militia in the last war with England, and had seen all kinds of service,-except a battle; and he had been very near seeing that, he added: very near. He had all his life been restless and locomotive, with an irresistible desire for change; and was still the son of his old self: for if he had nothing to keep him at home, he said (slightly jerking his hat and his thumb towards the window of the room in which the old lady sat, as we stood talking in front of the house) he would clean up his musket, and be off to Texas to-morrow morning. He was one of the very many descendants of Cain proper to this continent, who seem destined from their birth to serve as pioneers in the great human army; who gladly go on from year to year extending its outposts, and leaving home after home behind them; and die at last, utterly regardless of their graves being left thousands of miles behind, by the wandering generation who succeed.

His wife was a domesticated kind-hearted soul, who had come with him "from the q city of the world," which, it seemed, was P delphia; but had no love for this Western cour and indeed had little reason to bear it any; ha seen her children, one by one, die here of fever the full prime and beauty of their youth. heart was sore, she said, to think of them; an talk on this theme, even to strangers, in 1 blighted place, so far from her old home, eased somewhat, and became a melancholy pleasure.

The boat appearing towards evening, we ba adieu to the poor old lady and her vagrant spou and making for the nearest landing-place, were so on board The Messenger again, in our old cab and steaming down the Mississippi.

If the coming up this river, slowly making he against the stream, be an irksome journey, t shooting down it with the turbid current is almo worse; for then the boat, proceeding at the rate twelve or fifteen miles an hour, has to force i passage through a labyrinth of floating logs, which

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in the dark, it is often impossible to see beforehand or avoid. All that night, the bell was never silent for five minutes at a time; and after every ring the vessel reeled again, sometimes beneath a single blow, sometimes beneath a dozen dealt in quick succession, the lightest of which seemed more than enough to beat in her frail keel, as though it had been pie-crust. Looking down upon the filthy river after dark, it seemed to be alive with monsters, as these black masses rolled upon the surface, or came starting up again, head first, when the boat, in ploughing her way among a shoal of such obstructions, drove a few among them for the moment under water. Sometimes, the engine stopped during a long interval, and then before her and behind, and gathering close about her on all sides, were so many of these ill-favoured obstacles that she was fairly hemmed in; the centre of a floating island; and was constrained to pause until they parted somewhere, as dark clouds will do before the wind, and opened by degrees a channel out.