amid stumps, and a guide, equally admirable as marshal and companion,
who knew by heart the country and its history, both natural and
artificial, and whose clear hunter's eye needed neither road nor goal to
guide it to all the spots where beauty best loves to dwell.

Add to this the finest weather, and such country as I had never seen,
even in my dreams, although these dreams had been haunted by wishes for
just such an one, and you may judge whether years of dullness might not,
by these bright days, be redeemed, and a sweetness be shed over all
thoughts of the West.

The first day brought us through woods rich in the moccasin flower and
lupine, and plains whose soft expanse was continually touched with
expression by the slow moving clouds which

"Sweep over with their shadows, and beneath
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye;
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges,"

to the banks of the Fox river, a sweet and graceful stream. We reached
Geneva just in time to escape being drenched by a violent thunder
shower, whose rise and disappearance threw expression into all the
features of the scene.

Geneva reminds me of a New England village, as indeed there, and in the
neighborhood, are many New Englanders of an excellent stamp, generous,
intelligent, discreet, and seeking to win from life its true values.
Such are much wanted, and seem like points of light among the swarms of
settlers, whose aims are sordid, whose habits thoughtless and slovenly.