her hands covered with dough, calling the others, and they caught him
bodily before he had time to escape.

Here (at Kishwaukie) we received a visit from a ragged and barefoot, but
bright-eyed gentleman, who seemed to be the intellectual loafer, the
walking Will's coffeehouse of the place. He told us many charming snake
stories; among others, of himself having seen seventeen young ones
reenter the mother snake, on the intrusion of a visiter.

This night we reached Belvidere, a flourishing town in Boon county,
where was the tomb, now despoiled, of Big Thunder. In this later day we
felt happy to find a really good hotel.

From this place, by two days of very leisurely and devious journeying,
we reached Chicago, and thus ended a journey, which one at least of the
party might have wished unending.

I have not been particularly anxious to give the geography of the
scene, inasmuch as it seemed to me no route, nor series of stations, but
a garden interspersed with cottages, groves and flowery lawns, through
which a stately river ran. I had no guide-book, kept no diary, do not
know how many miles we travelled each day, nor how many in all. What I
got from the journey was the poetic impression of the country at large;
it is all I have aimed to communicate.

The narrative might have been made much more interesting, as life was at
the time, by many piquant anecdotes and tales drawn from private life.
But here courtesy restrains the pen, for I know those who received the
stranger with such frank kindness would feel ill requited by its
becoming the means of fixing many spy-glasses, even though the scrutiny