American Nation. And what a hackneyed story it is! How many other young
men from the East have travelled across the mountains and floated down
the rivers to enter those strange cities of the West, the growth of which
was like Jonah's gourd.

Two centuries before, when Charles Stuart walked out of a window in
Whitehall Palace to die; when the great English race was in the throes of
a Civil War; when the Stern and the Gay slew each other at Naseby and
Marston Moor, two currents flowed across the Atlantic to the New World.
Then the Stern men found the stern climate, and the Gay found the smiling
climate.

After many years the streams began to move again, westward, ever
westward. Over the ever blue mountains from the wonderland of Virginia
into the greater wonderland of Kentucky. And through the marvels of the
Inland Seas, and by white conestogas threading flat forests and floating
over wide prairies, until the two tides met in a maelstrom as fierce as
any in the great tawny torrent of the strange Father of Waters. A city
founded by Pierre Laclede, a certain adventurous subject of Louis who
dealt in furs, and who knew not Marly or Versailles, was to be the place
of the mingling of the tides. After cycles of separation, Puritan and
Cavalier united on this clay-bank in the Louisiana Purchase, and swept
westward together--like the struggle of two great rivers when they meet
the waters for a while were dangerous.

So Eliphalet was established, among the Puritans, at Miss Crane's. The
dishes were to his taste. Brown bread and beans and pies were plentiful,
for it was a land of plenty. All kinds of Puritans were there, and they
attended Mr. Davitt's Congregational Church. And may it be added in
justice to Mr. Hopper, that he became not the least devout of the