see thee taking up the scrip and the staff and setting forth for
the wildernesses of the Mississippi, of Arkansas, and Texas, far
beyond;--bringing the wild man of the frontier, and the red savage,
into the blessed fold and constant company of the Lord Jesus, to
whom all praise!"

"It were indeed a glorious service," responded the young stranger--whom
we shall proceed, hereafter, to designate by the name by which he
has called himself. He spoke musingly, and with a gravity that was
singularly inflexible--"it were indeed a glorious service. Let me
see, there were thousands of miles to traverse before one might reach
the lower Arkansas; and I reckon, Mr. Cross, the roads are mighty
bad after you pass the Mississippi--nay, even in the Mississippi,
through a part of which territory I have gone only this last summer,
there is a sad want of causeways, and the bridges are exceedingly
out of repair. There is one section of near a hundred miles,
which lies between the bluffs of Ashibiloxi, and the far creek of
Catahoula, that was a shame and reproach to the country and the
people thereof. What, then, must be the condition of the Texas
territory, beyond? and, if I err not, the Cumanchees are a race
rather given to destroy than to build up. The chance is that the
traveller in their country might have to swim his horse over most
of the watercourses, and where he found a bridge, it were perhaps
a perilous risk to cross it. Even then he might ride fifty miles
a day, before he should see the smokes which would be a sign of
supper that night."

"The greater the glory--the greater the glory, Alfred Stevens. The
toil and the peril, the pain and the privation, in a, good cause,
increase the merit of the performance in the eyes of the Lord.