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Show 38 THE CITY OF THE SAINTS. . CHAP. I. nent. When the government of the United States, after the fashion of France and England, begins to raise "Irregular Native Corps," the loss of the Delawares will be regretted. Changing mules at Kiowa about 10 A.M., we pushed forward through the sun, which presently was mitigated by heavy nimbi, to.Liberty.Farm, where a station supplied us with the eternal eggs and bacon of these mangeurs de lard. It is a dish constant in the great West, as the omelet and pigeon in the vetturini days of Italy, when, prompted by the instincts of self-preservation, the inmates of the dove-cot, unless prevented in time, are said to have fled their homes at the sight of Milordo's traveling carriage, not to return until the portent had disappeared. The Little Blue ran hard by, about fifty feet wide by three or four deep, fringed with emerald-green oak groves, cotton-wood, and long-leaved.willow: its waters supply catfish, suckers, and a soft-shelled turtle, but the fish are full of bones, and taste, as might be imagined, much like mud. The country showed vestiges of animal life, the prairie bore signs of hare and antelope; in the valley, coyotes, wolves, and foxes, attracted by the carcasses of cattle, stared us in the face, and near the stream, plovers, jays, the bluebird (sialia), and a kind "of starling, called the swamg or redwinged blackbird, twittered a.song.of satisfaction. We then resumed our journey over a desert,-waterless save after rain, for twenty-three miles; it is the divide between the Little Blue and the Blatte rivers, a broken table- land rising gradually toward the west, with, at this season, a barren soil of sand and clay. As the evening approached, a smile from above lit up into absolute beauty the homely features of the world below. The sweet commune with nature in her fairest hours denied to the sons of cities-who must contemplate her charms through a vista of brick wall, or over a foreground of chimney-pots-consoled us amply for all the little hardships of travel. Strata upon- strata of cloud-banks, burnished to golden red in the vicinity of the setting sun, and polished to dazzling silvery white above, lay piled half way from the horizon to the zenith, with a distinct strike toward a vanishing point in the west, and dipping into a gateway through which the orb of day slowly retired. Overhead floated in a sea of amber and yellow, pink and green, heavy purple nimbi, apparently turned upside down-their convex bulges below, and their horizontal lines high in the air- while in the east black and blue were so curiously blended that the eye could not distinguish whether it rested upon darkening air or upon a lowering thunder-cloud. We enjoyed these beauties in silence; not a soul said, " Look there!" or " How pretty!" At 9 P.M., reaching "Thirty-two-mile Creek," we were pleasantly surprised to find an utter absence of the Irishry. The station- master was the head of a neat-handed and thrifty family from Vermont; the rooms, such as they were, looked cosy and clean-and the chickens and peaches were plump and well " fixed." Sol- |
