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Show 254 Early Western Travels [ Vol. 26 miles in extent. It was a sultry afternoon when I was leisurely travelling along this road; and the shadowy coolness of the atmosphere, the perfume of wild flowers and aromatic herbs beneath the underbrush, and the profusion of summer fruit along the roadside, was indescribably delightful. Near sunset, a graceful bend of the road around a dump of trees placed before me the pretty little village of Belleville; its neat enclosures and white cottages peeping through the shrubbery, now gilded by the mellow rays of sunset in every leaf and spray. 1" Whether it was owing to this agreeable coincidence, or to the agreeable visit I here enjoyed, that I conceived such an attachment for the place, I cannot say; but sure it is, I fell in love with the little town at first sight; and, what is more marvellous, was not, according to all precedent, cured at second, when on the following morning I sallied forth to reconnoitre its beauties " at mine own good leisure/ 9 Now it is to be presumed that, agreeable to the taste of six travellers in a dozen, I have passed through many a village in Illinois quite as attractive as this same Belleville: but to convince me of the fact would be no [ 240] easy task. " Man is the sport of circumstance, 91 says the fatalist; and however this may be in the moral world, if any one feels disposed to doubt upon the matter in the item before us, let him disembark from a canal- boat at Pittsburgh on a rainy, misty, miserable morning; and then, unable to secure for his houseless head a shelter from the pitiless peltings, let him hurry away through the filthy streets, deluged with inky water, to a crowded Ohio steamer; and if " circumstances" do not force him to dislike Pittsburgh ever after, then his human "* In March, 1814, a commission appointed by the state legislature the preceding year, selected the site of Belleville for the seat of St. Clair County. George Blair* whose farm was chosen as the site, platted and named the county seat. The town was incorporated in 1819. See History of St. Clair County, Illinois ( 1881), pp. 183,185.- ED. |