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Show 1836- 1837I F/ agg's Far West 321 over it amid the chill, silent, and mysterious solitude of the scene. Emerging from the river- bottom, my pathway lay along a tract of elevated land, among beautiful forest- glades of stately oaks, through whose long dim aisles the yellow beams of summer sunset were now richly streaming. Once more upon the broad prairie, and the fragment of an iris was glittering in the eastern heavens: turning back, my eye caught a view of that singular but splendid phenomenon, seldom witnessed - a heavy, distant rain- shower between the spectator and the departing sun. Nightfall found me at the residence of Mr. D., an intelligent, gentlemanly farmer, with whom I passed an agreeable evening. I was not long in discovering that my host was a candidate for civic honours; and that he, with his friend Mr. L., whose speech I had subsequently the pleasure of perusing, had just returned from Mechanics-burg, 191 a small village in the vicinity, where they had been exerting themselves upon the stump to win the aura popularis for the coming election. " Sic itur ad astral" [ 69] Before sunrise I had crossed the threshold of my hospitable entertainer; and having wound my solitary way, partially by twilight, over a prairie fifteen miles in extent, " Began to feel, as well I might, The keen demands of appetite." Reining up my tired steed at the door of a log cabin in the middle of the plain, the nature and extent of my necessities were soon made known to an aged matron, who had come forth on my approach. " Some victuals you shall get, stran- ger; but you'll just take your creetur to the crib and gin him his feed; bekase, d'ye see, the old man is kind o' drinkin to- day; yester' m Mechanicsburg, fifteen miles east of Springfield, was laid out and platted in November, 2832, by William S. PickrelL- ED. |
