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Show 362 Early Western Travels [ Vol. » 6 airs of the " Missouri Harmony," from whose cheerful pages operations were performed, surely need not be done; therefore, prithee reader, question me not ML Vernon, IU. xxxn " After we are exhausted by a long course of application to business, how delightful are the first moments of indolence and repose! O eke beUa cms di far nietUel- STKWART. " Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn!" Falsiaf. THAT distinguished metaphysician Dugald Stewart, in his treatise upon the " Active and Moral Powers," has, in the language of my motto, somewhere214 observed, that leisure after continued exertion is a source of happiness perfect in its kind; and [ 117] surely, at the moment I am now writing, my own feelings abundantly testify to the force of the remark. For more than one month past have I been urging myself onward from village to village and from hamlet to hamlet, through woodland, and over prairie, river, and rivulet, with almost the celerity of an avant courier, and hardly with closer regard to passing scenes and events. My purpose, reader, for I may as well tell you, has been to accomplish, within a portion of time to some degree limited, a " tour over the prairies " previously laid out This, within the prescribed period, I am now quite certain of fulfilling; and here am I, at length " taking mine ease in mine inn" at the ancient and venerable French village Kaskaskia. It is evening now. The long summer sunset is dying away in beauty from the heavens; and alone in my chamber am I gathering up the fragments of events scattered 94 Philosophy, b. i., chap. x.- FLAGG. |
