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Show THE FAR WEST [ PART I] I " I do remember me, that, in my youth, When I was wandering-" MANIKED. IT was a bright morning in the early days of " leafy June." Many a month had seen me a wanderer from distant New- England; and now I found myself " once more upon the waters," embarked for a pilgrimage over the broad prairie-plains of the sunset West. A drizzly, miserable rain had for some days been hovering, with proverbial pertinacity, over the devoted " City of the Falls," and still, at intervals, came lazily pattering down from the sunlighted clouds, reminding one of a hoiden girl smiling through a shower of April tear- drops, while the quay continued to exhibit all that wild uproar and tumult, " confusion worse confounded," which characterizes the steamboat commerce of the Western Valley. The landing at the time was thronged with steamers, and yet the incessant" boom, boom, boom," of the high- pressure engines, the shrill hiss of scalding steam, and the fitful port- song of the negro firemen rising ever and anon upon the breeze, gave notice of a constant [ 14] augmentation to the number. Some, too, were getting under way, and their lower guards were thronged by emigrants with their household and agricultural utensils. Drays were rattling hither and thither over the rough pavement; Irish porters were cracking their whips and roaring forth alternate staves of blasphemy and song; clerks hurrying to and fro, with fluttering note- books, in all the fancied dignity of " brief authority;" |
