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Show 1836- 1837l Flagg's Far West 329 oryl and to lay his bones in the [ 78] quiet graveyard of his own native village, perchance may draw forth many a sorrowing sigh. But this now may never be; yet it will be consoling to the pilgrim- heart to realize that, though the resurrection morn shall find his relics far from the graves of his fathers, he shall yet sleep the long slumber, and at last come forth with those who were kind and near to him in a stranger- land; who laid away his cold clay in no " Potter's Field," but gathered it to their own household sepulchre. The human mind, whatever its philosophy, can never utterly divest itself of the idea that the spirit retains a consciousness of the lifeless body, sympathizing with its honour or neglect, and affected by all that variety of circumstance which may attend its existence: and who shall say how far this belief - superstition though it be - may smooth or trouble the dying pillow! How soothing, too, the reflection to the sorrow of distant friends, that their departed one peacefully and decently was gathered to his rest; that his dust is sleeping quietly in some sweet, lonely spot beneath the dark groves of the far- land; that his turf is often dewed by the teardrop of sympathy, and around his lowly headstone waves the wild- grass ever green and freel The son, the brother, the loved wanderer from his father's home, " Is in his gravel After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well." The route leading to Decatur from the west lies chiefly through a broad branch of the " Grand Prairie," an immense plain, sweeping diagonally, with [ 79] little interruption, through the whole State of Illinois, from the Mississippi to the Wabash. For the first time, in any considerable number, I here met with those singular granite masses, termed familiarly by the settlers " lost rocks; in geology, boulders. They are usually of a mammillated, |