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Show 1836- 1837] Flagg's Far West 365 my brief tarry savoured mightily of medicine or of something akin. Epsom salts and alum seemed the chief substances in solution; and with these minerals all the water in the region appeared heavily charged. [ 120] It was a misty, miserable morning when I left Mt. Vernon; and as my route lay chiefly through a dense timbered tract, the dank, heavy atmosphere exhaling from the soil, from the luxuriant vegetation, and from the dense foliage of the over- hanging boughs, was anything but agreeable. To endure the pitiless drenching of a summer- shower with equanimity demands but a brief exercise of stoicism: but it is not in the nature of man amiably to withstand the equally pitiless drenching of a drizzling, penetrating, everlasting fog, be it of sea origin or of land. At length a thunder- gust - the usual remedy for these desperate cases in Illinois - dissipated the vapour, and the glorious sunlight streamed far and wide athwart a broad prairie, in the edge of which I stood. The route was, in the language of my director, indeed a blind one; but, having received special instructions thereupon, I hesitated not to press onward over the swelling, pathless plain towards the east. After a few miles, having crossed an arm of the prairie, directions were again sought and received, by which the route became due south, pathless as before, and through a tract of woodland rearing itself from a bog perfectly Serbonian. " Muddy Prairie" indeed. On every side rose the enormous shafts of the cypress, the water- oak, and the maple, flinging from their giant branches that gray, pensile, parasitical moss, which, weaving its long funereal fibres into a dusky mantle, almost entangles in the meshes the thin threads of sunlight struggling down from above. It was here for the first time that I met in any considerable numbers [ 121] with that long- necked, long-legged, long- toed, long- tailed gentry called wild- turkeys: |