cacti and sage-brush shrubs. The river-banks are no longer picturesque. The waters wash against brown clay, and the Missouri, literally the "Mud River,” gets muddier and yellower every hour. "Nothing breaks the monotony of the plain. Not a single bit of bright colour, no object of beauty, not a shade even of pleasant verdure, refresh the tired eye. Everywhere is brown mud, grey clay, or white alkali; everything is graceless and depressing. A startled Indian drinking at the river tells us that we are in the country of the Blackfeet and other Indian tribes-Ishmaels, in whose presence no man's cattle are safe, and no man's scalp sacred. We are pass ing through the mauvais terre, the "Bad Land" of the Dakotas, a desert of clay, alkali, and sage-brush, uninhabited and uninhabitable."

6. "Still we follow the river through the Coteau du Prairie, a plateau 1,800 to 2,000 feet in height, on through the Indian's Land. But now pine-trees appear floating on its yellow waters, and as the current swells with the contributions of the Big Cheyenne and a score of lesser streams, we emerge from utter savagedom into semibarbarism. Indians are still the chief people we see on the banks, but they are Indians glossed with civilisation -they are red men in white men's clothes. Among the sand hills that fringe the western banks marauding parties of various Indian tribes may be found warring against each other, but ready at any time to rob the whites. Steamers now soon become numerous, and just before the shallow broad waters of the Platte pours in its sandy yellow tribute, the river sweeps between the rival towns of Omaha and Council Bluffs-the latter once famous in the annals of the West as the rendezvous of trappers and the starting-point of explorers bound for the then mysterious region." Just below the junction of the Kansas River, nearly two hundred miles farther down the river, stands Kansas city, a prominent railroad centre, and a city probably destined to become one of the chief cities of the West. A large trade in "packing" pork and beef is carried on here.

7. The river now wends its way in an almost easterly

direction till it joins the Mississippi, a little above the town of St. Louis, the queen city of the West. But although the rivers meet the waters seem unwilling to mingle. For some miles the clear and placid waters of the Mississippi flow side by side with the muddy-foaming torrent of the Missouri. Of the river as it passes through the huge arches of the St. Louis Bridge, Lord Dunraven writes:- "What a change has taken place! Can this turbid, sullen flood, reeking with the filth of cities, and rushing sulkily through the arches, frothing on its slimy banks, torn and beaten by the paddles of countless steamers, be the same stream that leaped into life in the northern sierras, and, sweet with the odour of the forest, with the dew and damp of meadows, with the curling smoke of wigwams, rushed through its palisade of pine-trees? ?"

8. Below the confluence of the Missouri the river receives the waters of three other great streams—the Ohio on the left bank bringing contributions from half a dozen States, and the Arkansas and Red River on the right bank. From a point thirty miles above the mouth of the Ohio to the delta the river flows through an alluvial plain from thirty to fifty miles wide. In all this distance. the river maintains nearly a uniform width of about 1,000 yards, except in the bends, where it swells out to a mile, or a mile and a half.

9. "The immense curves of the stream in its course through the alluvial plain sweep round in half circles, and the river, sometimes after traversing twenty-five or thirty miles, is brought within a mile or so of the place it had before passed. In heavy floods the waters occasionally bursts through the tongue of land and forms what is called a cut off, which may become a new and permanent channel. Semi-circular lakes, which are deserted river bends, are scattered over the alluvial tract. They are inhabited by alligators, wild fowl, and garfish, which the steamboats have nearly driven away from the main river. At high water the river overflows into these lakes. The low country around is then entirely submerged, and extensive seas spread out on either side, the

river itself being marked by the open broad water in the midst of the forests that appear above it."

10. "Some miles from the mouth of the Red River the Mississippi is divided into numerous arms and passes, each of which pursues an independent course to the gulf. The highest of these streams is the Atchafalaya, on the west side of the river. Below its point of separation from the Mississippi, the region of swampy lands, of bayous and creeks, is known as the delta. This delta covers an area of about 12,000 square miles. portion of the delta is often not over a few inches above the level of the surrounding waters, and in no place more than ten feet. The delta extends far into the Gulf of Mexico, and year by year is increasing, owing to the immense quantity of fine mud brought down by the river.

་

The lower

It

11. "Taking the Missouri as part of it, the Mississippi is the longest river in the world, excepting, perhaps, the Nile. It is literally the Great Water.' drains a region nearly half the size of Europe from its source in Lake Itasca, until it falls by many mouths into the Gulf of Mexico. From the mouth of the Missouri to the sea it is 1,286 miles long, from its head waters to its mouth 2,616 miles, or from the Gulf of Mexico to the sources of the Missouri about 4,400 miles."

LESSON LI.

THE PRAIRIES.

1. The great grassy plains called Prairies-from the French word for a meadow-occupy a vast extent of country lying between Ohio and Michigan on the east, and the arid desert near the Rocky Mountains on the west. The western part of Ohio, the southern part of Michigan, nearly the whole of Indiana, Illinois, and Jowa, the northern part of Missouri, and portions of Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, and Dacota, are prairie regions.

2. The altitude of the prairies above the sea differs. In Wisconsin the elevation is 400 feet above the Mississippi; about the centre of the State of Illinois the average elevation is about 700 feet, whilst the Prairie plateau, which divides the waters of the Mississippi from those of the Missouri is about 1,400, or 1,500 feet above the level of the sea.

3. Though the prairies present a general level to the whole country, the prairies are yet in themselves not always flat. Some of them exhibit a graceful waving surface, swelling and sinking with an easy slope and a full, rounded outline. Hence, in the expressive language of the country, they are spoken of as rolling prairies, the surface being said to resemble the heavy swell of the ocean when its waves are subsiding to rest after the agitation of a storm.

4. The soil is very fertile, and the grass grows high, and when, from any small elevation, the immigrant surveys the scene and sees the grass waving in the wind throughout the whole expanse around him, he may well imagine himself in the midst of an ocean, only that the billows that roll over it are green instead of blue. These plains furnish food for countless thousands of buffaloes, elks, antelopes, and other animals that feed on herbage, the whole mass moving continually to and fro over the vast expanse as the seasons change and the state of the pasturage invites them to new fields.

5. The attraction of the prairie consists in its extent, its carpet of verdure and flowers, its undulating surface, its groves and the fringe of timber by which it is surrounded. Of all these the last is the most expressive feature; it is that which gives character to the landscape, which imparts the shape and marks the boundary of the plain. If the prairie be small, its greatest beauty consists in the vicinity of the surrounding margin of woodland which resembles the shore of a lake indented with deep vistas like bays and inlets, and throwing out long points like capes and headlands, while occasionally these points approach so closely on either hand that the traveller passes through a narrow avenue or strait, where the