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effort he cried aloud, "Come back, my early days! come back!"

And his youth did return; for all this was but a dream which visited his slumbers on New Year's night. He was still young; his faults alone were real. He thanked God fervently that time was still his own; that he had not entered the deep, dark cavern, but that he was free to tread the road leading to the peaceful land, where sunny harvests wave.

Ye who still linger on the threshold of life, doubting which path to choose, remember that, when years have passed and your feet stumble on the dark mountain, you will cry bitterly, but cry in vain: "Oh, youth, return! Oh, give me back my early days!"

ABOU BEN ADHEM.

BY LEIGH HUNT.

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold.

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold
And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou?" The vision raised its head,
And, with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so," Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.'

The angel wrote, and vanished.

The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blessed;

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

BY GEORGE BANCROFT.

In 1673, on the tenth day of June, James Marquette and Louis Joliet, five Frenchmen as companions, and two Algonquins as guides, dragged their two canoes across the narrow portage that divides the Fox River from the Wisconsin. They reached the watershed; uttering a special prayer to the immaculate Virgin, they left the streams that could have borne their greetings to the castle of Quebec. "The guides returned," says the gentle Marquette, "leaving us alone, in this unknown land, in the hands of Providence."

Embarking on the broad Wisconsin, the discoverers went solitarily down its current, between alternate plains and hillsides, beholding neither man nor familiar beasts; no sound broke the silence but the ripple of their canoes and the lowing of the buffalo. In seven days "they entered happily the Great River, with a joy that could not be expressed," and, raising their sails under new skies and to unknown breezes, floated down the calm magnificence of the ocean stream, over the broad, clear sand bars, the resort of innumerable waterfowl, through clusters of

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islets tufted with massive thickets, and between the natural parks of Illinois and Iowa.

About sixty leagues below the Wisconsin the western bank of the Mississippi bore on its sands the trail of men ; a little footpath was discovered leading into beautiful fields; and, leaving the canoes, Joliet and Marquette resolved alone to brave a meeting with the savages. After walking six miles, they beheld a village on the banks of a river, and two others on a slope, at a distance of a mile and a half from the first. The river was the Moingona, of which we have corrupted the name into Des Moines.

Marquette and Joliet, the first white men who trod the soil of Iowa, commending themselves to God, uttered a loud cry. Four old men advanced slowly to meet them, bearing the peace pipe brilliant with many-colored plumes. "We are Illinois," said they, that is, when translated, "We are men"; and they offered the calumet.

An aged chief received them at his cabin with upraised hands, exclaiming: "How beautiful is the sun, Frenchman, when thou comest to visit us! Our whole village awaits thee; thou shalt enter in peace into all our dwellings." And the pilgrims were followed by the devouring gaze of an astonished crowd.

To the council Marquette published the one true God, their Creator. He spoke also of the great captain of the French, the Governor of Canada, who had chastised the Five Nations and commanded peace; and he questioned them respecting the Mississippi and the tribes that possessed its banks. For the messengers, who announced the subjection of the Iroquois, a magnificent festival was prepared of hominy and fish and the choicest viands from the prairies.

NEW MCGUF. FIFTH-11 161

After six days' delay, and invitations to new visits, the chieftain of the tribe, with hundreds of warriors, attended the strangers to their canoes; and, selecting a peace pipe embellished with the head and neck of brilliant birds, and all feathered over with plumage of various hues, they hung round Marquette the sacred calumet—the mysterious arbiter of peace and war, a safeguard among the nations.

The little group proceeded onward. "I did not fear death," says Marquette, in July; "I should have esteemed it the greatest happiness to have died for the glory of God." They passed the perpendicular rocks, which wore the appearance of monsters; they heard at a distance the noise of the waters of the Missouri, known to them by its Algonquin name of Pekitanoni; and, when they came to the grandest confluence of rivers in the world, — where the swifter Missouri rushes like a conqueror into the calmer Mississippi, dragging it, as it were, hastily to the sea, the good Marquette resolved in his heart one day to ascend the mighty river to its source; to cross the ridge that divides the oceans, and, descending a westerly flowing stream, to publish the gospel to all the people of this New World.

In a little less than forty leagues, the canoes floated past the Ohio, which was then, and long afterward, called the Wabash. Its banks were tenanted by numerous villages of the peaceful Shawnees, who quailed under the incursions of the Iroquois.

The thick canes begin to appear so close and strong that the buffaloes could not break through them; the insects become intolerable; as a shelter against the suns of July, the sails are folded into an awning. The prairies vanish; and forests of white wood, admirable for their vastness

and height, crowd even to the skirts of the pebbly shore. It is also observed that, in the land of the Chickasas, the Indians have guns.

Near the latitude of thirty-three degrees, on the western bank of the Mississippi, stood the village of Mitchigamea in a region that had not been visited by Europeans since the days of De Soto. "Now," thought Marquette, "we must, indeed, ask the aid of the Virgin." Armed with bows and arrows, with clubs, axes, and bucklers, amid continual whoops, the natives embarked in boats made out of the trunks of huge hollow trees; but, at the sight of the mysterious peace pipe held aloft, they threw down their bows and quivers and prepared a hospitable wel

come.

The next day a long wooden canoe, containing ten men, escorted the discoverers, for eight or ten leagues, to the village of Akansea, the limit of their voyage. They had left the region of the Algonquins, and, in the midst of the Dakotas and Chickasas, could speak only by an interpreter. A half league above Akansea, they were met by two boats, in one of which stood the commander, holding in his hand the peace pipe, and singing as he drew near. After offering the pipe, he gave bread of maize. The wealth of his tribe consisted in buffalo skins; their weapons were axes of steel a proof of commerce with Europeans.

Having descended below the entrance of the Arkansas, and having become certain that the father of rivers went not to the Gulf of California, but was undoubtedly the river of the Spiritu Santo of the Spaniards, which pours its flood of waters into the Gulf of Mexico, on the seventeenth of July Marquette and Joliet left Akansea and

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