Down the river went they
In and out among its islands,
Sailed through all its bends and windings,
Sailed through all its deeps and shallows.
Hiawatha.

The morning came bright and warm as ever.

At the boat Norman was delighted to see his friend, the pilot of the Grey Eagle, who introduced them to Captain Gray, of the Kate Cassel. There he saw too the lady who brought with her memories of the early dawn at St. Anthony. “You like to see everything that is to be seen,” she said to Mrs. Lester; “under that bare spot you see on the bluff south of the town is the grave of Dubuque, the Indian chief who once owned all this land.”

“Mother,” said Norman, as their kindly 139informant left them, “Dubuque is a very strange name for an Indian chief to have; he must have been named by the French when he was a child.”

“Julien Dubuque,” replied his mother, “was not an Indian, but a Frenchman, who bought all this valuable mining region, so rich in fine lead ore, from the Indians, in 1788. They had been discovered two years before by the wife of Peosta, an Indian warrior. Dubuque died in 1810. The Julien House is named, I suppose, in his honor.”

For a hot and weary hour the deck hands were busy taking on freight: first barrels from a warehouse on the Levee at Dubuque; then at Dunleith, a number of reapers and mowers, very heavy and cumbersome to be moved.

As soon as the boat was in motion Captain Gray asked Mrs. Lester if she would go to the pilot-house, as that was the coolest part of the boat. Very kindly 140he escorted her thither across the hurricane-deck. It was a delightful change from the heated atmosphere below to the cool refreshing breezes above.

“Two eagles at once,” said the captain. “There is something for you to look at, my boy.”

There was the Grey Eagle, her paddles both in motion, and the War Eagle following her in her northward course; a great sight for Norman.

The banks are well wooded, and of some elevation, and there are pretty islands; but the scenery is more monotonous and not so grand as that of the Upper Mississippi. The river is much more shallow, and can be navigated only by a smaller class of steamboats.

The captain pointed out to them, on the banks of the river, the entrance to a lead mine, and a hill-top called Pilot Knob.

At two o’clock they approached Fulton, 141and the captain courteously took them on shore.

Fulton, the terminus of an air-line road from Chicago, is rather an uninviting looking place, with a grand hotel, suitable for a great city; a destiny Fulton does not seem likely to achieve.

Seated in the cars, Norman saw the sun set for the last time on the great river that had become to him a familiar friend; saw the Rock River gleam in the moonlight; and soon after the welcome lights of his uncle’s home.

Norman had a great deal to tell his uncle and aunt about the Mississippi, and Minnehaha, and the boats, and the little incidents of their journey, and the week he was to spend at Dixon passed rapidly away.

One day Norman’s aunt took Mrs. Lester to see Father Dixon, the patriarch of the place to which his name is given. The hotel also bears the name given to 142him by the Indians, Nachusah, or the White Haired. His long flowing white hair makes him look very venerable; and there is an expression of gentleness in his delicate features that wins the love of the children of the town, who all call him Grandpapa. He established a ferry over the Rock River thirty years ago, when there were no white people in all the country round, and lived here in his solitary dwelling by the river side.

He lives there still; and Mrs. Lester was very much interested in her visit to him, and in his accounts of the Indians who formerly roamed over these prairies, now the fruitful farms of the white men.

One day a gentleman, who lived on the opposite side of the river, sent his two carriages over for Norman’s uncle and aunt, his mother and himself. As Norman was in the woods with Herbert Waldorf, they went without him. The bridge had been 143carried away by the flood, so they crossed by the rope ferry. A very stout wire rope was stretched across the river, and a scow was fastened to this by a rope which slipped by a wheel along the iron cable. When they drove on the scow, the man turned the prow of the boat up the current, which at once urged the boat onward. It is a very pleasant and rapid way of crossing the river, allowing one to have a near look of the swiftly flowing waters.

Mr. Dexter had a pretty cottage and fifty acres of prairie land just on the edge of the town. Mrs. Lester went up stairs to see the extensive view of prairie from Ernest Dexter’s window, and then she looked at a cabinet of fossils, most of which he had collected himself in Illinois. There were some very fine specimens, and he was kind enough to give Mrs. Lester a number of them.

The music of the piano called forth the 144rival notes of the mocking bird, and, accompanied by several canaries, he made the air vocal with sweet sounds. Mrs. Lester forg............