WE took passage in one of the fast boats of the St. Louis and St. PaulPacket Company, and started up the river.

When I, as a boy, first saw the mouth of the Missouri River, it was twenty-twoor twenty-three miles above St. Louis, according to the estimate of pilots;the wear and tear of the banks have moved it down eight miles since then;and the pilots say that within five years the river will cut through andmove the mouth down five miles more, which will bring it within ten milesof St. Louis.

About nightfall we passed the large and flourishing townof Alton, Illinois; and before daylight next morning the townof Louisiana, Missouri, a sleepy village in my day, but a briskrailway center now; however, all the towns out there arerailway centers now. I could not clearly recognize the place.

This seemed odd to me, for when I retired from the rebel armyin '61 I retired upon Louisiana in good order; at least in goodenough order for a person who had not yet learned how to retreataccording to the rules of war, and had to trust to native genius.

It seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat it wasnot badly done. I had done no advancing in all that campaignthat was at all equal to it.

There was a railway bridge across the river here well sprinkledwith glowing lights, and a very beautiful sight it was.

At seven in the morning we reached Hannibal, Missouri, where my boyhoodwas spent. I had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpsesix years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted.

The only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memoryof it as I had known it when I first quitted it twenty-nine years ago.

That picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph.

I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of adead-and-gone generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of whatthe Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come outand look upon Paris after years of captivity, and note how curiouslythe familiar and the strange were mixed together before them.

I saw the new houses--saw them plainly enough--but they did notaffect the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricksand mortar I saw the vanished houses, which had formerly stood there,with perfect distinctness.

It was Sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet. So I passedthrough the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was,and not as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically shakinghands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist;and finally climbed Holiday's Hill to get a comprehensive view.

The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fixevery locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good deal moved.

I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of mychildhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.'

The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again--convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply beendreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that;for they forced me to say, 'I see fifty old houses down yonder,into each of which I could enter and find either a man or a womanwho was a baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last, or agrandmother who was a plump young bride at that time.'

From this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river,and wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful--one of the most beautiful on the Mississippi, I think; which isa hazardous remark to make, for the eight hundred miles of riverbetween St. Louis and St. Paul afford an unbroken successionof lovely pictures. It may be that my affection for the one inquestion biases my judgment in its favor; I cannot say as to that.

No matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and it had thisadvantage over all the other friends whom I was about to greet again:

it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and graciousas ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be old,and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefsand defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit.

An old gentleman, out on an early morning walk, came along, and wediscussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters. I could notremember his face. He said he had been living here twenty-eight years.

So he had come after my time, and I had never seen him before.

I asked him various questions; first about a mate of mine in Sunday school--what became of him?

'He graduated with honor in an Eastern college, wandered off intothe world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledgeand memory years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs.'

'He was bright, and prom............