flowers in bloom; the alligator, with his
horribly sly face, and his jaws like two great
saws, was basking on the mud; and the strange
moss of the country was hanging in wreaths
and garlands on the trees, like votive offerings.
A little farther towards the west, and the
trees and flowers were changed, the moss was
gone, younger infant towns were rising, forests
were slowly disappearing, and the trees,
obliged to aid in the destruction of their kind,
fed the heavily-breathing monster that came
clanking up those solitudes, laden with the
pioneers of the advancing human army. The
river itself, that moving highway, showed him
every kind of floating contrivance, from the
lumbering flat-bottomed boat, and the raft of
logs, upward to the steamboat, and downward
to the poor Indian's frail canoe. A winding
thread through the enormous range of country,
unrolling itself before the wanderer like the
magic skein in the story, he saw it tracked by
wanderers of every kind, roaming from the
more settled world, to those first nests of men.
The floating theatre, dwelling-house, hotel,
museum, shop; the floating mechanism for
screwing the trunks of mighty trees out of the
mud, like antediluvian teeth; the rapidly-
flowing river, and the blazing woods; he left
them all behind—town, city, and log-cabin,
too; and floated up into the prairies and
savannahs, among the deserted lodges of tribes of
savages, and among their dead, lying alone on
little wooden stages with their stark faces
upward towards the sky. Among the blazing
grass, and herds of buffaloes and wild horses,
and among the wigwams of the fast-declining
Indians, he began to consider how, in the
eternal current of progress setting across
this globe in one unchangeable direction,
like the unseen agency that points the needle
to the pole, the Chiefs who only dance the
dances of their fathers, and will never have a
new figure for a new tune, and the Medicine-
men who know no Medicine but what was
Medicine a hundred years ago, must be surely
and inevitably swept from the earth, whether
they be Choctawas, Mandans, Britons,
Austrians, or Chinese.

He was struck, too, by the reflection that
savage nature was not by any means such a
fine and noble spectacle as some delight to
represent it. He found it a poor, greasy,
paint-plastered, miserable thing enough; but
a very little way above the beasts in most
respects; in many customs a long way below
them. It occurred to him that the 'Big Bird,'
or the 'Blue Fish,' or any of the other Braves,
was but a troublesome braggart after all;
making a mighty whooping and holloaing
about nothing particular, doing very little for
science, not much more than the monkeys for
art, scarcely anything worth mentioning for
letters, and not often making the world greatly
better than he found it. Civilisation, MR.
BOOLEY concluded, was, on the whole, with all
its blemishes, a more imposing sight, and a far
better thing to stand by.

MR. BOOLEY'S observations of the celestial
bodies, on this voyage, were principally
confined to the discovery of the alarming fact,
that light had altogether departed from the
moon; which presented the appearance of a
white dinner-plate. The clouds, too, conducted
themselves in an extraordinary manner, and
assumed the most eccentric forms, while the
sun rose and set in a very reckless way. On
his return to his native country, however, he
had the satisfaction of finding all these things
as usual.

It might have been expected that at his
advanced age, retired from the active duties
of life, blest with a competency, and happy in
the affections of his numerous relations,
MR. BOOLEY would now have settled himself
down, to muse, for the remainder of his days,
over the new stock of experience thus
acquired. But travel had whetted, not satisfied,
his appetite; and remembering that he had
not seen the Ohio river, except at the point of
its junction with the Mississippi, he returned
to the United States, after a short interval of
repose, and appearing suddenly at Cincinnati,
the queen City of the West, traversed the clear
waters of the Ohio to its Falls. In this expedition
he had the pleasure of encountering a
party of intelligent workmen from Birmingham
who were making the same tour. Also
his nephew Septimus, aged only thirteen.
This intrepid boy had started from Peckham,
in the old country, with two and sixpence
sterling in his pocket; and had, when he
encountered his uncle at a point of the Ohio
River, called Snaggy Bar, still one shilling of
that sum remaining!

Again at home, MR. BOOLEY was so pressed
by his appetite for knowledge as to remain at
home only one day. At the expiration of
that short period, he actually started for New
Zealand.

It is almost incredible that a man in MR.
BOOLEY'S station of life, however adventurous
his nature, and however few his artificial
wants, should cast himself on a voyage of
thirteen thousand miles from Great Britain
with no other outfit than his watch and purse,
and no arms but his walking-stick. We are,
however, assured on the best authority, that
thus he made the passage out, and thus
appeared, in the act of wiping his smoking head
with his pocket-handkerchief, at the entrance
to Port Nicholson in Cook's Straits: with the
very spot within his range of vision, where
his illustrious predecessor, Captain Cook, so
unhappily slain at Owyhee, once anchored.

After contemplating the swarms of cattle
maintained on the hills in this neighbourhood,
and always to be found by the stockmen
when they are wanted, though nobody takes
any care of them—which MR. BOOLEY
considered the more remarkable, as their natural
objection to be killed might be supposed to
be augmented by the beauty of the climate—
MR. BOOLEY proceeded to the town of
Wellington. Having minutely examined it in