town, it is only ten years old, and nevertheless numbers 10,000 inhabitants. The tide of emigration for the last few years, has spread with great rapidity over the fertile lands of the Upper Mississippi. St. Paul's has already 9,000 inhabitants, eight churches, several hotels, three printing-presses, schools, and a capitol. La Crosse, in spite of its shops fronting on the river, its stores, and its elevator, whose bulk overtops the railway station, still wears a look of poverty and neglect. Cows wander at will over the sands, where quadrangular streets are already marked out. Civilisation seems a long way off. In the bar-room of the hotel, round the reddened iron stove, sit silent and almost ferocious-looking groups. We can look at these faces of adventurers, so common all through the valley of the Mississippi; the beards are rough and uncared for, the clothing coarse, the felt hats pulled down over gloomy eyes that seem to follow some sinister shape in the empty space. At La Crosse I saw real Indians for the first time. Four men, wrapped in long red blankets, a woman enveloped in a grey cloak, and a half-naked child, were gathered round a great wood fire on the river's edge. The men were bareheaded; their thick black hair, that looked like a bunch of tangled horsehair, floated in the wind, and almost covered their gloomy faces. Near them, rudders and oars were strewed on the ground; from time to time they threw sticks of wood on the fire, and the chilly group was in a blacker cloud of smoke. At some little distance the steam-boats showed their white upper storeys above the level of the river. I had before me at the same

time the old masters of the Mississippi and its present possessors. The smoke of the fire lit by the Indians rose side by side into the sky with that puffed out by those powerful engines that to-day transport the traveller from the mouth of the Mississippi to the borders of Lake Superior. Was not the whole history of America in this picture?

CHAPTER IX.

A BORDER STATE--THE INVASION OF MISSOURI

SAINT LOUIS.

AFTER crossing the Northern States, and those of the West and Atlantic, I turned my steps towards one of those frontier States where civil discords have left their deepest traces. The time will come when this denomination of Border-State, still frequently employed in America, will cease to have any signification. Slavery alone had traced, in the very heart of the vast territory of the Union, an imaginary border line; the war has already half effaced it, and the reconstruction of the re-entering States will finally cause it to disappear entirely. The boundaries of the American republic will soon only be Canada in the North and Mexico in the South. But at the time I visited the United States the word Border-State had kept all its old signification, and civil war made it all the more apparent and sinister.

The Border-State which I proposed visiting was Missouri. I returned from La Crosse to Chicago by Milwaukee, a beautiful city, whose prosperity is fully equal to that of Chicago. I crossed over all the fertile plains of Illinois, and stopped at Quincy on the Missis

sippi. My intentions were to embark there, and to proceed to St. Louis by the river. I arrived at Quincy in the night, and repaired at once to the only hotel of the town. All through the day, in the train, I had heard people round me constantly speaking of the invasion of Missouri, where the rebels were committing great excesses. As is always the case on such occasions, a thousand rumours were rife, and the alarm had spread even as far as Quincy. On reaching the hotel I learned that during the evening the gas, both in the town and at the railway station, had been suddenly extinguished by an unknown hand. The porter of the hotel had been patrolling the streets in common with the other inhabitants, but, judging from his pallid looks, it did not seem to me, in case the rebels should cross the river and attack the town, that much confidence could be placed in this defender. The public room, in the midst of which stood a red-hot stove, was filled with groups of rough-bearded, long-haired men. Almost all were reading newspapers. Certain faces among them had an almost savage expression. I still see enter a poor lame soldier leaning on his cane, and attenuated by fever. An officer, with his large beaver hat, with its band and gold tassel, on his head, sits down at the nearest table and examines with much solemnity the letters which the train has just brought him. The landlord comes to tell me that I cannot have any supper, because it is after eleven o'clock; he seems astonished that I insist, being very hungry, on having at least a piece of bread. American travellers, in such cases, have a sort of resignation and passive indifference which always astonishes me in a

people so headstrong, and so opposed to all trammels. Both men and women accept without a word the small miseries of travelling with a fatalism mingled with contempt. Railroad companies have singularly tried this patience. I have scarcely ever been in a train

which arrived at its destination at the hour indicated; but there never appear in the newspapers in the United States those complaints that the English are constantly addressing to their papers. An annoyance once over, the American hastens to forget it. Owing to her position upon the limits of the free and slave States, and to the junction of the two great rivers of the American continent, Missouri became necessarily one of the battle-fields of the war-far from the centre, and from those provinces where the greatest efforts of the combatants were expended, but also for that very reason condemned to be the theatre of most frightful scenes, where the most savage and violent passions, unchecked by honour and military discipline, had free course. At the time of the first difficulties, the largest part of the Missourians were at no pains to conceal their sympathies for the rebels. The partisans of the Union scarcely numbered one-third in a State which was bound by all the ties of political traditions, and above all, by the institution of slavery, to the new confederation. After the first election of Mr. Lincoln, it was an even chance whether St. Louis, and with this city the whole State of Missouri, were not lost to the cause of the North. Already the partisans had armed themselves, formed a camp at the gates of St. Louis, and were preparing to suddenly promulgate their ordinance of secession.' A few

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