We may learn from the wide experience of the Chinese that there is no safety for us in merely building higher the walls to restrain the Mississippi. The nation must take hold of the matter with a strong hand. Possibly forty or fifty millions will be necessary to construct the works which will moderate the flow and distribute its waters to those who need it in their irrigating ditches. Even though it cost thrice the sum paid to Spain in settlement of the Philippine question, the people would more gladly give it. Nothing short of a great ship canal along the bed of the Mississippi will satisfy Americans. There is but one objection to the work, and that is its great expense. But we have recently seen that the cost of one great inundation along the Brazos was far more than the figures here named, and no account need be made of the loss of life and the suffering that followed that great disaster. Our great river must be controlled. Not in the Chinese fashion, which we know to be merely the storing of wrath against the day of wrath, but it must be done intelligently and with patience, with faith in ourselves and a determination to prevent the great loss of life which will be imminent every time there happens to be the coming of a flood from the eastern mountains and another from the western at the same time. Our great water way, when properly controlled and protected by permanent revetments and masonry, will furnish the farmers of the great plains a natural outlet to the sea for all their produce. This will be monopolized by no railway trust; no combination of steam-boat men will put the farmer into the hands of corporations seeking to rob him of the best part of his crop on the way to market, for there will be docks along every man's water front, and the rudest flatboat will always rely upon the favoring current to bear its cargo to the sides of independent vessels plying the seas to the uttermost parts of the earth. INDIAN SUMMER. Withal there comes a time when summers wane, When from the sunshine something seems withdrawn, And pensive shadows lengthen on the lawn; White bindweed wanders lonely in the lane, The one sweet thing that now unwithered doth remain. But there is beauty in autumnal bough No less than in dear April's dewy leaves, When with its store of golden-girdled sheaves Piled stands the wain where one time passed the plow, And ripened labor reaps fulfillment of its vow. Then, though no more the oblivious cuckoo calls From land to land, nor longer on the spray Of yellowing elm the throstle vaunts his lay, The ringdove's mate, as fades the leaf and falls, Reiterates its note of love that never palls. Though fluttereth still the soul-like lark aloft, There is a quiet in the woodland ways, The retrospective hush of vanished days, And around garden close and orchard croft A something in the air celestially soft.