“Moonshine, flummery, make-believe, sleepers, rails, stations, all of paper, _that’s_ what I mean, stranger;” rejoined the Major, somewhat impatiently. “But I spoke of a _bona fide_ concern—of a real railway, honestly made and fairly worked,” answered I; “what would you say to that?” “Say!” replied the Major, with infinite contempt, “say! Let me see the gonies. Trot ’em up to me, sir. Just let me have a look at the simple ones that are at the head of the business, and I’ll tell them what I think, fast enough. No, Nauvoo is a rising place, a neat location, but it can wait for a rail one while, unless every sage plant on the prairie turns to silver dollars.” After this I asked the Major no more questions. We reached Nauvoo, and through the dusk I espied the shingled roofs of its houses, the bold bluffs of limestone, the rushing coffee-coloured river, and the unfinished building-lots with their heaps of wreck and rubbish. We put up at the General Jackson Hotel. I had a letter of introduction to Squire Park of Nauvoo, a gentleman in the flatboat interest, who owed his title of Squire to his being in the commission of the peace. But on repairing to his house I was doomed to disappointment—the more vexatious because Mr Park had been eulogised by Judge Tips as a man who knew the West thoroughly. Squire Park was gone to Cairo on business, and was not expected back before the end of the month. On consulting the map I carried, I found that a place called Keosauque was the nearest of the few towns in Iowa to the line of railway, real or imaginary, in connection with which my name, and those of other men of respectability and substance, were flaming, in advertisements and on the broadsheets of a prospectus, throughout the British metropolis. I set off to Keosauque, mounted on an Indian pony, and accompanied by a guide in the shape of a wiry backwoodsman, in an enduring costume of leather, and who gave accommodation to my portmanteau behind his saddle. For some miles we rode in silence over the apparently boundless sea of grass, mottled with weeds and flowers, and occasionally studded with lone farmhouses and maize fields, or by herds of grazing cattle. Those half-reclaimed mustangs are not the most pleasant mount for a timid rider, nor am I, George Bulkeley of Stamford Hill, a very adventurous horseman; and before we had got far, I began to wish the brute I rode would desist from what seemed an alternation of starts and stumbles. My guide, a good-humoured wild man, observed my embarrassment, and undertook its removal.