road, is situated a considerable settlement, composed chiefly of gentlemen from the city of Baltimore.[172] The country is exceedingly beautiful, healthy, and fertile; the farms are under high cultivation, and the tone of society is distinguished for its refinement and intelligence. The citizens of St. Charles are many of them Catholics; and a male and female seminary under their patronage are in successful operation, to say nothing of a nunnery, beneath the shade of which such institutions invariably repose. "St. Charles College," a Protestant institute of two or three years' standing, is well supported, having four professors {21} and about a hundred students.[173] Its principal building is a large and elegant structure of brick, and the seminary will doubtless, ere long, become an ornament to the place. At no distant day it may assume the character and standing of its elder brothers east of the Alleghanies; and the muse that ever delights to revel in college-hall may strike her lyre even upon the banks of the far-winding, wilderness Missouri. Among the heterogeneous population of St. Charles are still numbered a few of those wild, daring spirits, whose lives and exploits are so intimately identified with the early history of the country, and most of whose days are now passed beyond the border, upon the broad buffalo-plains at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Most of them are trappers, hunters, _couriers du bois_, traders to the distant post of Santa Fé, or _engagés_ of the American Fur Company. Into the company of one of these remarkable men it was my fortune to fall during my visit at St. Charles; and not a little to my interest and edification did he recount many of his "hairbreadth 'scapes," his "most disastrous chances," "His moving accidents by flood and field." All of this, not to mention sundry sage items on the most approved method of capturing _deer_, _bar_, _buffalo_, and _painters_, I must be permitted to waive. I am no tale-teller, "but your mere traveller, believe me," as Ben Jonson has it. The proper home of the buffalo seems now to be the vast {22} plains south and west of the Missouri border, called the Platte country, compared with which the prairies east of the Mississippi are mere meadows in miniature. The latter region was, doubtless, once a favourite resort of the animal, and the banks of the "beautiful river" were long his grazing-grounds; but the onward march of civilization has driven him, with the Indian, nearer the setting sun. Upon the plains they now inhabit they rove in herds of thousands; they regularly migrate with change of season, and, in crossing rivers, many are squeezed to death. Dead bodies are sometimes found floating upon the Missouri far down its course.