{120} It was a misty, miserable morning when I left Mt. Vernon; and as my route lay chiefly through a dense timbered tract, the dank, heavy atmosphere exhaling from the soil, from the luxuriant vegetation, and from the dense foliage of the over-hanging boughs, was anything but agreeable. To endure the pitiless drenching of a summer-shower with equanimity demands but a brief exercise of stoicism: but it is not in the nature of man amiably to withstand the equally pitiless _drenching_ of a drizzling, penetrating, everlasting fog, be it of sea origin or of land. At length a thunder-gust--the usual remedy for these desperate cases in Illinois--dissipated the vapour, and the glorious sunlight streamed far and wide athwart a broad prairie, in the edge of which I stood. The route was, in the language of my director, indeed a _blind_ one; but, having received special instructions thereupon, I hesitated not to press onward over the swelling, pathless plain towards the _east_. After a few miles, having crossed an arm of the prairie, directions were again sought and received, by which the route became due _south_, pathless as before, and through a tract of woodland rearing itself from a bog perfectly Serbonian. "Muddy Prairie" indeed. On every side rose the enormous shafts of the cypress, the water-oak, and the maple, flinging from their giant branches that gray, pensile, parasitical moss, which, weaving its long funereal fibres into a dusky mantle, almost entangles in the meshes the thin threads of sunlight struggling down from above. It was here for the first time that I met in any considerable numbers {121} with that long-necked, long-legged, long-toed, long-tailed gentry called wild-turkeys: and, verily, here was a host ample to atone for all former deficiency, parading in ungainly magnificence through the forest upon every side, or peeping curiously down, with outstretched necks and querulous piping, from their lofty perches on the traveller below. It is by a skilful imitation of this same piping, to say nothing of the melodious gobble that always succeeds it, that the sportsman decoys these sentimental bipeds within his reach. The same method is sometimes employed in hunting the deer--an imitated bleating of the fawn when in distress--thus taking away the gentle mother's life through the medium of her most generous impulses; a most diabolical _modus operandi_, reader, permit me to say.