[Illustration: THE URNS, MANITOU PARK.] Our camera car had served our purposes in a most gratifying manner while making the long tour of the West, but in the eastern tour, which remained to be performed, it was considered that the car would be of no special advantage, since accommodations are so much more easily obtained in the built-up sections of the East than in the thinly and sometimes totally unsettled districts of the West, where in many cases our car was our only shelter. The journey east was begun in October, from St. Louis to Chicago, thence to Niagara Falls, and then up the St. Lawrence. Our route next lay through the Green and White Mountains, and other famous sections of the New England States; thence west into the Adirondacks, Mohawk Valley and Lakes George and Champlain, then down the picturesque Hudson into the Catskills. Continuing our journey southward, we visited the points of grandest scenery in Virginia, North Carolina, and Eastern Tennessee, and then proceeded on to Florida, where a part of the winter was spent photographing everything worthy of a place in this volume. On the return trip Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and Wyandotte Cave, in Indiana, received our attention, as well as other interesting places along the way, and early in February our labors were ended by a return to St. Louis to put the results in book form. Nearly all the descriptive writing was done while our party was on the way, and while the impressions produced by the glorious visions were fresh in the author’s mind. This work, accordingly, is practically one of inspiration, the whole constituting a story of extraordinary interest and a history of incomparable value. [Illustration: ON THE OCKLAWAHA RIVER, FLORIDA.] Illustrations, however fine, whether of wood or steel, represent the artist’s conceptions, dashed with an individual coloring that prevents a natural reproduction. The painter sketches his landscape from a special point of view, and working many days blends the sunrise with midday and sunset, the mists of morning with the clouds of noon, thus striving to please the eye rather than to truthfully present nature, without artificial adornments.