Thus, toward evening, I reached the pleasant town which was to be my resting-place for the night. By some strange perversion of ignorance, or freak of vanity, it is nicknamed Juliet, instead of _Joliet_, from the old pioneer of that name, who established his quarters here in olden time on a mount, which, fortunately, has escaped being travestied into Juliet, and still preserves his name. This mount is one of the most remarkable, as well as beautiful objects in nature. It rises directly from the prairie to the height, I should judge, of more than an hundred feet; is clothed with a rich velvet coat of grass on all sides, as well as at the summit; is entirely distinct from any other eminence; comprises an area of six or eight acres, and is as regular and perfect in construction, form, and outline, as any work of art I ever saw. It has been generally taken by travelers for a creation of those mysterious mound-builders, whose name and history have passed into oblivion, and who have left no memorials of their existence but such as render it only more inexplicable. It is, however, as I ascertained, a production of the cunning hand of Nature, who sometimes, it would seem, amuses herself by showing how much she can excel her illegitimate sister, Art, even in her most successful attempts at imitation. The canal connecting the Illinois with the lakes, runs directly at the foot of this mount, which with something like Gothic barbarity has been deeply excavated on one side, in order to form the outward bank. This process has disclosed a succession of different strata of earth, clay, and gravel, all regularly defined, and evidently not the work of man, but of the world of craters, which beyond doubt covered all the surrounding country, long posterior to the subsiding of the great deluge.