_Hunter._ Oh yes, you would. Variety in the works of creation is a gift of our bountiful Creator, for which we are not sufficiently thankful. Look at the changing seasons; how beautifully they vary the same prospect! And the changing clouds of heaven, too; what an infinite and pleasurable variety they afford to us! If the world were all sunshine, we should long for the shade. _Austin._ What do you mean by bluffs? _Hunter._ Round hills, or huge clayey mounds, often covered with grass and flowers to the very top. Sometimes they have a verdant turf on their tops, while their sides display a rich variety of many-coloured earths, and thousands of gypsum crystals imbedded in the clay. The romantic mixture of bluffs, and hills, with summits of green grass as level as the top of a table, with huge fragments of pumice stone and cinders, the remains of burning mountains, and granite sand, and layers of different coloured clay, and cornelian, and agate, and jasper-like pebbles; these, with the various animals that graze or prowl among them, and the rolling river, and a bright blue sky, have afforded me bewildering delight. Some of the hunters and trappers believe that the great valley of the Missouri was once level with the tops of the table hills, and that the earth has been washed away by the river, and other causes; but the subject is involved in much doubt. It has pleased God to put a boundary to the knowledge of man in many things. I think I ought to tell you of Floyd's grave. _Austin._ Where was it? Who was Floyd. _Hunter._ You shall hear. In the celebrated expedition of Clark and Lewis to the Rocky Mountains, they were accompanied by Serjeant Floyd, who died on the way. His body was carried to the top of a high green-carpeted bluff, on the Missouri river, and there buried, and a cedar post was erected to his memory. As I sat on his grave, and looked around me, the stillness and the extreme beauty of the scene much affected me. I had endured much toil, both in hunting and rowing; sometimes being in danger from the grizzly bears, and, at others, with difficulty escaping the war-parties of the Indians. My rifle had been busy, and the swan and the pelican, the antelope and the elk, had supplied me with food; and as I sat on a grave, in that beautiful bluff in the wilderness--the enamelled prairie, the thousand grassy hills that were visible, with their golden heads and long deep shadows, (for the sun was setting,) and the Missouri winding in its serpentine course, the whole scene was of the most beautiful and tranquil kind. The soft whispering of the evening breeze, and the distant, subdued and melancholy howl of the wolf, were the only sounds that reached my ears. It was a very solitary, and yet a very delightful hour. _Basil._ I should not like to be by myself in such a place as that.