Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Buchanan was not so much the representative of a past age, as the gristled type of unboned nothings. He was unorganized chaos, without any personal will to bring it into useful form, swinging through a blind menstruum of thin party air, lit up only by small fire-flies, that left a deeper darkness behind their quickly quenched and shifting sparks. His Cabinet was of course a bureau with no two drawers alike. Its principal one, Lewis Cass, was of rosewood, well seasoned, beautifully grained and polished. The money-drawer, Mr. Cobb, was of bird’s-eye maple, with eyes enough in it to see all ways. Lower down was one of _lignum vitæ_, hard and tough, John B. Floyd, with a knot-hole in the rear part by which access was had to the drawer above, full of metallic corn shelled off the Treasury cob. Below this was one of soft pine, full of treacherous, punky spots, Jacob Thompson, of and from the Interior. And still lower, Isaac Toucey, brought on from Hartford, Connecticut, looking like a Dismal Swamp cedar, quite unfit for navy purposes, or in fact for aught but the flanges of a dredging-machine, working up stagnant fever-and-ague channels. The cotton-seeds, so widely planted by Douglas, J. Davis, Brooks, Taney, A. H. Stephens, and others, during the preceding four years, now sprouted up in vigorous shoots. A Constitution, hastily shaken together by self-made delegates, mostly from Missouri, riding in foamy haste to Lecompton, was tied with a very black cord and sent to Washington, to be indorsed as a good thing for Kansas. Mr. Douglas struck it with his dike-cleaver; but Mr. J. Davis, J. M. Mason, John Slidell,—booted Knights of the African Order of the Woolly Fleece,—re-tied the severed strings and lifted it through the halls of Congress. [Illustration: A MORMON FAMILY OUT FOR A WALK. (p. 451) ] Meanwhile, the Mormons in Utah, getting up a sort of magic-lantern show of a rebellion,—outlining on the rocky walls of the Salt Lake basin, the shadowy procession of females looking defiantly at United States cannon and canons,—caused a momentary diversion from the new and growing question of a single Union. The next year, 1858, Minnesota, first penetrated by La Salle in 1680, a year before William Penn stood, for the first time, on the future site of Philadelphia, was brought in as a State, giving us St. Paul as a northwestern Cuba for consumptives, Fort Snelling for gamblers in public lands, and the rather low Falls of Minnehaha to be raised by a Long-fellow into a lofty iridescence, whose rainbow strands have been woven into heavenly fabrics in so many delighted households, American, European, and Asiatic. On paper it is poetically higher by many feet, iambic and trochean, than Niagara, or even the Falls of the Yosemite.