In the first place, you must know, my dear children, that this beautiful land of ours, where now dwell the freest and happiest people the blessed sun ever shone upon, was, only a few hundred years ago, all a vast unbroken wilderness; a place where no one but savage Indians found a home, whose chief amusement was to fight and kill and scalp each other; and whose chief occupation was to hunt wild beasts and birds, upon whose flesh they fed, and with whose hairy skins and horns and claws and feathers they clothed and decked themselves. Where in the leafy summer-time may now be heard the merry plough-boy whistling "Yankee Doodle" over the waving corn, the wild Indian once wrestled with the surly bear, or met his ancient enemy in deadly fight. Nibbling sheep and grazing cattle now range the grassy hills and valleys where he was wont to give chase to the timid deer, or lie in wait for the monstrous buffalo. Huge steamers ply up and down our mighty rivers where he once paddled his little canoe. Splendid cities have risen, as if at the rubbing of Aladdin's enchanted lamp, where in the depths of the forest he once kindled the great council-fire, and met the neighboring tribes in the Big Talk. The very schoolhouse, where you little folks are now tripping so lightly along the flowery path of knowledge, may perhaps stand on the selfsame shady slope, where, of a long summer evening, he would sit at the door of his bark-built wigwam, smoking his long pipe, and watching his naked red children with a more fatherly smile than you can well imagine in one so fierce, as with many a hoop and yelp they played at "hide-and-seek" among the gray old trees and pawpaw thickets. On yonder hill-top, where we at this moment can see the windows of the house of God shining and glancing in the moonlight, he may have stood, with his face to the rising or setting sun, in mute worship before the Great Spirit. But the stronger and wiser white man came; and, at his terrible approach, the red man, with all his wild remembrances, passed away, like an echo in the woods, or the shadow of an April cloud over the hills and valleys; and the place that once knew him shall know him no more for ever. And yet it might have been far otherwise with him and with us, had not a certain Christopher Columbus chanced to light upon this Western World of ours, as he came hap-hazard across the wide Atlantic, where ship had never sailed before, in quest of a shorter passage to Asia. By this great discovery, it was proved to the entire satisfaction of all who are in the least interested in the matter, that this earth upon which we live, instead of being long and flat, with sides and ends and corners like a great rough slab, was round, and hollow inside, like an India-rubber ball, and went rolling through empty space, round and round the sun, year after year, continually.