I was speaking some time ago of a painting I once saw, in illustration of the death of Eve, which represented her as on a journey in her haggard old age, accompanied by Cain (whose son built the first city in a wilderness), and as pausing in the journey on a height of ground, pointing toward a little cluster of trees in the distance, and saying to her son: "There was Paradise." But paradise is not to be realized by the masses of men in the return of man to the forests. The healing trees and the river are to be carried to the city. CHAPTER XII WESTERN TOWNS AND CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH PORTAGE PATHS The old French portage paths were also fruitful of cities on the edge of the Mississippi Valley, though the growth of these short paths was not-- with one notable exception--as luxuriant as that from the earth enriched of human blood and bones about the old French forts. These portages, or carrying paths, which differ from the trails of the wood runners in that they are but short interruptions of the water paths and were not designed or laid out, as a rule, by the wild engineers of the forests and prairies but by human feet, lie across the great highway along which, before the days of canals, one might have walked dry-shod from the Atlantic to the Pacific--between the basins of the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, the Pacific and the Arctic --a highway which has, however, been trodden by no one probably through its entire length, for in places it runs over inaccessible peaks of mountains and winds around the narrowest of ledges. But the paths across it--those connecting the streams that flow in opposite directions from the continental watersheds--are like isthmian paths between great oceans-- great dry oceans with watercourses through them. There were, to be sure, still other portage paths than those across watersheds, and the most common were those that led around waterfalls or impassable rapids, such as Champlain and the Jesuits followed on their journeys up the Ottawa to the Nipissing. It was of such portages that Father Brébeuf wrote--portage paths passing almost continually by torrents, by precipices, and by places that were horrible in every way. In less than five days they made more than thirty-five portages, some of which were three leagues long. This means that on these occasions the traveller had to carry on his shoulders his canoe and all his baggage, with so little food that he was continually hungry and almost without strength and vigor. [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 8:75-77.] Another priest tells of a portage occupying an entire day, during which he climbed mountains and pierced forests and carried, the while, his chapel and his little store of provisions.