“I--I--behold it?” he cried. “Why, there is no one in England whose eyes have looked upon that great river. Had I set out to find it I should have had to travel for a whole year before reaching it--a year, even if the forests had opened their arms to receive me, and the prairie had offered me a path I spoke with an Indian who had seen it, and I spoke with the widows of two men who had gone in search for it. Four years had passed without tidings of those men, and then one of the Iroquois tribe found a tattered hat that had belonged to one of them, on the borders of the backwoods, not a hundred miles from his starting place. Of the other nothing has yet been forthcoming. I tell you, friends, that I was used to let my eyes wander across the plain until they saw that forest, and they never saw it without forcing me to look upon it as a vast, monstrous thing--but a living creature--one of those fabled dragons that were said to lie in wait to devour poor wretches that drew nigh to it. Nay, when I looked upon it I recalled the very striking lines in John Milton's fine epic of 'Paradise Lost': 'With head uplift above the wave, and eyes That sparkling blazed; his other parts besides Prone on the flood, extended long and large, Lay floating many a rood,--” “One must needs be a dweller among the adventurers in America in order to understand in its fulness how terrible a monster those backwoods are thought to be. There it stretched, that awful mass--that monstrous mother of that venomous brood--the huge snakes that lurk in the undergrowth, the fierce lynx, the terrible panther, the wolf and the wildcat. I have heard, too, of a certain dragon and the vampire--a huge bat that fans a poor wretch asleep by the gentle winnowing of its leather wings only to drain his life's blood. These are but a few of the brood of the backwoods. Who can name them all? The poisonous plants that shoot out seeds with the noise of the discharge of a musket, the swamps made up of the decay of a thousand years--breathing fevers and agues--the spectre of starvation lurks there unless you have weapons and the skill to use them--fire--they told me of the prairie fires--a blast of flame five miles broad--sometimes twenty miles broad--rushing along driving before it beasts and birds until they drop in sheer exhaustion and become cinders in a minute--these are some of the terrors that dwell in the backwoods, but worst of all--most fierce--inexorable, is the Red Indian. Tongue of man cannot tell the story of their treachery--their torturings. Our settlers do not fear to face the beasts of the backwoods--the rattlesnakes--the pestilence of the swamps--the most cruel of these is more merciful than the Indian.”