Shakespeare's play of "As You Like It" is an eulogy of the flight from the highly formal life of city life to the simplicity of the forest and the retirement of the plains. Even in the banished Duke, there is a strain of oddity and quaintness. Not many years after the middle of last century, a Detroit lawyer fled from the troubles of society and city life to the peaceful plains of secluded Assiniboia. Marrying, after his arrival, a daughter of one of our best native families, and on her death, a pure Indian woman, he reared a large family. The poetic spirit of Frank Larned was never repressed, and we give, with some changes, to suit our purpose, and at times some divergence from the views expressed, scenes of the Red River Settlement, in which he, for more than a generation, dwelt. BRITAIN'S ONE UTOPIA--SELKIRKIA. That brave old Englishman, Thomas More--afterwards, unhappily for his head--Lord High Chancellor of England--wrote out, in fair Latin,--in his chambers in the City of London, over three centuries ago--his idea of an Utopia. This, modest as are its requirements, has yet found no practical illustration, even among the many seats of the great colonizing race of mankind. The primitive history of all the colonies that faced the Atlantic--when the new-found continent first felt the abiding foot of the stranger--from Oglethorpe to Acadia, reveals, alas! no Utopia. It remained for a later time,--the earlier half of the present century, amid some severity of climate, and under conditions without precedent, and incapable of repetition,--to evolve a community in the heart of the continent, shut away from intercourse with civilized mankind--that slowly crystalized into a form beyond the ideal of the dreamers--a community, in the past, known but slightly to the outer world as the Red River Settlement, which is but the bygone name for the one Utopia of Britain--the clear-cut impress of an exceptional people living under conditions of excellence unthought of by themselves until they had passed away. THE UTOPIAN COLONY. A people, whose name in the vast domain, was in days by gone, sought out and coveted by all. Unknown races had rested here and gone away, leaving only their careful graves behind them. The "Mandans"--the brave, the fair, the beautiful, and the "Cheyennes," pressed by the "Nay-he-owuk," and the "Assin-a-pau-tuk," had quitted their earthen forts on the banks of the streams and urged their way to the broader tide of the Missouri. More fatal to the conquerors came afterward, the white man, "Nemesis" of all Indian life, spying with the instinct of his race, a spot of abounding fertility, where the great water-reaches stretched from the mountains to the sea, and southward touched almost the beginning of the great River of the Gulf.