Nothing seems to thrive there but the cold-spring at the foot of the sand-ridge, and the poplar and weeping-willow which grow above it. These trees had and have for me a plaintive undertone to the rhythm of their rustling leaves which I do not hope to make others hear. The willow was the whip with which a friend rode twenty miles from the county-seat to visit my father, in the early times, and it was stuck in the ground there, on the margin of the spring, by my little sister; the poplar was planted beside it by my mother. They are both tall trees now, and a sprig from one of them has been growing a long time over the graves of father, mother, and sister. * * * * * At an early stage of my existence and of my orphanage I was introduced to a species of _in transitu_ life, being passed from one natural guardian to another very much as wood is loaded upon Mississippi steamboats. It was, indeed, rather a rough passage of short stages,--each, however, more remote from my Ohio birthplace; and I have always thought there would not have been so many figurative slivers left behind in the hands through which I passed, if the passage had not been so rough and headlong. Finally, at the age of eight or nine years, I was shipped away to Buffalo, N. Y., to be placed at school. I was sent thither down Lake Erie from Toledo, on board the old steamer Indiana, Captain Appleby commanding. Many are yet living, I suppose, who will remember this craft,--the first of the kind upon which I ever embarked. For my part, at least, I think I shall forget everything else before I forget the noble sheet-iron Indian who stood astride of her solitary smoke-stack, and bent his bow and pointed his arrow at the lake breezes. A meagre brass-band, too, as was the generous custom of those days, was attached to the steamer, and discoursed thin, gratuitous music during the voyage. To a more sophisticated gaze the attenuated, besmoked brave of my juvenile rapture would, alas! have looked more like an indifferent silhouette plastered belligerently against the sky; but it was the first piece of statuary I ever saw, as that execrable brass band made the first concert I ever heard, and the Apollo Belvedere, at Rome, or Strauss’s own orchestra, led by himself, at Vienna, has never since excited in me such honest thrills of admiration. It was many and many a month before that swarthy sheet-iron Indian ceased occasionally to sail at night through a mingled cloud of coal-smoke and brass music, in my boyish dreams.