I think I have never known a man on whom a striking scene in nature had so powerful an effect. He would look upon a beautiful or wild landscape for hours at a time. There could have been no affectation in this, for he rarely expressed his admiration audibly; and when he did, it was in some brief exclamation that was forcible or original. I shall always remember the evening when we sat upon the quarter-deck of a steamboat at a backwoods landing, on one of the great Western rivers, where for some reason we were detained. We were sitting alone, I think. It was nearly midnight, and there was scarcely a cloud in the heavens or a ripple in the water. The moon was shining grandly, duplicating in shadow the thick forests for miles along the stream. The Governor had been looking in silence at the magnificent scene for as much as a half-hour when I took occasion to remark that I thought I would go to my state-room. The words were scarcely uttered when he startled me by jumping suddenly to his feet and exclaiming, his voice all a-quiver: “Great God! a man does not see three such nights as this in a lifetime; how can you--how can they sleep? I shall not go to bed till the moon does!” And as I left him, he sat down again with the determined yet injured look of one who had been insulted through nature. The Governor liked to pass for a great literary character, and I believe he succeeded in his ambition among his peculiar associates. By a lucky chance I have found, between the leaves of an old diary which I kept spasmodically at that time, a specimen of his production. It is an elaborate “Life of Michael Mitchell, the Comedian and Dancer.” I cut it out of a Cincinnati paper,--the Commercial, if I am not mistaken; and I am not sure that I did not once admire it almost as much as did the Governor himself. I see now, by the light of greater technical knowledge in such matters, that this rare bit of biography was printed bodily as an advertisement. It has, after the manner of special patent-medicine notices, “Communicated” just over it, in brackets. I observe, too, that it has at the left-hand bottom corner these cabalistic signs: “d1t.” I am glad, nevertheless, to be able to give an extract or so. The opening sentence has, as will be seen, a striking though inadvertent allusion to one of the games with which the old gambler was doubtless much more familiar than he could have been with the hazardous Latin. “The subject of this sketch,” writes the biographer, “was born in Ireland, on the 20th of November, Anno Domino 1831.”