After a nice and beautifully served breakfast, Norman and his mother got into a carriage to return to St. Paul and the Grey Eagle. They would have liked to spend the day at St. Paul, but Mrs. Lester was anxious to return home, as she thought she would be able to do, before the Sabbath. They crossed the suspension bridge, drove through Minneapolis, called to say good-by to Mrs. Lisle and the children, who had added so much to the pleasure of their river travel, and then rapidly over the broad prairie. Their attention was attracted by a lonely tomb, deeply shaded with trees, on the banks of the Minnehaha, and the driver told them that it was the tomb of the young wife and child of an officer of the army, who, when stationed at Fort Snelling, buried his beloved ones on the banks of this romantic stream. The driver stopped; they were on the prairie, with nothing to excite expectation. “The falls of Minnehaha[2] Did not call them from a distance; Did not cry to them afar off.” Footnote 2: See Frontispiece. Then getting out of the carriage, and descending a narrow path, the fall was before them, perfectly satisfying in its beauty; a gem of a fall, at once stamping its image on the memory; “a thing of beauty” to be “a joy forever.” The fall is sixty feet high, and makes one graceful leap over an amphitheater of rock, that recedes far enough to enable one to walk round behind the fall, beneath the overhanging cliff. One large tree grew on the steep bank on which they stood, sufficiently near to make a fine foreground to the picture, and throw its masses of foliage across the fall. There was nothing to mar the perfect loveliness of the scene. A stir in the branches of the great tree against which Norman leaned induced him to look up, and there, upon the bough, “With tail erected Sat the squirel, Adjidanmo; In his fur the breeze of morning Play’d as in the prairie grasses.” Norman watched him leap surely from branch to branch, over the deep abyss below, and then gathered some pretty flowers within reach, and asked the guide to gather some graceful hare-bells that hung over the steep cliff. Another look from the head of the falls, and a few more flowers gathered, which they pressed, together with the rose-buds from Owah-Menah, and they got into the carriage. Soon they reached Fort Snelling, in which Norman was very much interested. They drove round the deserted barracks, no longer astir with “the pomp and circumstance of war.” Norman would have enjoyed seeing the sentinel on duty and the soldiers on parade. His mother thought of the lonely lives the officers and their families must have led on that frontier post, far, far as it then was from the center of civilized life.