Toward evening, as he was sitting on the window, Norman saw a number of people flocking to the Levee, and he asked his mother’s permission to follow them, and ascertain what had happened. He soon returned, looking very grave and downcast. He had been in the presence of death. A young man of nineteen had been drowned the evening before, seized with sudden cramps while bathing, and they had just found his body. There it lay, floating on the water, the head downward, the limbs drawn up; and in the solemn presence of death light and careless words had been spoken that shocked Norman, touched as he was by the unfamiliar sight. The drowned lad was French, an orphan and a stranger in the land, with no one to miss him or mourn for him, save one loving heart, that of a sister, left alone without kindred or friends. Later in the evening the vehicle containing the body stopped at a confectioner’s, on the opposite side of the street, and the young man was carried in to the room he had left the evening before, in the fullness of life and health. “Death enters and there’s no defense; His time there’s none can tell; He’ll in a moment bear thee hence, To heaven, or down to hell.” Well is it in this life of uncertainty, when the happiest moments may be darkened by the presence of this grim visitor, to be prepared for his coming; to have our fear of him taken away; to be able to look upon him as the messenger sent to call us to our Father’s house. “In the midst of life we are in death: to whom then, O Lord, can we turn but unto thee!” CHAPTER XII. DOWN THE RIVER. Down the river went they In and out among its islands, Sailed through all its bends and windings, Sailed through all its deeps and shallows. HIAWATHA. The morning came bright and warm as ever. At the boat Norman was delighted to see his friend, the pilot of the Grey Eagle, who introduced them to Captain Gray, of the Kate Cassel. There he saw too the lady who brought with her memories of the early dawn at St. Anthony. “You like to see everything that is to be seen,” she said to Mrs. Lester; “under that bare spot you see on the bluff south of the town is the grave of Dubuque, the Indian chief who once owned all this land.” “Mother,” said Norman, as their kindly informant left them, “Dubuque is a very strange name for an Indian chief to have; he must have been named by the French when he was a child.” “Julien Dubuque,” replied his mother, “was not an Indian, but a Frenchman, who bought all this valuable mining region, so rich in fine lead ore, from the Indians, in 1788. They had been discovered two years before by the wife of Peosta, an Indian warrior. Dubuque died in 1810. The Julien House is named, I suppose, in his honor.”