that had the choice been left to myself, I could have made none better. Thus launched into the midst of this interminable Far West, how often did I repeat these beautiful lines of Racine:
O Dieu, par quelles routes inconnues aux mortels Ta Sagesse conduit tes desseins eternels !
In seven days from my departure from St. Louis, namely on the 30th of April, I arrived at Westport, a frontier town on the west of the United States. It took us seven days, on board a steamboat, to perform this journey of 5oo 13901 miles, no unfair average of the time required to travel such a distance on the Missouri at the breaking up of the winter, when, though the ice is melted, the water is still so low, the sand-banks so close together and the snags so numerous that boats cannot make greater head
way. * * * We landed on the right bank of the river, and took refuge in an abandoned little cabin, where a poor Indian woman had died a few days before, and in this retreat, so like to that which once merited the preference of the Savior and for which was thenceforth to be substituted only the shelter of a tent in the wilderness, we took up our abode until the Loth of May - occupied as well we might be in supplying the wants created by the burning of our baggage wagon on board the steamboat, the sickness of one of our horses which we were compelled to leave after us, and the loss of another that escaped from us at the moment of landing.
We started, then, from Westport, on the Loth of May, and after having passed by the lands of the Shawnees and Delawares, where we saw nothing remarkable but the colle -e of the Methodists, built, it is easy to divine for what, where the soil is richest; we arrived after five days' march on the banks of the Kansas river, where we found those of our companions who had traveled by water, with a part of our baggage. Two of the relatives of the grand chief had come twenty miles from that place to meet us, one of