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We had passed the more toilsome and monotonous part of the journey; but four hundred miles still intervened between us and Fort Laramie; and to reach that point cost us the travel of three additional weeks. During the whole of this time, we were passing up the centre of a long narrow sandy plain, reaching like an outstretched belt, nearly to the Rocky Mountains. Two lines of sandhills, broken often into the wildest and most fantastic forms, flanked the valley, following our course, at the distance of a mile or two on the right and left; while beyond them lay a barren, trackless, waste- -The Great American Desert' - extending for hundreds of miles to the Arkansas on the one side, and the Missouri on the other. Before us and behind us, the level monotony of the plain was unbroken as far as the eye could reach. Sometimes it glared in the sun, an expanse of hot, bare sand; sometimes it was veiled by long coarse grass. Huge skulls and whitening bones of buffalo were scattered every where; the ground was tracked by myriads of them; and often covered with the circular indentations where the bulls had wallowed in the hot weather. From every gorge and ravine, opening from the hills, descended deep, well-worn paths, where the buffalo issue twice a day in regular procession down to drink at the Platte. The river itself runs through the midst, a thin sheet of rapid, turbid water, half a mile wide, and scarce two feet deep. Its low banks, for the most part, without a bush or a tree, are of loose sand, with which the stream is so charged that it grates on the teeth in drinking. The naked landscape is of itself, dreary and monotonous enough; and yet the wild beasts and wild men that frequent the valley of the Platte, make it a scene of interest and excitement to the traveller. Of those who have journeyed there, scarce one, perhaps, fails to look back with fond regret to his horse and his rifle.

Fancy to yourself a long procession of squalid savages approaching our camp. Each was on foot, leading his horse by a rope of bull-hides. His attire consisted merely of a scanty cincture, and an old buffalo robe, tattered and begrimed by use, which hung over his shoulders. His head was close shaven, except a ridge of hair reaching over the crown from the centre of the forehead, very much like the long bristles on the back of a hyæna, and he carried his bow and arrows in his hand, while his meagre little horse was laden with dried buffalo meat, the produce of his hunting. Such were the first specimens that we encountered and very indifferent ones they were of the genuine savages of the prairie.

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They were the Pawnees whom Kearsley had encountered the day before; and belonged to a large hunting party, known to be ranging the prairie in the vicinity. They strode rapidly past, within a furlong of our tents, not pausing or looking toward us, after the manner of Indians when meditating mischief, or conscious of ill desert. I went out and met them; and had an amicable conference with the chief, presenting him with half a pound of tobacco, at which unmerited bounty he expressed much gratification. These fellows, or some of their companions, had committed a dastardly outrage upon an emi

grant party in advance of us. Two men, out on horseback at a distance, were seized by them; but lashing their horses, they broke loose and fled. At this the Pawnees raised the yell and shot at them, transfixing the hindmost through the back with half a dozen arrows, while his companion gallopped away and brought in the news to his party. The panic-stricken emigrants remained for several days in camp, not daring even to send out in quest of the dead body.

The reader will recollect Turner, the man whose narrow escape I mentioned not long since; and expect perchance a tragic conclusion to his adventures; but happily none such took place; for a dozen men whom the entreaties of his wife induced to go in search of him, found him leisurely driving along his recovered oxen, and whistling in utter contempt of the Pawnee nation. His party was encamped within two miles of us; but we passed them that morning, while the men were driving in the oxen, and the women packing their domestic utensils and their numerous offspring in the spacious patriarchal wagons. As we looked back, we saw their caravan, dragging its slow length along the plain; wearily toiling on its way, to found new empires in the West.

Our New-England climate is mild and equable compared with that of the Platte. This very morning, for instance, was close and sultry, the sun rising with a faint oppressive heat; when suddenly darkness gathered in the west, and a furious blast of sleet and hail drove full in our faces, icy cold, and urged with such demoniac vehemence that it felt like a storm of needles. It was curious to see the horses; they faced about in extreme displeasure, holding their tails like whipped dogs, and shivering as the angry gusts swept over us, howling louder than a concert of wolves. Wright's long train of mules came sweeping round before the storm, like a flight of brown snow-birds driven by a winter tempest. Thus we all remained stationary for some minutes, crouching close to our horse's necks, much too surly to speak, though once the Captain looked up from between the collars of his coat, his face blood-red, and the muscles of his mouth contracted by the cold into a most ludicrous grin of agony. He grumbled something that sounded like a curse, directed, as we believed, against the unhappy hour when he had first thought of leaving home. The thing was too good to last long; and the instant the puffs of wind subsided we erected our tents, and remained in camp for the rest of a gloomy and lowering day. The emigrants also encamped near at hand. We being first on the ground, had appropriated all the wood within reach; so that our fire alone blazed cheerily. Around it soon gathered a group of uncouth figures, shivering in the drizzling rain. Conspicuous among them were two or three of the half-savage men who spend their reckless lives in trapping among the Rocky Mountains, or in trading for the Fur Company in the Indian villages. They were all of Canadian extraction; their hard, weather-beaten faces and bushy moustaches looked out from beneath the hoods of their white capotes with a bad and brutish expression, as if their owner might

be the willing agent of any villany. And such in fact is the character of many of these men.

On the day following we overtook our emigrant companions, and thenceforward, for a week or two, we were fellow-travellers. One good effect, at least, resulted from the alliance; it materially diminished the serious fatigues of standing guard; for the party being now more numerous, there were longer intervals between each man's turns of duty.

WRECK OF THE SEGUN TUM: A BALLAD.

BY

JAMES KENNARD, JR.

THE Spanish ship Seguntum' was wrecked on the Isles of Shoals in the winter of 1813, and all hands on board perished.

FAST o'er the seas, a fav'ring breeze

The Spanish ship had borne;

The sailors thought to reach their port
Ere rose another morn.

As sunk the sun the bark dashed on,
The green sea cleaving fast :
Ah! little knew the reckless crew
That night should be their last!

They little thought their destined port
Should be the foaming surge;
That long ere morn again should dawn
The winds should wail their dirge!

As twilight fades, and evening shades
Are deepening into night,

The sky grows black, and driving rack
Obscures the starry light.

And loudly now the storm-winds blow,
And through the rigging roar ;
They find, too late to shun their fate,
They're on a leeward shore.

'Mid snow and hail they shorten sail;
The bark bows 'neath the blast;
And, as the billows rise and break,
She's borne to leeward fast.

The straining ship drives through the seas,

Close lying to the wind;

The spray, on all where it doth fall,
Becomes an icy rind.

It strikes upon the shrinking face
As sharp as needles' prick;

And ever as the ship doth pitch,

The shower comes fast and thick.

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* THIRTEEN in number. Their graves are still to be seen on one of the Isles of Shoals. These islands lie off the harbor of Portsmouth, (N. H.,) nine miles from the mouth of the Piscataque.

LOVE

AND LOVE LETTERS.

BY DAVID STRONG.

THE passion of love, in its effects, curiously blends the serious with the amusing, the tragic with the comic. A faithful transcript of the mind under its influence would at least equal in interest, the movements of an opium eater, or in amusement, the antics produced by nitrous-oxide. This truth occurred to me with singular clearness this morning as I lingered over the contents of my escritoire. There, lay before me all the tokens of a score of 'loves.' And among them (more to my purpose,) were copies of my own letters written in the heat of passion and in the ardor of youth. They have hitherto been sacred-treasures that money could not buy, and for which I would not have thanked any one to tempt me with fame. But time and untruth have robbed them of their sanctity; and the keen sense of the ridiculous they inspired me with this morning, has sealed their fate. With a reservation in favor of those addressed to one lady, they go into the fire. The record of thoughts made over to her has yet an interest for me. She was the last object that lingered on my gaze as I passed out from boyhood's land of dreams; her memory is the dim twilight of my day of sentiment gone by. She is another's now,' but my life is happier in the trust that she still recurs to our acquaintance with undiminished friendship. I the more cling to the hope, and foster the belief, from the falsehood I have met elsewhere. Once shake my faith in her and thereafter my trust in woman will be confined to the limits of my organs of vision.

Indeed the rings, ringlets, ribbands, seals, valentines, billets, mottoes, and every other variety of the peace-disturbing arms of Cupid that lie scattered before me, are so many mute witnesses of the instability of woman's love. The history of the lock of hair that shades one corner of my paper, is the history of the rest. story of one, is the story of all. Pledges given, and pledges broken. Therefore I do well to take fast hold on the faith of her who, giving no promises, has ever kept to the spirit of our friendship. It is well there is one.

The

But to proceed: It has been said that a man of sense may love like a madman, but never like a fool.' The fact is self-evident; for a man would cease to be considered sensible who, for a considerable length of time, under any circumstances, continued to play the simpleton. Foolish acts however do not necessarily imply a total want of sense. No man conducts wisely at all times; and no man was ever known to do so under the influence of the tender

passion. But a man may under its influence do brilliant things. It may be a ridiculous passion, as it has been termed, still it is a

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