America older than Europe, Asia, or Africa.—Chronic Errors on the Subject.—Europe presented to America.—Truth vindicated.—Proofs of our Superior Antiquity.—Luxurious Civilization of the Races who stocked this Continent before the Indians.—Amount of Coal left by them unburned.—Large supplies of Fish packed away safely in our Mountains.—Fish Culture Measure of Human Culture.—Fossil Cran-iology.—Laughable Blunders of Former Historians and Ethnologists.—Ancient Nations, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Ten Lost Tribes, etc., trickling through, appearing on this Side of the Earth.—Instances cited.—Mythologies of Greece and Rome originated here.—Proofs and Reproofs.—American Nests well feathered Ages ago.—Large Stocks for Future Use.

Hitherto not only foreign writers, but even our own people, have ignored the existence of America prior to what is popularly called its discovery, a phenomenon which might be more appropriately denominated a return of the descendants of the old stock to the haunts of their forefathers. That event—reserved until the close of the fifteenth century of the Christian era, after the invention of gunpowder had exploded numerous obstructions in the path of progress, and just before the Lutheran Reformation came in with its fresh needs for more room—turned up an Old World for new uses.

Of course the newly ventilated space thus rediscovered excited much talk at the time, and created a sensation in that unsensational age. The first Europeans who were presented to America were as much elated, as Americans now at their presentation to European courts; as if America, like those courts, had not existed and had not had its shows, jewels, follies, history, and fêtes, centuries before they were shown up to it. Has not this sensation lasted quite long enough? Is it not time—now that nearly four hundred years have allowed the first ardor and surprise to cool off—to vindicate the claim of the Western Continent against the long-suffered error of mistaking what they were new to for what was itself new?

The arrogant pretensions of what is pleased to call itself the Old World have quite long enough kept back our bashful and blushing claims.

Indeed, in our chronic modesty, we are allowing our country to get somewhat mature in speaking of itself as new; while even children now know that ours is, in fact, the elder continent. Agassiz is not gassing us when he picks our ancient Alleghany flints and tells us, that the camp-fires in the Lackawanna, Schuylkill, and Lehigh valleys blazed away long before those at Newcastle and in the English Black Country were lit up. The Rocky Mountains got up their vertebrated backs ages before Mont Blanc put on such cool airs and carried its head so loftily over the more modest chignon of our Orizaba and Long’s Peak. The Mississippi got down to its delta long before the Rhone or Rhine reached even their alpha. Let us then henceforth assert the dignity of our superior antiquity; and commiseratecommiserate the other half of the globe in being so long unknown to our older America.

What was the precise height, the fashionable color of hair and eyes, the modish vices, the sartorial virtues, of the races which stocked our prairies, and hunted plesiosauria, and megalosauria, and other tall game along our wide valleys, and across the granite peaks of our long mountain ranges, we have not now at hand any plates or photographs to show; but well do we know that we are very much obliged to them for leaving unburned such lots of good coal, snugly stowed away in dry, ample cellars; and that those cellars were placed in such a peaceable Quaker State as Pennsylvania, where we can go and help ourselves by the cart-load without getting into a stew. How beautifully, too, they—those young Americans—packed away their fish; so well that they—the fish—are now just as fresh as when Noah performed his maritime adventure, Moses was fished up by the banks of the Nile, or Jonah became cargo in the deeply laden whale.

What large provisions those jolly dwellers on this hemisphere, long ages ago, must have made, when we find such abundance of funny finny things, so carefully stowed away in layers, all over the continent, from the icy plains around the North Pole, down through the Isthmus belt, and along the saw-shaped ridges of South America, to the farthermost cape. Now, if we had no other proof of the high civilization, we may truthfully say, the dainty and luxurious refinement, of those pre-Columbian inhabitants of this hemisphere, the existence of these fish, so beautifully canned,—better disposed, in fact, than if they had been arranged in layers by the accomplished herring-packers of Scotland or Holland,—we might safely rest there the well-digested argument; knowing well, as all our readers do, that the love of fish was one of the peculiar features that marked the highest point of Assyrian, Egyptian, and Persian civilization; remembering that in the time of Pericles, the polished Athenian left the charming music of his flowing speech, when he heard the bell in the Agora announce that the fish auction had begun; and further recalling the fact that the fish-ponds of Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, and the millionnaire Romans, gauged, like yard-sticks, the intellectual culture of Rome.

Fossil cranes have also been found ingeniously tucked away in appropriate crusts,—a cran-iological development not to be overlooked; although upon this head we forbear to enlarge. The Hadrosaurus—now restored to us by strangely unsubstantial Water-house Hawkins—shows that in his (i. e. the former H.’s) production what countless ages must have been exhausted and for his sustenance what numberless lives consumed, which, if unslaughtered, might have gone on, and after centuries of growth developed to be not only men, but even American voters.

From what has already been said it is clear that many of the aboriginal settlers in this half of the world died game to the last.

After mention of these higher arguments of our elder civilization, we shall not weaken the proofs by an exhibition of later American antiquities, such as the sculptured temples found in Yucatan and Central America; the time-coated, swallow-tailed fanes of the Peruvians; the exaggerated structures of the dwarfed Aztecs; or the tall earth-mounds which, scattered from Lake Erie through the Mississippi Valley, and forced through the tight-set lips of the Isthmus, are at last swallowed up by Venezuela.

Many doubtless are the swarms that have hived here through the busy centuries which preceded the Egyptian Pharaohs, the comparatively modern empires of Assyria, Persia, and China, and the still later kingdoms of Agamemnon and Priam; empires and kingdoms that stand on the dim frontis-pages of our ordinary histories. These hives, overflowing their quarters, have sent out superfluous swarms across the ice bridge over our northern strait into the plains of Asia, and thence into Africa and Europe.

Laughable indeed is the exhibition which erudite European historians, ethnologists, and others have made of themselves in deducing from Asia, as the mother-swarm, the colonies that have peopled the world; when in truth Asia was only the half-way house, the luncheon-place of our trampers, on their march into their foggy countries and chronicles.

Thus it is now ascertained by late researches that there is a great resemblance between the languages of the Mongols and Japanese, and those of Equador and New Granada. Hopes are entertained that antiquarians may discover some ancient precedents for our Yankee tongues and words derived from sources whose authoritative beginnings now puzzle us.

So, too, no doubt, migrations homeward have taken place from the faded and colorless scenes of these exploring raids.

Hitherward trickled, probably, the ten Israelitish tribes, hitherto supposed to be lost, diffusing themselves wanderingly for the past two thousand five hundred and eighty-nine years, and now collecting in pools in our towns and cities, and around our stock-exchanges.

Here, too, have reappeared, after going in on the other side, the broken pieces of the empire of Nineveh, mixed up with fragments of its gates of brass, which fused in the transmission, have veneered the faces of those who pulled through, forming in their descendants the race of brazen-faced itinerant pedlers, auctioneers, and plumbers among us.

So the ancient empire of Egypt, shivered up by Cæsar, percolating through, at last dripped into that stalagmite, the Tombs of New York, with its newly formed but not reformed Cæsars and Pompeys inside.

In a word, most of the old kingdoms, and even cities, such as Troy, Rome, Syracuse, Alexandria, Macedon, Athens, Sparta, and others, disappearing from sight on the other and newer hemisphere, and straining through into ours, have come out on our side condensed by the pressure in small spots, but with similar names,—spots smaller but just as smart and big-feeling as their larger selves. This, too, accounts for our sudden expansions, whether in crinoline or credit; the compressed and squeezed germ reasserting often its chance for pristine greatness in sudden and unexpected ways.

Now that we have started the train of thought, each of our readers can easily turn engineer and stoker, and by applying a little fuel of his own, can drive it over all the various tracks which run from his metropolitan, central brain.

“No wonder,” each one will exclaim, “that our people are so thin after so much pressing of their ancestors; no wonder at our new-minted words, the old ones having been fused at a red heat in the central fires.”

Here, too, is the secret of our burning eloquence. This is the source of our extraordinary architecture, borrowed, like an actor’s costume at a fancy ball, from huddled heaps of clothing made for others, and brought together in party-colored, but ill-sorted union. Looked at from this angle, we can account, too, for our mythological tendencies,—the invocations to Jove, when surprised; the devotion to Apollo in our magazines; the frequent use of the lyre in our trade; the love for bare shoulders, like Junos, in our divine assemblages; our leanings at night to Bacchus; and other customs and habits that creep out even from under pan-taletes. Greece at first took her Olympus from us; and we in the course of time have, like affectionate parents, borrowed it back again.

From these varied proofs it is manifest that, before Columbus brought over to America specimens of the European stock existing in his time, our hemisphere had been hard at work firing up at Popocatepetl; scooping out harbors on our coasts; creasing our valleys in fluvial grooves for our fast-running craft and boats; feathering the future nests of a later posterity with materials for use; and in general laying in a large stock for a successful business to be taken up and carried on afterwards by those who should come back from their migrations to become large dealers in universal notions, general purveyors, forwarders and advancers on all kinds of property, from continents to a spool of cotton, from polar Alaska ice to West India warming-pans and peppery troches.

How long it took them to flutter back to these old deserted nests, how many were lost before they had fairly got settled in them, and what broods now chirp, sing, and crow, through branches new and old, honest or brittle, these pages are full fledged to show.

America not discovered by Jason.—Lithographic Specimens attributed to the Northmen in the Eleventh Century curious, but by Skalds more Modern.—Bishop Berkeley’s Western Star not the First American Constellation.—Columbus offers a Continent at Private Sale; Isabella, a Spanish Lady, takes him up, and the Profits also.—Of Ferdinand’s Necklace.—Price of Eggs advanced in Spain.—England finally sees Something.—A Fish Story confirmed.—Discoveries which Columbus did not make.—Ponce de Leon.—Mexico unfortunately discovered.—The Straits of Magellan and other Straits.—De Soto at the Bottom of the Mississippi.—Champlain, a wise Man, founds Quebec upon a Rock.—Sir Walter Raleigh and him smoking.—The Mayflower anchored.—Hudson up Stream.

America was not discovered by Jason while looking up the golden fleece, although the existence of many American habits point to an originator, whose name is lost, but whose Asiatic practices are not. It is supposed by some that the late war crops were the product of certain stray dragon’s teeth, possibly dropped by that wily Greek on our prolific soil. But these hypotheses, although as wise as many others connected with early maritime discoveries, are too learned to be useful. History declines to pull such wool over the eyes of its readers or to encourage traditions which flatter the pride of ancient nations, whose age is the only excuse for their fond, grandfatherly dotings. Nor is it any more true that the Northmen, in the eleventh century, fell upon this out-lying continent, when engaged in general lithography along our coasts,—the pictured rocks near Taunton, although a spirited illustration of one page of our chronicles, being now proved to be sketches by later Scandinavian Skalds, less than eight hundred years old. We also feel obliged to deny the merit accorded by some to Bishop Berkeley, of having made the first discovery of America. This notion of some rests all its weight on the strength of those lines, “Westward the star of empire takes its way.” But those were not the first lines that were carried ashore and made fast to our continent, nor this the earliest star which appeared over our American boards.

Much as we should love, in the interest of modern historical research, to invent a new discoverer for America, candor compels us to award the glory still to Christopher Columbus. Had he lived three hundred and seventy-seven years later, he would have advertised for a partner in some paper of wide circulation; but not having that advantage, he circulated himself, offering a continent at private sale to all European nations that fronted the sunset. But all declined with thanks, until at last, as is well known, one Isabella, a Spanish lady, taken with the speculation, became a silent partner in the business. She not only furnished the capital, and took a high interest in the result, but finally reaped nearly all the profits,—a pleasant example of woman’s rights thoroughly enforced. She even took a necklace from her neck to procure funds for the expedition; and with this example before him, her associate Ferdinand, after trying his hand on several Moors, thought that, after unclasping from the neck of Columbus “the gem of the Antilles,” he could substitute a chain less golden. Posterity, however, indignantly breaking the metallic hasp, has clapped the iron collar back on the neck of the selfish, cunning, and thankless Ferdinando.

We must not forget to mention that before the old pilot could get his project to stand, he had raised the price of eggs throughout Spain by placing so many on their own poor broken heads. For this destruction, however, he consoled himself with the maxim, “all’s well that ends well.” He carried his eggs and hopes to England, France, Portugal, and Navarre; but both were kept so long that they became addled.

A heavy fog prevented England at first from seeing the enterprise; but after the discovery of real land was made, she lost no time in procuring the advantages of it, and endeavored to secure them to herself, by allowing several vessels to be outfitted at Bristol.

These vessels were not built by Laird; but, sailing away on the blind side of the island, succeeded at last in boarding the continent, and exchanging some unprinted religious tracks for certain other tracts, afterwards well stamped by royal authority.

On their return, the promoters of this missionary enterprise built a handsome church, where prayers were daily offered for many years, for past success, and intercessions made for the interposition of the same kind Providence for new exchanges of a similar kind. These expeditions, it may be remarked, have been and are the foundation of England’s greatness,—her church and her trade; or rather to name them in juster order and according to her own estimate, her trade and her church. The Cabots, father and son, will ever be remembered by their addition to the world’s wealth by the discovery, in 1497, of Newfoundland. At the time it was thought to be a story somewhat fishy, but it is now swallowed without any bones.

The Portuguese were less fortunate, their ships having got somehow entangled in the line in crossing it, they were obliged to cast anchor against a high wind, which as usual was not so ill as not to benefit their English rivals. What became of these ships is not positively known; a glimpse of only one of them having since been obtained in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The rest may have drifted northwards, and their masts made to serve to splice the north pole, the old one having become somewhat loose from being so much worked about by meddlesome navigators.

Among the discoveries in America which Columbus did not make we may enumerate the following:—

First, a name for the continent; an omission afterwards supplied by a shabby countryman of his, whose own name we will not perpetuate by mentioning in this history.

Second, iron-clads; although he did come across some very hard characters, whose scaly armor history has ever since been mercilessly denting and battering. Columbus himself, although at one time cased in iron, and sent home on a trial trip, while he learned the value and preciousness of metal at the Spanish court, failed to discover its property to float him across seas successfully. Nor do we find any warrant for believing that he was the discoverer of,

Third, balsam of liverwort, the extract of buchu, Peruvian hair-dye, or the sozodont, notwithstanding the strenuous assertions to the contrary of the candid proprietors of those invaluable preparations. The only extract he succeeded in making was a promise of honors, never performed, although highly labelled; and it is well known that the only color he succeeded in obtaining in America, for his own hair, was gray. From the ingredients of this blanching powder he ultimately died himself at Valladolid.

Fourth, nor is there any better foundation for the common error, that he was the discoverer of the Tammany Society, and furnished designs and colored drawings for the wigwam, in which the Democratic braves find so many original and aboriginal voters. Indian polls, from which the hair had been carefully removed, he did see, and even took a few back with him to Spain; but it is needless to say that these polling-places were not the exemplars of those which Tammany so often and so lovingly pats on the head.

Fifth, equally erroneous is the general belief that he discovered “Hail Columbia,” although it is true that he got enough of it, in the sense that some illy educated small boys now use that phrase.

Ponce de Leon, following up the discoveries of Columbus, landed in Florida, in 1512, and endeavored to find there a fountain possessing the properties of giving to the imbiber perpetual youth. Although he did not succeed in this quest, it seems probable that some one else did, for it is well known that several Americans, such as Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and others, have lived quite too long, while other distinguished Americans, as Burr and others, have manifested in a very lively way a green old age, cutting up capers which none but very young people would have thought of. He also discovered the Dry Tortugas,—a temperance station of the first water, famous as the habitation of Dr. Mudd.

A few years later, A. D. 1517, Mexico was unfortunately discovered, and from that time to the present has been the scene of constant embroilments, beginning with the broiling of Montezuma, by Cortez, and ending with the unhappy stew made by Maximilian for himself. Mexico is the American abattoir,—the general slaughter-house of our continent. Ice for the preservation of the quarters of her victims, where no quarter was shown, is obtained from the elevated plains into which the country is as yet insufficiently broken up.

We ought to mention the voyage, in 1520, of a Portuguese, Magellan by name, who touched at the Canaries for yellow birds, coasted along the shores of Brazil in search of other golden products, but finally brought up in a very tight place, on the extreme southern tip of our western globe; calling the spot, under great pressure, the Straits of Magellan.

He became so exhilarated, however, at Cape Horn, that he kept on, like the man with the cork leg, and went all around the world, being its first circumventor, and giving the first proof of the gyrating effects of mixing liquors with water.

De Soto first chanced upon the Mississippi River, and, in 1542, was flung upon it with all his heavy armor on,—“a sink-or-swim” experiment, which resulted in his remaining down at the bottom.

Diving for wrecks has since become for divers and diverse reasons common in that turbulent stream; but he is honored as the great diver; the river not being strong enough to get him up. John Law afterwards tried a Mississippi venture; but, unlike De Soto, he went up, and never came down again. Both De Leon and De Soto showed true American enterprise and energy in the pursuit of gold. Like their countryman Cortez, in Mexico, they were, however, more desirous of discovering metallic placers, and extracting from them sudden riches, than of luring by patient industry from a jealous soil its hoarded secrets of cereal wealth.

On the north, Cartier, in 1534, became the unhappy discoverer of the Canadas, and other out-lying, uncovered, cold regions, afterwards parcelled out, not to ice companies like the Knickerbocker and others, but into viceroyalties. These freezing places, from the continual stirring about in them of such contrary elements for the succeeding century, might well be called the ice-creameries of England and France.

Champlain, in 1603, like a wise man, founded Quebec on a rock; for which he has been illy requited by being called the father of the French settlements in Canada.

Sir Walter Raleigh’s name must always burn brightly in American history, for his discovery of a smoking material on the James River. But his fame needs no puffing here, although his reputation became somewhat blown before his death. Another important event soon after occurred in connection with American discoveries. A Mayflower drifted, in December, across seas, and floating against Plymouth Rock, struck its tiny anchors in it, and, with Yankee enterprise, climbed all over it, covering its rugged clefts and bare surface with a mass of luxuriant flowers, with which also sprang up tangling weed-growths, all of which have since been dried and attracted great attention, much sneezing, some sneering, and great use of handkerchiefs to preserve the odor of, or prevent the smell of, what has penetrated all departments of American history. The last discovery which we shall here mention was that of Hudson, who brought to light the benighted island of Manhattan, then, as since, infested by Woods and other poisonous growths. The natives, as now, were very free in their manners; staring at the newly arrived, and taking them in by the exhibition of trinkets and gilt ornaments. In spite of the sluggish airs from the shores of Westchester and Dutchess, the ships of Hudson succeeded in reaching Rhinebeck; a few of his men even penetrating to the dense regions of Albany.

Survey of Indian Character and Lands.—Our Pacific Intentions towards the Indians.—The Whites better read than the Red Men, and the Effects of Learning.—The Pale Complexion of their Affairs.—Wet Blankets thrown over their other Habits.—Different Traits discovered by School-Girls and through official Spectacles.—Meaning of Indian Reservations.—Indian Style of Dress and its Conveniences.—Indian Names.—Examples of their Happy Application.

No history of the United States would be complete without a survey of the character of the Indian; as no State of the Union is acceptable to its inhabitants without a survey and appropriation of his lands.

Various as are the lights in which the former may be regarded, there is but one light, that of an enlight-ened self-interest, with which the latter have been treated. The speed with which we have hurried the brick-colored races towards the sun’s setting is conclusive proof of our Pacific intentions, and of our dislike to unsettled titles. Red as is the color of the Indian, to this complexion do all his tribes come at last,—a pale conviction that the white man is better read than they.

The chapter of our discoveries on this continent opens with the Indian in the foreground; and the historian, like the earliest explorer, is brought immediately face to face with him. Unlike the explorer, however, we will pause long enough to bury the proprietor of the estate which he seized and we occupy.

Blankets, often very wet, have been thrown over the Indian; while as often he has been painted so thickly, and feathered so profusely, as to become a bird of quite another color from that of our North American vulture. Slow in learning the geography of the race that rides him down as on a pale horse evermore, he has acquired the name of but one of our streams, that of the Firewater, a river whose dry banks seem always to divide his retreating from our pursuing frontier boundaries.

Perhaps we cannot give a more variegated notion of the different aspects under which the Indian character is viewed, than by putting it in an American kaleidoscope, and there giving it a few turns, certain that these turns will not be more curious or numerous than their owners’ fortunes.

1. The Indian character as viewed in schools and colleges.

Listen to an average specimen from the pen of Miss Jemima Letitia Youngfancy,—her most pronounced effort before the trustees and patrons of Rising Hill Seminary.

“No subject is of greater importance to the well-being of our race than a proper estimate of the character of the red man. Injustice here is more deplorable, since it involves the historic position of a race once lords of all this continent, now fast dwindling away, not only out of physical existence, but from the realms of discriminating praise. His has been the misfortune to be despoiled, not simply of the bosky inheritance of fair fields and boundless domains, where his ancestors roamed as free as the winds that sweep over the breezy sierras of the Rocky Mountains, but of the justice which pleads before the tribunal of posterity for rights withheld and wrongs inflicted. Not content to pursue his retreating and emaciated footsteps into the tomb, where his poor body is scarcely allowed to moulder away in peace, amid the implements and trophies of the chase, the white man, as voracious as the prairie wolves, which whet their sharp fangs against the rocky bases that prop up the giant Cordilleras of our beloved land, has denied to him those monumental rights with which even savages adorn the last resting-places of their braves,—the trophied inscriptions carved in the enduring language in which Virgil sang and Tully burned, and in which Menander, prophetic of our Transatlantic greatness, babbled to the dull ears of a Roman race, which recked not of that ‘proud stoic of the woods,’ who, in life a victim of wrong, at death folds himself to his solemn sleep, in the language of the greatest of our living poets,

but who, also, in the apt words of the same rapt minstrel,

While the waves of applause which ripple around this popular and characteristic rhapsody, grow calm against the solid shores of historic truth, we turn to another American view equally characteristic.

2. The Indian character as seen through official spectacles. Extract from the Report of the Secretary of the Interior:—

“The beneficent policy of repression, steadily pursued by our government towards the Indian tribes still surviving, cannot fail to strike every one but themselves. While sentimental Christianity continues to dwell upon the rapid extinguishment of their tribes, the archives of this department bear gratifying witness to the more rapid extinguishment of their titles.

“There now remain in our borders—which were, it must be admitted, for the sake of argument, once theirs—but about three hundred thousand of these nomad wanderers. Our people must feel an especial gratification in the proud reflection, that it is their bounty which, now reaching forth the comforts of our abundance to these remnants of tribes, supplies at the reasonable rate of some $10.15 per caput, the wants of such as are spared by our efficient and active army corps of Indian destructives.

“This bounty is distributed by honest agents, who never fail, while dispensing it, to impress upon the recipients a proper regard for the moral suasion of our well-mounted rifles. The small commissions reserved from these treaty-stipulated funds, by these agents, is too American not to be recognized with patriotic pride; and the especial thanks of Congress are due to these self-denying distributers for the amount which they kindly leave to be disseminated among the intended beneficiaries.

“There is a natural jealousy among our people in those States and Territories where former laws injudiciously, but, as it fortunately proves, unsuccessfully located these Indian remnants, against the continuous occupation of tracts of lands called reservations, to which they have been from time to time removed. I cannot too strongly recommend that this jealousy and acquisitiveness be duly respected, and new reservations somewhere be speedily provided. Both Providence and our need of their territory plainly mark the Indians as the American Ishmaelites, against whom everybody’s hand is raised, and whose shifting tent can only be steadied up permanently against the sunset on the Pacific Ocean.”

Some people seem to think that the Indian was created to keep before us a décolleté style of dress, adapted to the freedom of our institutions,—a traveller’s costume, most convenient for the administration of medical assistance, in case of such railroad divertisements and steamboat pyrotechnic displays as often enliven our journeyings.

Others look upon the preservation of these remnants as providential fields for the employment of the patience of domestic missionaries. Young ladies contemplate them as the only living representatives of mythological Loves, the sole heirs to the bow and arrow. Others still admire them as our only legendary and poetic creations; the only ghostly figures that creep weirdly through our sharp-set American quadrilles.

But while such discordant notions rasp the American ear and conscience about their predecessors, there is a mode of hushing up all these family jars; one which seems to have been adopted in all ages, from the time of Joshua the son of Nun, down to the Irish wakes of our time, namely, to drown them all in the jubilant music procured and paid for at the expense of the estate to be divided up.

A few words in regard to Indian names. An affectionate and grateful regard for the painted races, which will soon be seen only in the picture-galleries and books of colored engravings, has sought to sow a crop of Indian names over our lakes, rivers, mountains, and towns. Unfortunately we have succeeded in keeping scarcely enough for seed. But one State has borrowed the name of the Indian himself,—Indian-ah?—she spelling it, however, in an un-English way, without a h, as if she had said,

The application of some of these names has been singularly felicitous, as Sing-Sing, where the State guests attempt no musical flights, but are made to hum quite another tune, if not to hush up altogether; Miss-ouri, whose ill-fated union in our Federal family has been attended with such left-handed rights,—State rights, Fanny Wrights, and, for a long time in Kansas, conflicting rights; Minnehaha, whose ringing laugh is during so long a portion of the year frozen in her soft throat; Kan-sas, suggestive of her capacity for billingsgate and free use of abusive language; Oregon, and yet inviting emigrants to her valuable mines while she laughs a cunning laugh under the protecting cap of Mount Hood; Wy-an-dot River, as if it had come to a sort of rocky comma, or interrupting ledge, over which it was pausing a moment for breath to take a hop-and-skip-and-carry-one overy leap; Pot-to-wat-o-my River, seeming like a whole family council around a skillet steaming over a fire, while the carrotty-headed mother was slightly walloping the youngest of the party for asking some improper question; Pawn-ee Fork, reminding one of those old-clothes shops kept by U. S., where the unsuspecting and improvident Indian, always in want, might be tempted to pledge his wild lands for a little ready cash, or a silver fork, or blue trinket; Man-hat-tan, as if to perpetuate the fact of the great head quality of the white man in dealing with the dusky ones for the purchase of the little island that carries as its name, a cover for the little transaction which transferred twenty-four dollars to the one, for the fourteen miles of real estate sandwiched between the North and East Rivers; Winne-bago, which sets one sneezing a coltish sneeze even at the head-waters of the Missis-sippi, and in her matronly presence; and a thousand other spicy aboriginal condiments, sprinkled, like pepper and salt over a luscious ham, over our continent, to make it more piquant and relishable in the taking.