Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/49

26 great and then so small, St. Louis, full of French people and Northern people and Southern people and negroes. It did not look as it does now. To my great horror and amazement, my cousins owned slaves, and their backyard was full of pickaninnies. I remember two great men — the Reverend Mr. Elliot, one of our Unitarian saints, and Mr. Holmes, now Professor of Law at Harvard, then a young lawyer, and the author of a book to prove that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare; also some pretty, very agreeable women; but my heart was too heavy to allow me to notice much, and I was too young to be a philosophic observer. My father and I, after his recovery, started off up the Mississippi, that muddy, great, dark river, and I always felt the force of the subsequent witticism when the indignant Yankee answered the assuming Briton, "You could stir the whole of England into the Mississippi without making it a bit muddier."

We had the same cotillon party and most interesting companions. I suppose "Elijah Pogram" or his prototype was on board, but I do not remember him. Of all the ways of travel, I remember none which were so agreeable as these floating palaces, on which we lazily encompassed such vast distances.

One day we stopped at Nauvoo, the first settlement of the Mormons. My father knew Joe Smith, their first Prophet. He had been a bricklayer at Keene, and had not laid his bricks even and well. He and a man from Peterboro, where my father was born, Jesse Little, I think, came down and invited us up to see their great temple, resting on the shoulders of carved wooden oxen. It was impressive, but the general effect was more like the Eden of Charles Dickens, which was yet to be described, than any other place I remember. They were already in trouble, and I think made their exodus the