Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/354

Rh handsome and kind landlady; had the pleasure of washing off the dust, putting on fresh linen, and drinking a glass of excellent milk, and then to be still, and contemplate the life and movement in the market-place, the largest in the city, and near to which the hotel stood.

Five and twenty years ago the ground on which the city stood, and the whole region around, was Indian territory and Indian hunting-ground. Where those wild dances were danced, and their wigwams stood, now stands Maçon, with six thousand inhabitants, and shops and workshops, hotels and houses, and an annually increasing population; and in the middle of its great market stands Canova's Hebe in a fountain, dispensing water. The young militia of Carolina and Georgia paraded the streets and the market-place this evening by moonlight. All the windows were open, and the negro people poured out of the houses to see the young men march past with their music.

I was up early the next morning, because it was glorious; the world looked young and fresh as morning, and I myself felt as fresh as it. I went out on a voyage of discovery with merely a couple of bananas in my old man (you know that I give my travelling-bag that appellation). All was as yet still in the city; every thing looked fresh and new. I had a foretaste of the young life of the west. The pale crescent moon sank slowly amid a violet-tinted mist, which wrapped the horizon in the west, but a heaven of the most beautiful blue was above me. Trees and grass glittered with dew in the rising sunlight. I walked along streets planted with trees, and, leaving the city, found myself upon a broad high road, on each side of which lay a dense, dark forest. I walked on; all was hushed and silent, but my heart sang. That which I had wished for, and longed for through the whole of my youth; that which I seemed to myself to be more excluded from than anything else, a