Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/248

Rh far from it are erected, in the same way, two or three other log-houses; they all are furnished with excellent beds, and there always lies on the shelf a Bible, a hymn-book, and some other religious books. A little further off stands a somewhat larger log-house, where a dozen or two children—the half-wild offspring of the wilderness—are assembled. This is the school. The room is poor, and without furniture; but the walls are covered with maps of all parts of the globe, and in the hands of the children are books which present them with views over the whole world, and reading-books which contain the noblest pearls of literature, in paragraphs, short essays, narratives, poems, &c. Anon other houses spring up; some of framed timber, some of stone; they become more and more ornamental; they surround themselves with fruit-trees and flowers; you see a chapel of wood arising at the same time with the wooden houses; but when the stone houses come, there come also a stone church and a states-house. The fields around are covered with harvests; flocks and herds increase, and before long you behold one or two steam-boats advancing up the river; they lie-to at the new buildings; they purchase wares and cattle, and leave newspapers behind them. In two or three years there is here a little city of two thousand souls; motherly women institute Sunday schools in the church, and assemble the little children to instruct them in Christianity, and establish an asylum for orphaned little ones. Shops spring up at the same time with the school and the church, and they constitute, together with the printing-press and the states-house, the ensign of the Anglo-American; and wherever he plants this, thence retreats the Red Man, now almost without resistance, with his wigwam and his subjected women, and goes to light his fires farther off in the wilderness. He knows, by experience, that the new erections which he beholds will, within a quarter of a century, become a great city with its