Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts 2.djvu/50

 The grand feature hereabouts is the Mississippi River. Too much can hardly be said of its grandeur, and of the beauty of this portion of it, from Dunleith, and probably from Rock Island to Red Wing. St. Paul is a dozen miles below the Falls of St. Anthony, or near the head of uninterrupted navigation on the main stream, about two thousand miles from its mouth. There is not a &quot;rip&quot; below St. Anthony; and the river is almost as wide in the upper as in the lower part of its course. Steamers go up to the Sauk Rapids, above the Falls of St. Anthony, near a hundred miles farther, and then you are fairly in the pine woods and lumbering country. Thus it flows from the pine to the palm. The lumber, as you know, is sawed chiefly at the Falls (what is not rafted in the log to parts far below), having given rise to the towns of St. Anthony, Minneapolis, etc. In coming up from Dunleith you meet with great rafts of sawed lumber and of logs, twenty rods or more in length by five or six wide, floating down, all from the pine region above the Falls.

I read your letter on my arrival here,