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Feeling rich with my remaining fifty francs, I ordered the waiter to bring me a goulasch and a carafe of blond beer, after the consummation of which I spent an hour in the reading of a newspaper. Can it be credited that the journal of my perusement was the one which may be called the North-American paper of the aristocracies of Europe?
Eagles were sailing, like a placid thought in a large heart, far over our heads in the intimacy of a spotless sky; the great ground-squirrel flashed like a gray gleam over the gnarled mossy roots at the side of our narrow dug-way; and in brilliant blots or darting shafts of Magenta fire, we recognized among the tree-tops that loveliest bird of the North-American forest, the great crested woodpecker.
"Totidem esse hostes quot servos" said Seneca; but he was thinking of the Scythian and Germanic tribes. A North-American Indian, or a Carib, though less pagan than a native African, could never become so subdued.
I am now brought to the admission that before to-day I had experienced some prejudices against the inhabitants of the North-American republic, though not on account of great experience of my own.
If the North-American tribes, among several of which there are traditions of a Sun-god, had developed a combined civilization, there would similarly have arisen among them a mythology which ascribed to the Sun several different proper names and genealogies. Let me briefly set down the leading characters of this hypothesis which give it probability.
In "Nago Mbwiri" the sense is an idol, an object of worship, a "medicine" as the North-American Indians say, in contradistinction to Munda, a grigri, talisman, or charm. Every Mpongwe, woman as well as man, has some Mbwiri to which offerings are made in times of misfortune, sickness, or danger. I afterwards managed to enter one of these rude and embryonal temples so carefully shut.
About the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, Henry Hudson, the intrepid navigator who was looking for a North-West Passage by water through the North-American Continent to the Western Sea, discovered the great Bay which bears his name to this day.
Among these huge Tertiary Mammalia, one of those most common on the North-American continent seems to have been the Mastodon. The magnificent specimens preserved in this country are too well known to require description. The remains of the Rhinoceros occur also in the recent Tertiary deposits of North America, though as yet no perfect skeletons have been found.
Verrazano and Gomez, and probably the English captain, John Rut, had all sought for the opening of a strait of salt water like Magellan's Straits in the far south which should lead them through the great North-American continent to the regions of China and Japan.
Macdonald quickly responded to the overture, and the next day he and Galt met Brown in the St Louis Hotel, Quebec. It is worthy of note that at this interview Macdonald and Galt proposed, as a remedy for existing ills, a federal union of all the British North-American provinces.
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