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Then what delightful hours I passed wandering up and down the dry river-courses, full of water-holes and rocks and fallen trees, and overshadowed by magnificent vegetation. I soon got to know every hole and rock and stump, and came up to each with cautious step and bated breath to see what treasures it would produce.
Strategic points of immense value, important cities and fortresses, vital river-courses and communications which foreign tyranny had acquired during the tragic past with a patient iniquity almost without a parallel, and which patriotism had for years vainly struggled to recover were the earliest trophies and prizes of his art.
Wyvern remarked, his wonted solemnity lightened by the gleam of a brief smile. Looking closely into his face was like examining a map in relief; you saw heights and plains, the intersection of multitudinous valleys, river-courses with their tributaries. It was the visage of a man of thought and character.
If he didn't mean all I said, let the responsibility rest upon me, for I certainly meant every word of it. The farming districts are limited chiefly to the valleys along the river-courses, and such portions of arable lands as lie along the shores of the Fjords. A large proportion of the country is extremely wild and rugged, and covered, for the most part, with dense pine forests.
Although the banks of the Low Country rivers were usually heavily wooded, one found here and there wide grassy glades opening to the waterside. The country being flat, the river-courses were usually wide, with many large rocks standing high out of the water. Between these the streams eddy and wind.
An immense plain stretched from my feet to the mountain a plain so vast that every object of hill and wood and lake lay dwarfed into one continuous level, and at the back of this level, beyond the pines and the lakes and the river-courses, rose the giant range, solid, impassable, silent a mighty barrier rising-midst an immense land, standing sentinel over the plains and prairies of America, over the measureless solitudes of this Great Lone Land.
The burning of the mountain was seen 100 miles away, while the thunders of its convulsions and the tremblings of the earth reached the same distance. Seven hills, at whose base ran a river crowded with dead buffaloes, deer, apes, tigers, and crocodiles slipped down and became a level plain. River-courses were changed, forests were burnt up, and the whole face of the country was completely altered.
We are now able to see how the river-courses of the Northwest permitted a complete exploration of the country, and that in these courses Wisconsin held a commanding situation, But these rivers not only permitted exploration; they also furnished a motive to exploration by the fact that their valleys teemed with fur-bearing animals. This is the main fact in connection with Northwestern exploration.
Rivers are Nature's roads; and we may be sure that the country had not been long settled before a water communication began to be established between towns upon the river-courses, and commodities began to be transported by means of them.
When he repassed the barn to go back to Marygreen he observed that the ladder was still in its place, but that the men had finished their day's work and gone away. It was waning towards evening; there was still a faint mist, but it had cleared a little except in the damper tracts of subjacent country and along the river-courses.
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