HEROES OF THE LONE STAR STATE.

897

dread took possession of him, and he remembered nothing of what happened afterward. In the morning, when he woke up, the sun was shining brightly overhead, and the birds were whistling and chirping in the trees above him. He looked around for his gun, and was surprised beyond measure when he picked it up that the barrel was all eaten up with rust, and the stock so decayed and rotten that it all fell to pieces in his hand. His dog was nowhere to be seen, and he whistled and called to him in vain, but at his feet he saw a heap of white bones, among which there was a skeleton of a neck with the collar his dog had worn still around it! He then noticed that his buckskin hunting-shirt was decayed and mildewed, and hung in tatters upon him, and that his hair had grown so long that it reached down nearly to his waist.

" Bewildered by all these sudden and curious changes, he took his way toward the top of the hill, from which, the evening before, he had seen the smoke rising up from the cabins of the frontier settlement, and wdiat was his astonishment, when he saw, spread out in the valley below him, a great city, with its spires and steeples rising up, as far as his eye could extend, and, in place of the dense, unbroken forests, that covered the earth when he came, a wide, open country presented itself to his view, fenced up into fields and pastures, and dotted over with the white man's stately houses and buildings.

"As he gazed at all this, in surprise and wonder, he could distinctly hear, from where he stood, the distant hum of the vast multitude, who were laboring and trafficking and moving about in the great city below him. Sad and dispirited, he turned his course homeward, and, after traveling many days, through farms and villages and towns, he at length reached once more the banks of the mighty Mississippi. But the white people had got there before him, and, in place of a silent and lonely forest, he found a large town built up where it had once stood, and saw a huge steamboat puffing and paddling along right where he had crossed the 'father of waters' in his little canoe.