tions of scenery, and from their pictures of our western wilds and prairies before trodden by the feet of civilization, will always maintain a position in our early literature, and be read with interest.

INDIAN MOUNDS.

At first the eye mistakes these mounds for hills; but when it catches the regularity of their breast-works and ditches, it discovers, at once, that they are the labors of art and of men. When the evidence of the senses convinces us that human bones moulder in these masses; when you dig about them, and bring to light domestic utensils, and are compelled to believe that the busy tide of life once flowed here; when you see, at once, that these races were of a very different character from the present generation, you begin to inquire if any tradition, if any, the faintest records, can throw any light upon these habitations of men of another age. Is there no scope, beside these mounds, for imagination and for contemplation of the past? The men, their joys, their sorrows, their bones, are all buried together. But the grand features of nature remain. There is the beautiful prairie over which they "strutted through life's poor play." The forests, the hills, the mounds, lift their heads in unalterable repose, and furnish the same sources of contemplation to us that they did to those generations that have passed away.

These mounds must date back to remote depths in the olden time. From the ages of the trees on them, we can trace them back six hundred years, leaving it entirely to the imagination to descend further into the depths of time beyond. And yet, after the rains, the washing, and the crumbling of so many ages, many of them are still twenty-five feet high. Some of them are spread over an extent of acres. I have seen, great and small, I should suppose, a hundred. Though diverse in position and form, they all have an uniform character. They are, for the most part, in rich soils, and in conspicuous situations. Those on the Ohio are covered with very large trees. But in the prairie regions, where I have seen the greatest numbers, they are covered with tall grass, and are generally near beaches, which indicate the former courses of the rivers, in the finest situations for present culture; and the greatest population clearly has been in those very positions where the most dense future population will be.

FASHION AND RUIN versus INDUSTRY AND INDEPENDENCE.

We have not the elements on which to base the calculation; but we may assume that there are in the United States a hundred thousand young ladies, at least, brought up to do nothing except dress and pursue amusement. Another hundred thousand learn music, dancing, and what are called the fashionable accomplishments. It has been said that "revolutions never move backwards." It is equally true of emulation of the fashion. The few opulent, who can afford to be good for nothing, precede. Another class presses as closely as they can upon their steps; and the contagious mischief spreads downward, till the fond father, who lays everything under contribution to furnish the means for purchasing a piano and hiring a music master for his daughters, instead of being served, when he comes in from the plough, by the ruined favorites for whom be has sacrificed so much, finds that a servant must be hired for the young ladies.

Here is not the end of the mischief. Every one knows that mothers and daughters give the tone and laws-more unalterable than those of the Medes and Persians-to society. Here is the root of the matter, the spring of bitter waters. Here is the origin of the complaint of hard times, bankruptcies, greediness, avarice, and the horse-leech cry "Give, give!" Here is the reason why every man lives up to his income, and so many beyond it. Here is the reason why the young trader, starting on credit, and calling himself a merchant, hires and furnishes such a house as if he really was one, fails, and gives to his creditors a beggarly account of empty boxes and misapplied sales. He has married a wife whose vanity and extravagance are fathomless, and his ruin is explained. Hence the general and prevalent evil of the present times, extravagance-conscious shame of the thought of being industrious and useful. the concealment of these, their good deeds, with as much care as if they were crimes, by so many thousand young ladies, who have not yet been touched by the extreme of modern degeneracy, and who still occasionally apply their hands to domestic employment. Every body is ashamed not to be expensive and fashionable; and every one seems equally ashamed of honest industry. *

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Hence

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I cannot conceive that mere idlers, male or female, can have respect enough for themselves to be comfortable.

I have no

conception of a beautiful woman, or a fine man, in whose eye, in whose port, in whose whole expression, this sentiment does not stand embodied: "I am called by my Creator to duties; I have employment on the earth; my sterner, but more enduring pleasures are in discharging my duties."

Compare the sedate expression of this sentiment in the countenance of man or woman, when it is known to stand, as the index of character and the fact, with the superficial gaudiness of a simple, good-for-nothing belle, who disdains usefulness and employment, whose empire is a ball-room, and whose subjects dandies, as silly and as useless as herself. Who, of the two, has most attractions for a man of sense? The one a helpmate, a fortune in herself, who can aid to procure one, if the husband has it not; who can soothe him under the loss of it, and, what is more, aid him to regain it; and the other a painted butterfly, for ornament only during the vernal and sunny months of prosperity, and then not becoming a chrysalis, an inert moth in adversity, but a croaking, repining, ill-tempered termagant, who can only recur to the days of her shortlived triumph, to embitter the misery, and poverty, and hopelessness of a husband, who, like herself, knows not to dig, and is ashamed to beg.

We are obliged to avail ourselves of severe language in appli cation to a deep-rooted malady. We want words of power. We need energetic and stern applications. No country ever verged more rapidly towards extravagance and expense. In a young republic, like ours, it is ominous of anything but good. Men of thought, and virtue, and example, are called upon to look to this evil. Ye patrician families, that croak, and complain, and forebode the downfall of the republic, here is the origin of your evils. Instead of training your son to waste his time, as an idle young gentleman at large; instead of inculcating on your daughter, that the incessant tinkling of a harpsichord, or a scornful and lady-like toss of the head, or dexterity in waltzing, are the chief requisites to make her way in life; if you can find no better employment for them, teach him the use of the grabbing hoe, and her to make up garments for your servants. Train your son and daughter to an employment, to frugality, to hold the high front, and to walk the fearless step of independence. When your children have these possessions, you may go down to the grave in peace, as regards their temporal fortunes.

Western Review.

THE SHORES OF THE OHIO.

The weather up to a couple of days of milder and lighter

It was now the middle of November. this time had been, with the exception of fog and rain, delightful. The sky has a azure than that of the Northern States. The wide, clean sandbars stretching for miles together, and now and then a flock of wild geese, swans, or sand-hill cranes, and pelicans, stalking along on them; the infinite varieties of form of the towering bluffs; the new tribes of shrubs and plants on the shores; the exuberant fertility of the soil, evidencing itself in the natural as well as cultivated vegetation; in the height and size of the corn, of itself alone a matter of astonishment to an inhabitant of the Northern States; in the thrifty aspect of the young orchards, literally bending under their fruit; the surprising size and rankness of the weeds, and, in the inclosures where cultivation had been for a while suspended, the matted abundance of every kind of vegetation that ensued-all these circumstances united to give a novelty and freshness to the scenery. The bottom forests everywhere display the huge sycamore, the king of the western forest, in all places an interesting tree, but particularly so here, and in autumn, when you see its white and long branches among its red and yellow fading leaves. You may add, that in all the trees that have been stripped of their leaves, you see them crowned with verdant tufts of the viscus or mistletoe, with its beautiful white berries, and their trunks entwined with grape-vines, some of them in size not much short of the human body. To add to this union of pleasant circumstances, there is a delightful temperature of the air, more easily felt than described. In New England, when the sky was partially covered with fleecy clouds, and the wind blew very gently from the southwest, I have sometimes had the same sensations from the temperature there. A slight degree of languor ensues; and the irritability that is caused by the rougher and more bracing air of the north, and which is more favorable to physical strength and activity than enjoyment, gives place to a tranquillity highly propitious to meditation. There is something, too, in the gentle and almost imperceptible motion, as you sit on the deck of the boat, and see the trees apparently moving by you, and new groups of scenery still opening upon your eye, together with the view of these ancient and magnificent forests, which

the axe has not yet despoiled, the broad and beautiful river, the earth and the sky, which render such a trip at this season the very element of poetry.

CHARACTER OF THE INDIAN.

An Indian seldom jests. He usually speaks low, and under his breath. Loquacity is with him an indication of being a trifling character, and of deeds inversely less as his words are more. The young men, and even the boys, have a sullen, moody, and unjoyous countenance; and seem to have little of that elastic gayety with which the benevolence of Providence has endowed the first days of the existence of most other beings. In this general remark, we ought not, perhaps, to include the squaw, who shows some analogy of feeling to the white female.

The males evidently have not the quick sensibilities, the acute perceptions, of most other races. They do not easily sympathize with what is enjoyment or suffering about them. Nothing but an overwhelming excitement can arouse them. They seem callous to all the passions, but rage. Every one has remarked how little surprise they express for whatever is new, strange, or striking. True, it is partially their pride that induces them to affect this indifference-for, that it is affected, we have had numberless opportunities to discover. It is, with them, not only pride, but calculation, to hold in seeming contempt things which they are aware they cannot obtain and possess. But they seem to be born with an instinctive determination to be independent, if possible, of nature and society, and to concentrate within themselves an existence, which, at any moment, they seem willing to lay down.

Their impassible fortitude and endurance of suffering, their contempt of pain and death, invest their character with a kind of moral grandeur. Some part of this may be the result of their training, discipline, and exercise of self-control; but it is to be doubted whether some part be not the result of a more than ordinary degree of physical insensibility. It has been said, but with how much truth we do not pretend to say, that, in undergoing amputation, and other surgical operations, their nerves do not shrink, or show the same tendency to spasms, with those of the whites. When the savage-to explain his insensibility to cold-called upon the white man to recollect how little his own face was affected by it, in consequence of its constant exposure, the savage added, "My body is all face."