“Before us, and separating the shore from us, was a part of the river yet to be forded. At an early hour the teams were brought from the valley-neck of land, where they had found scant pasturage for the night, and attached to the wagon. We soon made the opposite bank. Before us was quite a steep declivity of some two hundred feet, by the way of the road. We had proceeded but a short distance when our galled and disarranged teams refused to go. We were again compelled to unload, and with our own hands and strength to bear the last parcel to the top of the hill. After this we found it next to impossible to compel the teams to drag the empty wagon to the summit.
“After reaching the other bank we camped, and remained through the heat of the day intending to travel the next night by moonlight. About two hours and a half before sunset we started, and just before the sun sank behind the western hills we had made the ascent of the hill and about one mile advance. Here we halted to reload the remainder of our baggage.
“The entire ascent was not indeed made until we reached this point, and to it some of our baggage had been conveyed by hand. I now plainly saw a sad, foreboding change in my father’s manner and feelings. Hitherto, amid the most fatiguing labor and giant difficulties, he had seemed generally armed for the occasion with a hopeful countenance and cheerful spirit and manner, the very sight of which had a power to dispel our childish fears and spread contentment and resignation upon our little group. While ascending this hill I saw, too plainly saw, (being familiar, young as I was, with my father’s aptness to express, by the tone of his action and manner, his mental state,) as did my mother also, that a change had come over him. Disheartening and soul-crushing apprehensions were written upon his manner, as if preying upon his mind in all the mercilessness of a conquering despair. There seemed to be a dark picture hung up before him, upon which the eye of his thought rested with a monomaniac intensity; and written thereon he seemed to behold a sad afterpart for himself, as if some terrible event had loomed suddenly upon the field of his mental vision, and though unprophesied and unheralded by any palpable notice, yet gradually wrapping its folds about him, and coming in, as it were, to fill his cup of anguish to the brim. Surely,
“‘Coming events cast their shadows before them.
Who hath companioned a visit from the horn or ivory gate?
Who hath propounded the law that renders calamities gregarious?
Pressing down with yet more woe the heavy laden mourner;
Yea, a palpable notice warneth of an instant danger;
For the soul hath its feelers, cobwebs upon the wings of the wind,
That catch events, in their approach, with sure and sad presentiment.’