about in a country so beautiful and a season so delightful,

that it would have seemed to them a perfect paradise,

but for the savage tribes who hovered about them,

and kept them ever on the

qui vive

.

They soon passed from the immediate embrace of stupendous

heights and dark gorges to a land of sloping

ridges, which divided the country into a hundred luxuriant

vales, composed part of woodland and part of prairie.