wounded. Mr. Mills received a shot that entered under his right shoulderblade and came out through his ribs."

Like William Penn, the judge at first tried a conciliatory policy, though not with the success of the persuasive Quaker, for soon after we find him a convert to the logic of gunpowder and importuning the authorities for more troops. "Beyond all doubt," he writes to Captain Dayton, "we are the most advanced settlement on the frontier of the United States, and yet all our guard is an ensign and twelve men to defend the most perilous post in the Western country. I beg,

sir, to repeat that we are really distressed here for the want of troops. If, therefore, you have influence with General Knox, do prevail with him to order us some further protection."

Soon afterward, things came, indeed, to a crisis, in spite of a personal interview with Black Beard, the Shawanese sachem, who had expressed his willingness to negotiate, though without concealing his mistrust in the pacific overtures of the settlers. "The chief," reports the representative of the colony, "wished to be informed how far I was supported by the United States, and

whether the Thirteen Fires' had sent us hither. I answered in the affirmative, and spread before him the thirteen stripes which I had in a flag then in my camp. I pointed to the troops in their uniform, then on parade, and informed the chief that those were the warriors which the Thirteen Fires kept in constant pay to avenge their quarrels. I also showed him the seal of my commission, on which the American arms are impressed, observing that while the eagle had a branch of a tree as an emblem of peace in one claw, she had strong and sharp arrows in the other, which denoted her power to vanquish her enemies. The chief, who observed the device with great attention, replied, by the interpreter, that he could not perceive any

intimation of peace from the attitude of an eagle bearing a whip in one claw and such a number of arrows in the other, and, with her spread wings, seeming to be wholly bent on war and mischief."

Farther east the table-land still rises, till it culminates in the heights of Mount Lookout and Mount Washington, both exceeding an elevation of five hundred feet above the level of the Ohio. These ridges and the intermediate highlands of East Walnut Hills are dotted with charming villas, many of them sequestered in sylvan dells where the neighborhood of a large city might be forgotten, if it were not for the signal-shrieks of the numerous railroads which converge in the narrow valley between the base of the mountains and the river-shore. The

Little Miami Railroad, which here enters the Ohio Valley, was the first Western road that adopted the system of special passenger-trains, and its nightexpress now carries travellers to the Pennsylvania terminus in less time than the first settlers could reach the next county seat. Only eighty years ago, Major Swan congratulates himself on the rapid transit of an expedition which passed more than a month on the road from Cincinnati to Pittsburg. "We arrived here after a passage of only forty-four days," he writes; "but we exhausted our provisions and groceries, and had to lay in a fresh stock at Marietta, at which place I purchased thirteen pairs of shoes for my men."

Four times within the last ten years the table-land suburbs have received a large access of population by the concourse of sight-seers and of refugees from the devastations of the river-floods. The average depth of the channel varies here from two to three fathoms; yet in the winter of 1876 the river rose forty-eight feet within as many hours; in 1882 it rose nearly fifty feet, in 1883 sixty-eight feet, and in 1884 more than seventy feet. Whole streets of the littoral suburbs were not only flooded, but submerged and obliterated. The rise of the "backwater" turned creeks into rivers, valleys into bays, plains into vast, surging lakes covered with the spoils of a thousand ruined homesteads. Rocks or stanch trees that managed to stand their ground became natural flood-gauges, constantly watched by anxious observers, who knew that every foot of vertical rise meant additional square miles of submerged lowlands, "rich farms swept into the maddened current and gone; a thousand homes, with all their penates, their sweet associations that no relief-committee can restore, all scattered upon the waves and on their way to the Gulf."

Yet to some observers the yearly-increasing magnitude of the visitation had still another meaning, a dire prognostic significance. That winter floods are caused by the destruction of forests in mountain-countries is as well established

as any fact in the physical geography of our planet. European rivers, which once preserved their average level as steadily as the great lakes of our northern frontier, shrink now to humble brooks in summer and deluge their valleys in winter. Qualis æstate, talis solet esse hyeme," ("It is the same in winter as in summer,") says the emperor Julian of the Seine, a river which now varies more than forty feet in the levels of its water-marks. The Mella, an Italian river once famous for its "mellifluous current" and the Arcadian beauty of its shores, has caused more damage by its last inundation than its shore-dwellers can hope to repair in the course of a century. The Po now runs at a level of forty feet above its ancient bed, and still rises by flooding its valley with a yearly deluge of gravel and detritus. Spain, Dalmatia, and Southern France have witnessed similar changes. The Loire has repeatedly caused emigration en masse by totally ruining the bottomland settlements of its upper valley. The Rhone has reduced hundreds of fertile plains to a state of desolation which Blanqui compares to the havoc of the Vandal invasion. But the Rhone drains only eighteen thousand square miles of mountain-lands, while the Upper Ohio, with its mountain-tributaries, embraces a surface of more than forty thousand square miles; and, as the work of forest - destruction is still progressing year after year, the floods of the last decade may be only a playful allusion to the possibilities of the next fifty years. The Ohio does not drain an alpine country, but the Alleghanies are quite as high and steep as the Cévennes, which have repeatedly flooded the valley of the Loire with "torrents that turned whole villages into ruins and a fertile plain into a chaos of débris and diluvium."

The farmers of the Mill Creek Valley have already become familiar with similar scenes. From the Chester Park hippodrome, seven miles north of Cincinnati, through Cummingsville, to the shores of the Ohio, a long stretch of demolished buildings marks the track

of the terrible "backwater" that poured through the mountain-gates of the estuary as if the drainage of the valley had been inverted. The grassy slopes of the foot-hills are smeared with sediment,

the tops of tall trees are festooned with hay and reeds, as if a whirlwind had thus scattered its spoils.

But extremes meet, and, by a strange contrast, this valley of desolation borders

BELLEVUE HOUSE, AND THE UNIVERSITY.

upon the finest highland park on the North-American continent,-the incomparable mountain-suburb of Clifton. I have seen Vaucluse, and the Val d'Arno, and the Hellenen-Thal, near Vienna, but I believe that, even in Europe, Clifton has only one rival,-the mountain-paradise of Wilhelmshöhe, which the Elector of Hesse adorned at the expense of a hundred ill-gotten millions. Imagine

the palaces and gardens of Fifth Avenue transferred to the heart of the Alle

ghanies, and surrounded by stately forests, alternating with lakes, lawns, statues, garden - temples, and botanical parks, with a rivulet in every dell and a boundless prospect from all the heights, and we may form an idea of the results which wealth and the art of landscapegardening can effect in the course of a single generation, even in the bleak latitudes of Upper North America, and perhaps a dim idea of what nature and the art of a hundred garden-loving generations combined may have once produced in the Eden of the Mediter

ranean coast-lands. He who would materialize the spirit of the Orbis Romanus, of "the land still breathing the fragrance of a long-withered paradise, still gilded by the memory of a sun that set two thousand years ago," should visit Hesse-Cassel, in Europe, and the highlands of Clifton, in North America. Clifton contains about twelve hundred acres of land. Ninety years ago, Captain Dayton, the New-Jersey land-speculator, admonished his Western agent not to sell any good Ohio farms at less than forty cents per acre. "You have been selling your lands, I am told, for two shillings specie," he writes from Elizabethtown. "The price at this moment seems to be, and undoubtedly is, a good one; but as much cannot be said of it when you find hereafter that, in consequence of the rise of certificates, another acre in another payment may cost you in specie two shillings and sixpence." Hill-farms, however, still went at the old price; and sixty years ago all Clifton could probably have been bought for three hundred dollars. The present aggregate value of its real estate has been estimated at twenty-five millions. Ten or twelve of its palatial residences would compare favorably with the princely castles of Continental Europe. The mountain-seat of Mr. Henry Probasco is a magnificent structure of blue limestone, in the Anglo-Norman style. The residences of Mr. William Resor, Mr. George Schoenberger, and Mr. Thomas Sherlock, tower high above the trees of the summit-forests, and some of the viaducts and artificial cascades emulate the splendor of Fontainebleau.

The highland road from Clifton to the city is lined with country-seats, and terminates on the esplanade of the "Bellevue House," where visitors may take the cars of the Inclined Plane, or linger to enjoy the view,-a bird's-eye panorama of the northern or upper part of the city and the terraced hill-sides from Cummingsville to Mount Adams. The conspicuous fabric on the slope of the next foot-hill is the "University of Cincinnati," a structure combining all the ugliest features which so often dis

tinguish corporation-buildings from private edifices. An ungainly, top-heavy mass of masonry, it rises from the declivity of a naked mound, like an obelisk stuck into the flank of a sand-hill. In a solitude it would be nothing but a monument of bad taste; but in situ quo it serves at least as an effective foil to the charm of the pretty villas around.

The " Key's House," at the corner of University Lane and the Hamilton Pike, was erected in 1825, having been begun by Martin Baum and completed by Nicholas Longworth, who passed here the last seven years of his life. Another old landmark is the "Home of the Good Shepherd," in the square on Bank Street. It was once the residence of Major Dan Gano. On Third Street, between Elm and Plum, there stands a sample of a style of architecture which once prevailed in all the fashionable city quarters of North America,—a massive, one-story building, with a broad portico and Grecian temple-façades.

Between Clifton Heights and the Mill Creek Valley a long series of hill-side gardens extends along the line of the Miami Canal, which is crossed by numerous viaducts connecting with avenues that lead up to the Clifton table-land and the summit of Mount Auburn. In summer-time the canal, nem. con., serves as a free public bath for all the gamins of the western suburbs, the German truck-farmers of the Mill Creek Valley being the reverse of prejudiced, and the police instructed or permitted to connive. Shoals of splashing youngsters almost obstruct the boat-channel, and the jubilee of the aquatic sports is often heard on the hill-tops of the opposite highlands.

Burnet Woods and Mount Auburn are so blended by shady avenues that picnickers sometimes stray into the private grounds of the splendid mountain-suburb, like the wood-birds that visit their cousins in the martin-boxes. The Cincinnati parks are veritable aviaries; every song-bird is sacred, and even the sparrows follow their naughty pursuits with local impunity; and in the