The Choir Invisible

Many another group and solitary figure he saw to remind him of the turbulent

history of the time and place. A parson, who had been the calmest of Indian

fighters, had lost all self-control as he contended out in the road with

another parson for the use of Dr. Watts' hymns instead of the Psalms of

David. Near by, listening to them, and with a wondering eye on all he saw in

the street, stood a French priest of Bordeaux, an exile from the fury of the

avenging jacobins. There were brown flatboatmen, in weather-beaten felt

hats, just returned by the long overland trip from New Orleans and

discussing with tobacco merchants the open navigation of the Mississippi;

and as they talked, up to them hurried the inventor Edward West, who said

with excitement that if they would but step across the common to the town

branch, he would demonstrate by his own model that some day navigation would

be by steam: whereat they all laughed kindly at him for a dreamer, and went

to laugh at the action of his mimic boat, moving hither and thither over the

dammed water of the stream. Sitting on a stump apart from every one, his dog

at his feet, his rifle across his lap, an aged backwoodsman surveyed in

sorrow the civilization that had already destroyed his hunting and that was

about sending him farther west to the depths of Missouri--along with the

buffalo. His glance fell with disgust upon two old gentlemen in

knee-breeches who met and offered each other their snuff-boxes, with a deep

bow. He looked much more kindly at a crave, proud Chickasaw hunter, who

strode by with inward grief and shame, wounded by the robbery of his people.

Puritans from New England; cavaliers from Virginia; Scotch-Irish from

Pennsylvania; mild-eyed trappers and bargemen from the French hamlets of

Kaskaskia and Cahokia; wood-choppers; scouts; surveyors; swaggering

adventurers; land-lawyers; colonial burgesses,--all these mingled and

jostled, plotted and bartered, in the shops, in the streets, under the

trees.

And everywhere soldiers and officers of the Revolution--come West with their

families to search for homes, or to take possession of the grants made them

by the Government. In the course of a short walk John Gray passed men who

had been wounded in the battle of Point Pleasant; men who had waded behind

Clark through the freezing marshes of the Illinois to the storming of

Vincennes; men who had charged through flame and smoke up the side of King's

Mountain against Ferguson's Carolina loyalists; men who with chilled ardour

had let themselves be led into the massacre of the Wabash by blundering St.

Clair; men who with wild thrilling pulses had rushed to victory behind mad

Antony Wayne.