right to the land upon which they had settled, and further with the expectation that he would disobey this order as he had a previous one. As I was considered to be Lyon's aider and abettor, I was ordered to accompany, as medical officer, this expedition of a company of infantry against two men and some women and children.

But Lyon knew the difference between an outrage and a violation of law. He had been informed by his military superiors that the land upon which the Dixons had settled was a part of the military reservation. Whether it was or was not was none of his business. That was a matter that specially concerned the Dixons, and that might safely be left for them to bring to the notice of the highest authority. So he and his command proceeded to obey the order. The Dixons were at first a little disposed to resist, but Lyon told them that if they fired on his men he would return the fire, and that as to the ultimate result there would be no doubt So they submitted. They went off, and Lyon, with yokes of oxen, tore down the houses, and effectually demolished them. Then after his bloodless victory, he marched back, and set himself to work preparing charges against the commanding officer of corruption and of other crimes, upon which he was not long afterward tried and dismissed from the service.

Lyon was a witness at this trial, and before he gave his testimony was asked by the Judge-Advocate whether he believed in a God who would punish falsehood, with the view of excluding his testimony if he answered in the negative, as it was doubtless thought he would. But Lyon went into a long disquisition-he liked nothing better than such an opportunity on the subject of his religious belief, or rather disbelief, the gist of which was that he believed that falsehood would be punished in this world, and it was decided to allow him to testify.

Lyon was possessed of a great love for science, and was especially interested in natural history, though he knew little of it beyond its familiar every-day features. He was a staunch believer in the doctrine of evolution before Darwin published his views. He had read something of Lamarck's ideas, and had full faith in their correctness. Upon one occasion I was performing some experiments with black snakes, during which I daily subjected them to the influence of an atmosphere of oxygen. While they were inhaling the stimulating gas the animals displayed a degree of activity altogether in excess of that that was natural to them, darting here and there about the glass case in which they were confined, and coiling and uncoiling themselves with lightning like rapidity. Lyon used to come and watch them, and showed the greatest interest in their actions. When

I had finished my investigations I let them go, and when Lyon came the

next morning to see them, as he expected, under the influence of oxygen, he was much disappointed to find the cage empty. "I was performing experiments of my own with the snakes," he said. "If you had kept them here a little while longer I am very sure legs would have grown out of their bellies just as wings have been developed on fishes that through the course of ages have been stranded on the shore and that are now birds."

I laughed at this theory, but he stuck to it, and argued with considerable force and intelligence in support of the doctrine that organic beings owed their forms to the circumstances in which they were placed, and the demands made upon them by the conditions of their existence. And this was several years before Darwin published his views on the subject, though of course many years after Lamarck gave expression to his theory. Lyon was familiar with Lamarck's ideas, and had besides a good practical acquaintance with geology.

The chief mental characteristics of Lyon, as I knew him a few years before the civil war, in which he lost his life, were intensity and conscientiousness. Whatever he felt he felt with a force that carried everything before it. There was no middle ground with him in any matter that engaged his attention, and he conceived that it was his duty to enforce his doctrines or his ideas upon all with whom he came in contact, even to the extent of being offensive. At the same time he was possessed of as tender a heart as ever beat in a man's breast. He was particularly fond of children, and always expressed the utmost respect for women, though probably he would never have married. He was as strong in his friendships as he was in his enmities. He was one to be trusted implicitly to any extent. He was truth personified.

As a soldier he was one of the strictest disciplinarians I have ever encountered, and was not at all times, when acting under impulse or excitement, just in his treatment of his men. There was, in fact, with all his kindness of heart, a vein of cruelty in his disposition so far as those were concerned whom he thought had behaved badly. I am quite sure that if he had possessed the power he would have killed every upholder of what he called the "Slave power" upon whom he could have laid his hands. Indeed, I have often heard him exclaim that they had equitably forfeited their lives, and that they were outlaws, that any one ought to be empowered to destroy. Douglas, Pierce, Buchanan, and all the advocates of the "Kansas-Nebraska Bill," met with his scorn and contempt, and no words short of oaths--for he never swore-were too strong for him to use to express his condemnation of what he conceived was their treason to the cause of freedom.

He frequently lamented the violence of his temper, that so often led him into the perpetration of unreasonable and unjust acts, and he was always ready to make all the amends in his power for any outrages into which it might have betrayed him. During the few years that we were associated at Fort Riley he certainly succeeded in overcoming, to a great extent, his natural tendency to break out into explosions of rage.

As is well known, he, by his decision and firmness, kept the State of Missouri from going out of the Union. He lost his life at the battle of Wilson's Creek, while in command of the Federal forces, gaining a victory, however, over an army threefold greater than his own. Had he lived, there can be no doubt that he would have come to the very top of the pyramid of those gallant commanders who were most successful in the field. And he would have reached the apex, not because of any great military skill that he possessed, but because he had in him an indomitable spirit that was always awake, a fixity of purpose that never faltered, and a courage that was never for an instant met by the slightest feeling of fear. He did not know what fear was.

Milian Atammand бидеть делале я Вид

Saul

THE ADVENTURE OF MONSIEUR DE BELLE-ISLE

Distant from the country of the Natchitoches Indians one hundred and fifty leagues to the northwest, some one hundred and sixty years ago, lay the land of the Attakapas nation, of whom the old French historians of Louisiana relate that they were anthropophagi, or man-eaters. It was among these people that Monsieur de Belle-Isle, Chevalier of the royal and military Order of St. Louis, and subsequently Major-General of the troops of the marine in Louisiana and Major of New Orleans, an officer who served for forty-five years in the colony with the highest merit and distinction, dwelt for two years a captive and the slave of a widow of the nation.

The story of Monsieur de Belle-Isle occupies a special place in the chronicles and records of the early annals of Louisiana. It even formed the theme for two or three sentimental romances and idylls. Its currency

in France may have been due to the contrast it presented to the ordinary phases of life familiar to the courtiers of Louis XV., who, cloyed perhaps with the monotony of the dissipations of a sumptuous civilization and the artificial atmosphere of life at Versailles, saw in the narrative of a youthful French officer of noble family, dwelling, an enforced guest, for two years among cannibals (real or so declared) in the primitive simplicity of the golden age the slave of an elderly widow-a piquant change from their own vapid existence.

In one of the several versions of the Chevalier's adventure, a copperplate engraving represents him as parting from the widow-a tearful scene indeed, with a foreground of human arms and legs lying about, mute witnesses to the anthropophagic tastes of the Attakapas. The "Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes Occidentales," written by the Chevalier Bossu, captain of troops of the marine in Louisiana, has preserved this pictorial reminiscence of Monsieur de Belle-Isle's experiences.

It was in the year 1719 that the Chevalier's fortunes led him, an ambitious young ensign in the service of the India Company, to the then almost untrodden wilds-untrodden by the foot of the European—of Louisiana. New Orleans, at that time a collection of mere huts, barracks and officers' quarters, with an occasional house offering some pretensions to architectural symmetry, had been founded only the previous year, and the seat of government was still at Biloxi, on the Mississippi Sound, where Bienville resided and exercised the duties of governor of the colony. Monsieur de

VOL. XIII.-No. 3.-17

Belle-Isle had sailed from the port of L'Orient, in France, in an expedition composed of a thousand people-soldiers, civilians, etc.-sent out by the company to people the colony. The expedition was bound for the Mississippi and New Orleans; but even as, many years previously, La Salle had missed the mouth of the great river, so was the ship on which the Chevalier sailed driven by currents and contrary winds far to the westward. It was at the Bay of St. Bernard (now Matagorda Bay in Texas), finally, that the captain of the bark, the drinking-water having given out, came to anchor and sent the ship's yawl ashore to obtain water.

Taking advantage of this temporary stoppage, Monsieur de Belle-Isle, Monsieur de Charleville, a Canadian and an experienced explorer, the Sieur Silvestre, a sergeant of the military detachment, and another officer, disembarked, with a view of passing the intervening hours, before the vessel's departure, in the chase. The ship was to sail the next day, and the captain informed them that in the evening he would discharge several musket-shots so that they might know their bearings, and on the following day he would fire the cannon as a signal for the bark's departure two hours later.

Monsieur de Belle-Isle and two of his companions, contrary to the advice of the fourth man of the party, Monsieur de Charleville, who, however, accompanied them, plunged into the depths of the forest in pursuit of a deer. Sundown found them lost in the intricacies of the woods. They heard, it is true, the firing of the muskets, as the captain had promised, but these discharges, like will-o'-the-wisps of sound, only served to lure them to their ruin, for, as the reports seemed to them to come from an opposite direction, they were led by the delusive sounds still deeper into the gloomy forest. As they went onward they listened, but in vain, for the beating of the waves on the shore. Finally night overtook them, and they slept where the shadows found them.

It was

At daybreak their ears were greeted by a remote, muffled roar. the discharge of the cannon-the signal that in two hours the ship would sail. The report of the cannon, like the musket-shots of the preceding evening, only caused the belated men to wander still farther from the shore. The virgin forest, as if glad of the companionship of these men of a race strange to it, opened its arms before them. They entered its embraces and were lost.

Meanwhile, the captain, although impatient at the delay, waited for them until the afternoon; and, at last, when the rays of the evening sun fell aslant, like arrows of light, through the tops of the trees nearest to the beach, the ship's sails were spread and her prow was turned to sea.