Page 353 - Third Book of Reading Lessons

352 T IRD BOOK OF
that were thrown up by our people during the war of the revolution. None of those monuments date back more than fty years. These mounds must date back to remote depths in the olden time.
3. From the ages of the trees on them, and from other data, we can trace them back six hundred years, leaving it entirely to the imagination to de­ scend rther into the depths of time beyond. And yet, after the rains, the washing, and the crumbling of so many ages, many of them are still twenty- ve feet high. All of them are, incomparably, more conspicuous monuments than the works which I just noticed. Some of them are spread over an extent of acres. I have seen, great and small, I should sup­
pose, a hundred. Though diverse in position and rm, they all have an uni rm character.
4. They are, r the most part, in rich soils, and in conspicuous situations. Those on the Ohio are covered with very large trees. But in the prairie regions, where I have seen the greatest numbers, they are covered with tall grass, and generally near · benches,-.which indicate the rmer courses of the rivers,-in the nest situations r present culture ; and the greatest population clea y has been in those very positions where the most dense ture popula­ tion will be. * . *
5. The English, when they sneer at our country, speak of it as steril in moral interest. "It has," say they, :' no monuments, no ruins, none of the massive remains of rmer ages; no castles, no mouldering abbeys, no baronial towers anq dungeons; npthing to connect the imagination and the heart with the past ; no recollections of rmer ages, to associate the past with the future."