The Pyramids of Egypt. 359 



THE PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT. 



It is claimed that in the same year that William Penn, of peaceful mem- 

 ory, founded the Quaker city of Philadelphia, the first settlements of the 

 French were also made in the Mississippi Valley by the establishment of 

 the missions and villages of Notre Dajnc de Cascasquias and Sainte Familie 

 de Kasquias (as Pittman calls them). Both of these now unimportant and 

 somewhat dilapidated hamlets are situated in that part of Illinois, which, 

 either from the Nile-like fertility of its river-banks, or a former scarcity of 

 spelling-books among its inhabitants, has long been known as " Egypt," 

 and even at this day has its Cairo, Thebes, and I know not what other 

 namesakes of its African original. 



The French settlers, coming, in part at least, from orchard-bearing Nor- 

 mandy, had a proper appreciation of pomological products, and, if we 

 may trust tradition, planted orchards or fruit-gardens, probably with seed- 

 lings grown by themselves, some remains of which endure even to this day 

 in some stately pear-trees known among pruning pomologists as the Pyra- 

 mids of Egypt. 



While year by year we plant our modern dwarfs and standards, and early 

 mourn over blighted hopes, these pioneers of generations ago still stand 

 strong like hale old patriarchs among an effete and degenerate race of 

 descendants. 



All the old French settlements in Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, and, I 

 presume, other States, have their old pear-trees ; but I have seen and heard 

 of the most of these in the old French settlements of the Upper Missis- 

 sippi. 



These trees are all found on the " American Bottom," a strip of alluvial 

 or lacustrine deposit lying on the banks of the Mississippi, opposite St. 

 Louis, and extending from Alton to Chester, a length of perhaps seventy- 

 five miles, with a width of from four to eight. It is interspersed with nu- 

 merous ponds and marshes, that in former, and even in later years, render 

 it a breeding-place of chills and fever, mud-turtles and frogs ; but its more 

 elevated portions have a soil of unsurpassed depth, warmth, and fertility. 

 There is no limit, practically, to the downward extension of the deep-rooted 



