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At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, aman in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecynap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He wasunaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger.In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favorite steamer Fidele, on thepoint of starting for New Orleans. Stared at, but unsaluted, with the air of one neither courting norshunning regard, but evenly pursuing the path of duty, lead it through solitudes or cities, he held onhis way along the lower deck until he chanced to come to a placard nigh the captain's office, offering a reward for the capture of a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived fromthe East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein his originalityconsisted was not clearly given; but what purported to be a careful description of his personfollowed.As if it had been a theatre-bill, crowds were gathered about the announcement, and among themcertain chevaliers, whose eyes, it was plain, were on the capitals, or, at least, earnestly seeking sight ofthem from behind intervening coats; but as for their fingers, they were enveloped in some myth;though, during a chance interval, one of these chevaliers somewhat showed his hand in purchasingfrom another chevalier, ex-officio a peddler of money-belts, one of his popular safe-guards, whileanother peddler, who was still another versatile chevalier, hawked, in the thick of the throng, thelives of Measan, the bandit of Ohio, Murrel, the pirate of the Mississippi, and the brothers Harpe, the Thugs of the Green River country, in Kentucky-creatures, with others of the sort, one and allexterminated at the time, and for the most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the sameregions, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem cause for unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those who think that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, thefoxes increase.

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