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of the fittings and furniture of his church, as likely to keep away the poor, of whom I saw none present at either of the services. To which he replied that as to the soft carpets and cushions they were put there by his congregation, who built and fitted the church at their own expense, and after their own fancy, and were proud of having it as comfortable as money could make it, and he had no voice in the matter; and as for the poor, two-thirds of his people lived on weekly wages, and were in fact the poor of Chicago. "What! those men and women I see now, going away from church?" "Certainly," he said. There was not a man amongst them who was not at least as well dressed as either of us. Can it be that there are really no poor in such a city? was the problem which occurred to me, and to which my short stay did not enable me to get an answer satisfactory to myself. But it did give me enough insight into the character and habits of the people to make their splendid rally after the great fire a matter of no surprise. Probably Mr. Collyer's congregation have lost everything, and have had to begin life again; but I venture to predict that, in another eighteen months or so, the visitor to Chicago will find that they have put him back in at least as fine a church as that in which I had the privilege of worshipping with them a year ago.

GALENA proved to be, like most border towns, a city with a great future history. As yet it presents no feature of greater interest than the solid red-brick house, with green latticed blinds to the windows, standing on one of the hills over which the town straggles, which the citizens have presented to General Grant. But there are fine big public schools-the universal feature of Western towns, where the biggest and best building is always the school-and comfortablelooking residences on the hills, and manufactories more or less developed, and wharfs for lumber and other produce by the side of the rather doleful

looking stream which connects it with the Mississippi. Up and down this stream run steamers of somewhat oldfashioned build it seemed to us, on the look-out, of course, as we all were, for the "Prairie Bell." I doubt whether I should put my money on Galena if I were bound for settlement in the West; but the citizens, to judge by the one or two we met, are not of this advice, and believe in the future of their own city with a faith which seems to go a long way towards making its forecastings come out true.

It is undoubtedly the centre of a rich mineral district, indeed one may say exceptionally rich, for it would seem that silver grows there. A shaft near the town was abandoned for some years. When opened again lately, an old chain, which had been left hanging by the former explorers, was found coated with silver instead of the futile rust of the Old World! I ventured to cross-examine the mining engineer (a matter-of-fact, successful person) who told me the story, and was convinced he was not joking, and believed himself that all metals grew.

But the most amusing case of faith in Galena that we came across, was that of one, whom I may perhaps call a typical Western adventurer.

He came out young, and had tried many ways of life, including that of undertaker, encouraged to this particular branch of business by a serious epidemic. As the ordinary funeral apparatus was scarce in Illinois at that time, he converted a light waggon he had into a hearse by the help of some black trappings, and in it he drove a famous old trotter which he had brought from the east. The trade throve with him, until one day, when he was called on to convey a well-known settler, and justice of the peace, to his last resting-place. There would seem to have been a considerable gathering of waggon-owning neighbours to the ceremony in question, and, when the procession started, one or two of them kept pressing up on the flanks of the hearse. Somehow the pace would keep quickening, till at last, about a mile from the cemetery, in order

to hold his place at all, the undertaker was obliged to drop his hands, shove out his feet, and cry "g-lang" to his old trotter. He brought up at the cemetery with a clear lead, though the chief mourner made pretty good time; but, possibly in consequence of an accident which happened to the coffin, or because the epidemic abated, soon after left his mournful occupation. Turning his attention to mining and land investment, he became the convert of an ingenious mining speculator and theorist, who has established, to his own satisfaction, that Galena and the immediate neighbourhood are the heaviest part of the known world, and will, therefore, prove the richest in metals. From a cursory perusal of the pamphlet in which the proofs are given, I gather the argument to be, that the present rotatory motion of the earth makes it certain that the weight is pretty evenly divided, and that America is, in fact, about as heavy as the three old continents taken together. But, having regard to the immense disproportion between the aggregate superficial area of Europe and Asia, and that of North America, it is clear that the latter must be composed of vastly heavier material; otherwise the world would be lopsided, and its motion entirely different from what we experience. This extra weight can only be caused by an immense preponderance of metals on the American side, and abstruse calculations show that Galena is the precise spot where the greatest mass of them will be found to exist. I give the information for what it may be worth to intending investors. There are wilder crotchets about in the West by scores.

"We shall be on the Mississippi now in about half an hour," said the President, as we moved out of Galena. The intelligence set us all on the qui vive for the first glimpse of the father of waters, and we swarmed out on the platform in front of our saloon car, as the "Champaign" spun cheerily along the north bank of the sluggish Galena stream. Our first glimpse was a disappointment. As we ran round the

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base of the last of the range of Illinois hills and turned northward, the President pointed across to the west, and said, "There's the river." We looked, and saw a mighty swamp, but not a river, miles and miles of trees, some of them large ones, standing in stagnant water and covered with creepers. river was luckily high, so we got this sight of a forest growing out of water to perfection. Then for a mile or two the land would just manage to assert itself, sometimes becoming sound enough for a few cattle to pick about in a desolate kind of way, and then again mere swamp, only fit for alligators and wild fowl. The former we did not see, as there are none; but numbers of the latter, including canvas-back ducks on their migration southwards, and what I took for a beautiful white heron. The creepers were getting their autumn tints, and, in places, the fine purple tint of the shumack bushes, and the bright yellow of a tall plant like our golden-rod, which grew in great masses, lighted up the dismal swamp, and made it almost cheerful. Presently we began to catch glimpses of the main river, and of what in the distance looked like a bridge of gossamer, over which we were to cross into Iowa. It is a marvel of lightness and strength, 1,700 feet of iron truss work, consisting of light bars and bolts, resting at long intervals on stone piers. There were only two to this Dunluth bridge, though the river is nearly half a mile broad. In the centre of the bridge is a moveable "draw," working on a pivot, to allow of the passage of steamers. The draw is 320 feet in length, and so nicely balanced that a single man can swing it in fine weather. Soon we dived into a tunnel cut through a rocky bluff, and came out suddenly on the bridge itself, over the centre of which a large iron eagle with spreading wings keeps watch over the Mississippi. And a most glorious view he has of it, or, at any rate, we had, up and down the broad stream, flowing between high wooded bluffs, majestic and clear, not yet sullied by Missouri sand, and at this point 1,600 miles from the sea.

The

optimist was evidently impressed as we steamed slowly over the bridge.

"Well," he said at last, "I feel bound to own that your disagreeable bird up there has a right to scream and clap his wings over this bridge."

"I guess you may," said the potentate. "This is ever so much the best thing in bridges you can see on this, or any other continent."

"Come, that's a large order. I've been at Montreal."

"And you did the Victoria bridge there, of course?”

"Yes; and I don't say it's graceful. You may call it ugly, if you like. But those superb granite piers, and the covered iron-way, are about the most remarkable engineering work in the world. I felt that our respectable British beast had a right to roar then."

"Did you? Then I guess he ought to roar on the wrong side of his mouth." "How do you mean ?"

"Why, what did that bridge cost?" "Well, several millions. I don't remember the figures."

"Nor I. But I know that if the Grand Trunk would knock their great stupid pipe to pieces and sell it, they might build a better bridge on this truss system for the cost of the old iron."

"A truss bridge there! pooh, pooh, remember the snow."

"So I do. We've got nearly as much snow here."

"Well-but-confound it, if you have heavy snows, you must keep them off the bridge; you must have a cover, and the cover must be strong enough."

"You don't want any cover at all. Why can't you just let it through, as we do here?"

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world put out. Perhaps he saw this; at any rate he rattled on :

"Well, now, you mustn't grudge us our Mississippi. It's something like our backbone, you see, and whenever we think of it we feel big. We all do so, I tell you. I remember when I was at Singapore I used to go to a tavern down by the port, which was the house of call of the merchant captains. Your skippers always mustered strong there, and one day after dinner they got over their grog to canvassing the navies of all the world. They soon made a clean sweep, I tell you, of all the rest, and left the British navy riding alone on the bosom of the ocean. There was a long yellow chap in one corner, a tough, silent, double-jointed fellow. I could see in a moment he hailed from somewhere within sight of Plymouth Rock. Well, he sat there hitching and wincing, till first he couldn't drink, and then he couldn't chaw, and at last up he jumped, slapped his cap on to his head, and roared out, By thunder, you Britishers, I jest tell you this. Thar's steamers enough on our Mississippi to tow your cussed thundering little island across the Atlantic without your knowing it.' And then he made sail for the door. And now here we are at Dubuque, and you're going to get prairie chicken for tea."

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So we landed, and walked into the town while tea was being prepared at the railway restaurants. The prairie chickens, for which the Vice-President had wired on, had to be split and broiled, the delicious fashion in which they are served; so we had a spare halfhour to inspect our first half-settled town. And quaint, pushing, go-ahead, slip-shod places they are, one and all. Dubuque streets are laid out as wide as Portland Place, and have street cars running in the middle of them, but the rest of the carriage-way is a slough of despond, often axle-tree deep in mud. The side pavements are of wood. In the main street there was a wholesale silversmith's store with a splendid show of goods, and several great dry-goods and grocery stores; then a lot of dirty

wooden hovels, or a blank lot with holes full of water; then a newspaper office (there are three dailies in Dubuque, and in the copy of an evening paper which we bought were quotations from that morning's London Morning Post). Every house, big or small, was placarded in huge letters with the owner's name and trade; amongst others, greatly to the confusion of our English notions, "H. Tuttle, Justice of the Peace and Notary Public," announced himself over a door from which projected a barber's pole, and a darkie invited us to be shaved. Here, too, we saw for the first time trains of emigrants starting for the prairies, in their long covered waggons loaded with lumber for their first houses, women, children (in plenty, and healthy, happy-looking little folk), and a few household goods. The teams were mostly of serviceable well-bred horses, and a few cattle followed each waggon. We got back to the station hotel much interested, and just in time to fall heavily upon our chickens and beef steak. After tea we went "aboard," and received the M.C. of Dubuque and several of the principal citizens for a smoke in our saloon. Our talk till late in the night was of the wonders of the West, and of the certainty of Dubuque becoming before long the chief of these wonders. Then our guests went "ashore," and we turned in, while the "Champaign" got up steam and travelled away westward into the night.

It was early morning when we drew up at Fort Dodge. Not many years have passed since the spot was merely known as one where a garrison of a hundred men were kept to serve as a breakwater against Indian forays; but the settler and the locomotive have pushed on so fast that it is no use looking for a red man now-a-days on the east side of the Missouri.

Stepping off the "Champaign" on to the station platform, I saw the optimist and the struggler intently staring at the little station-house, a very ordinary looking building of roughhewn whitish stone.

"I say," called out the struggler, "just

look here. The Vice has been telling us that the ground about this place has been found to be one mass of gypsum, and the station itself is built of solid gypsum blocks."

"Gypsum! What's gypsum, optimist?"

"Something to do with plaster of Paris, isn't it? But I'm past the age for examination questions. Ask the struggler."

"Gypsum is a mineral consisting of sulphate of lime mixed with twenty-one per cent. of water," said the struggler with mock solemnity. "The Vice told me so, and he always speaks like an Encyclopædia, you know. And crushed gypsum makes a very fine manure ; and Fort Dodge is going to stuff its own and the railway company's pockets by selling it; and finally this station-house will be ground up, and utilized as a tonic for over-worked and exhausted prairie soils. Not just yet, though, luckily for us. We're to be on genuine unadulterated prairie before breakfast is over."

"Yes, sir," broke in the Vice, coming up at this moment from a visit of inspection of station buildings and rolling stock, such as he never failed to make at every halting-place,-" before this year Fort Dodge was the terminus of civilization and the Illinois Central in this location. But we wanted to tap the Upper Missouri: so this summer we got a track pushed out right across country, a matter of near a hundred and forty miles, to Sioux City on the river, and the route is hardly so settled up yet but what you'll find some pretty natural prairie on it, I guess, if you care for that sort of thing."

I, for one, owe many a pleasant hour to Messrs. Cooper and Mayne Reid, so no wonder that I cared enough for "that sort of thing" to cut breakfast very short this morning, and take my cigar out upon that best of travelling observatories, the front car platform.

The look of the country changed rapidly as we left Fort Dodge behind us. Steaming past an emigrant party just breaking up night-quarters and starting their file of bullock teams west

wards along a black oozy trail, and past a thoroughly Irish-looking colony of shanties, that no doubt owed existence to the navvies employed on the new line, we ran out upon a dreary, treeless, undulating plain, where the only signs of man's work and life were the threadlike track of the railroad, and here and there in the distance the outline of some solitary settler's home. We were the centre of a huge circular disk of tangled grass, of which the rails, stretching on both sides with mathematical straightness to the horizon, formed a diameter. Rank weeds and grass everywhere, up to the very edges of the unfenced track, and not even a prairie chicken on the wing to give animation to the dull expanse of downs. And this was 'rolling prairie'! Well, of all the uninteresting places

"Guess you want a friend to play showman," said the Vice cheerily, behind me. "Open prairie is just like one of those school-books that must have a commentator to make one appreciate them, that's a fact. The bare text don't go down well, eh? Own up, now."

I confessed that I had begun to think the scenery a trifle monotonous.

"Monotonous ? Ah, I see you're looking at the track. Well, it is rather straight perhaps. We're now running over a fifty-mile stretch, that, bar one trifling curve, is as dead straight a line as can be drawn on this continent. But what would you have? In England, you first let your country towns and villages get built up just where they'd a mind, and then had to run your railroads in the awkwardest inconvenientest zigzags to suit them all. Out here in the West we've a different plan, which the old countries would follow too, I warrant, if they could only clear the table and have a fresh deal all round. We fix on a likely route for settlers and traffic, build a bee-line track along it for there is seldom anything to go out of the direct way foropen depôts (what you call stations) at intervals, and raise a healthy crop of towns as fast as young 'uns grow

mustard on a piece of wet flannel. Towns can't be, in fact, on these prairies till the railroads are built." "Why not?"

"What are you to build them of? Dame Nature laid out the soil for large farming, and hasn't provided an ounce of stone, or clay, or timber on it. Look there to the left; there's a specimen of what we call a sod-shanty,-turf walls, you see, and grass thatching,-the only sort of living-place a settler can put up in pre-locomotive days; and a rough time some of them have, I tell you. Afterwards, when we railroad people come along, about the first loads we carry West are lumber from Wisconsin and Michigan. And then the tide of settlers does begin flowing, if you like. Whole families come out, each with their frame-house, in numbered pieces, stowed in the baggage-cars like other traps, and a lot-certificate from our land office in their pockets, and almost before you've time to turn off steam a whole prairie has vanished into arables and streets. We shall be at one of our new towns, warranted this season's growth, in a few minutes, and you shall see for yourself whether I'm romancing."

"Perish the thought, O most sober and attractive of Vices. But don't I see a clump of young trees in front there?" You see,

"Another importation. when it rains or blows in these parts, it isn't a one-horse kind of raining or blowing by any means. So, as there is no natural shelter for man or beast, the settler just makes one, by planting a good thick screen of cotton-wood alongside his farm buildings. But I must go in and scheme out to-morrow's run with the President. Guess you'll right down hate the prairie if I lecture you any more about it."

"On the contrary; your talk has had on me that most notable effect of a cold tub, out of which, someone wisely says, you never take the same ideas that you carried into it."

The slamming of the car door announced that my friend had lost the compliment of my last remark. Feel

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