and turnings, bends for a space westwards. Then you seem to be floating down the current towards a vast canopy of fire and flame and golden glory. There, indeed, you behold a sunset such as the fancy of Turner alone might have pictured, and sought in vain to realize. Trade was dull on the Mississippi. At this early summer season the boats would have been crowded only two years ago by hundreds of Southern families flying from the deadly heats of New Orleans, but now we had scarce a score of passengers on board. There was but little life upon the river; two or three times a-day we passed steamers bound to St. Louis; and sometimes we came upon a string of huge lumberrafts punted cautiously along by gangs of wild-looking red-shirted boatmen. But this was all. Every couple of hours or so, we touched at some small town on the river-side, to take up passengers, of whom there were few forthcoming. These towns are all alike, differing only in size. A long street of low houses, stores, and wharves fronting the river, a large stone building, generally an hotel which has failed, a few back streets running towards the bluff, perhaps a row of villas on the hill-side, and very often a railway depôt ; these are the common characteristics of a Mississippi town. The one beautiful thing about them is their position, nestling as they do at the foot of the cliffs, and this is a beauty which even the ugliness of the towns themselves cannot destroy.

There are still many traces in this part of the Mississippi of the early French settlements. Prairie du Port, Prairie du Chien, and Dubuque are names which bespeak their own origin. Along the river there are several French villages, or rather parts of villages. The inhabitants are a queer race, "jumbos," as the American settlers call them-half French, half negro, and half Indian. In this admixture of half-breeds the French element has kept the mastery, and they still speak a broken French and are all devout Catholics. They also retain the passion of the French peasant for his land. No price will induce a half-breed to part willingly with his land, but he is content to possess it without seeking to improve it. Indeed, the development, physically as well as morally, of this mixed breed has not been such as to strengthen the cause of the advocates of amalgamation between the white and the coloured population. They are a wild, handsome, gipsylooking race, though not of sturdy growth. As a rule, they are an inoffensive people, but are dirty, ignorant, and indolent. They live chiefly by fishing and hunting, and die away gradually in the villages where they are born. As far as I could learn, there is no particular prejudice against them amongst the Anglo-Saxon settlers any more than there is against the Indians. Both races, half-breeds as well as Indians, are so obviously dying out that the feeling of the Americans towards them is one rather of pity than of jealousy. At Prairie du

Chien, or "Prare doo Shane," according to the popular Western pronunciation, stand the ruins of large barracks. It seems strange in this land of railroads and steamboats and great cities to learn that these barracks were erected only thirty years ago, in order to protect the soldiers of the United States against the Indians in the famous Black Hawk war. The barracks are useless already, for the Indian has retreated hundreds of miles away. By these ruins I came upon the first party of genuine Indians I had seen. There were four of them, two men, father and son, with their squaws. They were very dirty, very ragged, and painted with all kinds of colours. They had bows and arrows with them, of the rudest kind, but their chief livelihood, I suspect, was derived from begging. They told us, in broken English, that they were very miserable, which I have no doubt was true; and the only trace of dignity I could see about them was that they took the small alms our party gave, with absolute apparent unconcern. The one piece of luggage belonging to the tribe was carried by the younger squaw, and that-alas! for Mohican romance!—was a teapot of Britannia metal.

CHICAGO AND THE WEST.

Of all American commercial cities, Chicago is, to my mind, the handsomest. Thirty years ago, not a house was standing there. Now, with its miles of wharves and warehouses, its endless canals and docks, its seventy churches, and its rows of palace-like mansions, Chicago is probably, both in size and importance, the third or fourth city in the States. There is an unusual uniformity about the buildings, from the fact that they have all been built almost at the same time, and the monotony of the straight rectangular streets is somewhat relieved by the Dutch-looking canals which intersect them in every direction. When, however, you have made the stock remark that, within a quarter of a century, a Trans-Atlantic Liverpool has been raised upon the swampy shores of Lake Michigan, you have said pretty well all that is to be said about the metropolis of the West. If a poor neighbour becomes a millionaire, you think it a remarkable occurrence, and possibly you regard him with envy; but I don't think,

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judging from my own ideas, that you are struck with a reverential awe. So, in like manner, when you have once realized the idea of how Chicago has grown out of nothing in no time, you have about exhausted the subject. Barges, and drays, and steamboats, and factories, are much the same all the world over. Goethe is constantly reported to have said (though I own I never came across the saying in any of his writings), that there was more poetry in a spinning-jenny than in the whole Iliad of Homer. It may be so, but Goethe never tried to write a poem about a factory, and so I defy any one, except a land agent, to expatiate on the beauties and glories of Chicago. To me it is remarkable and noteworthy, chiefly as the centre of the New World, which is growing up with a giant's growth in those Free States of the North West. A commercial panic, a change in the route of traffic, might destroy Chicago, but no human power could destroy the great corn-growing region of which, for the time, it is the capital.

At the period of my visit, Illinois was undergoing one of those periodical revolutions which seem so strange to English politicians. The whole State was about to throw off its Constitution as a snake casts its slough, and Chicago naturally enough was the headquarters of the agitation, such as there was. Politics run high in Illinois. It is the State, by birth or by adoption, not only of President Lincoln, but of Stephen