Mississippi, are larger towns; but they have not grown large so quickly, nor do they now promise so excessive a development of commerce. Chicago may be called the metropolis of American corn - the favourite city haunt of the American Ceres. The goddess seats herself there amidst the dust of her full barns, and proclaims herself a goddess ruling over things political and philosophical as well as agricultural. Not furrows only are in her thoughts, but free trade also, and brotherly love. And within her own bosom there is a boast that even yet she will be stronger than Mars. In Chicago there are great streets, and rows of houses fit to be the residences of a new Corn Exchange nobility. They look out on the wide lake which is now the highway for breadstuffs, and the merchant, as he shaves at his window, sees his rapid ventures as they pass away, one after the other, towards the East.

or a

I went over one great grain store in Chicago possessed by gentlemen of the name of Sturgess and Buckenham. It was a world in itself,—and the dustiest of all the worlds. It contained, when I was there, half a million bushels of wheatvery great many, as I might say in other language. But it was not as a storehouse that this great building was so remarkable, but as a channel or a river course for the flooding freshets of corn. It is so built that both railway vans and vessels come immediately under its claws, as I may call the great trunks of the elevators. Out of the railway vans the corn and wheat is clawed up into the building, and down similar trunks it is at once again poured out into the vessels. I shall be at Buffalo in a page or two, and then I will endeavour to explain more minutely how this is done. At Chicago the corn is bought and does change hands, and much of it, therefore, is stored there for some space of time,-shorter or longer as the case may be. When I was at Chicago, the only limit to the rapidity of its transit was set by the amount of boat accommodation. There were not bottoms enough to take the corn away from Chicago, nor indeed on the railway was there a sufficiency of rolling stock or locomotive power to bring it into Chicago. As I said before, the country was bursting with its own produce and smothered in its own fruits.

At Chicago the hotel was bigger than other hotels, and grander. There were pipes without end for cold water which ran hot, and for hot water which would not run at all. The post-office also was grander and bigger than other post-offices -though the postmaster confessed to me that that matter of the delivery of letters was one which could not be compassed.

Just at that moment it was being done as a private speculation; but it did not pay, and would be discontinued. The theatre too was large, handsome, and convenient; but on the night of my attendance it seemed to lack an audience. A good comic actor it did not lack, and I never laughed more heartily in my life. There was something wrong too just at that time-I could not make out what-in the constitution of Illinois, and the present moment had been selected for voting a new constitution. To us in England such a necessity would be considered a matter of importance, but it did not seem to be much thought of here. "Some slight alteration probably," I suggested. "No," said my informant-one of the judges of their courts- "it is to be a thorough radical change of the whole constitution. They are voting the delegates to-day." I went to see them vote the delegates; but unfortunately got into a wrong place-by invitation-and was turned out, not without some slight tumult. I trust that the new constitution was carried through successfully.

From these little details it may perhaps be understood how a town like Chicago goes on and prospers, in spite of all the drawbacks which are incident to newness. Men in those regions do not mind failures, and when they have failed, instantly begin again. They make their plans on a large scale, and they who come after them fill up what has been wanting at first. Those taps of hot and cold water will be made to run by the next owner of the hotel, if not by the present owner. In another ten years the letters, I do not doubt, will all be delivered. Long before that time the theatre will probably be full. The new constitution is no doubt already at work; and if found deficient, another will succeed to it without any trouble to the State or any talk on the subject through the Union. Chicago was intended as a town of export for corn, and, therefore, the corn stores have received the first attention. When I was there, they were in perfect working order.

From Chicago we went on to Cleveland, a town in the State of Ohio on Lake Erie, again travelling by the sleeping cars. I found that these cars were universally mentioned with great horror and disgust by Americans of the upper class. They always declared that they would not travel in them on any account. Noise and dirt were the two objections. They are very noisy, but to us belonged the happy power of sleeping down noise. I invariably slept all through the night, and knew nothing about the noise. They are also very dirty,-extremely dirty, dirty so as to cause much annoyance.

But then

they are not quite so dirty as the day cars. If dirt is to be a bar against travelling in America, men and women must stay at home. For myself I don't much care for dirt, having a strong reliance on soap and water and scrubbing brushes. No one regards poisons who carries antidotes in which he has perfect faith.

Cleveland is another pleasant town,-pleasant as Milwaukee and Portland. The streets are handsome, and are shaded by grand avenues of trees. One of these streets is over a mile in length, and throughout the whole of it, there are trees on each side-not little paltry trees as are to be seen on the boulevards of Paris, but spreading elms, the beautiful American elm which not only spreads, but droops also, and makes more of its foliage than any other tree extant. And there is a square in Cleveland, well sized, as large as Russell Square I should say, with open paths across it, and containing one or two handsome buildings. I cannot but think that all men and women in London would be great gainers if the iron rails of the squares were thrown down, and the grassy enclosures thrown open to the public. Of course the edges of the turf would be worn, and the paths would not keep their exact shapes. But the prison look would be banished, and the sombre sadness of the squares would be relieved.

I was particularly struck by the size and comfort of the houses at Cleveland. All down that street of which I have spoken, they do not stand continuously together, but are detached and separate; houses which in England would require some fifteen or eighteen hundred a year for their maintenance. In the States, however, men commonly expend upon house rent a much greater proportion of their income than they do in England. With us it is, I believe, thought that a man should certainly not apportion more than a seventh of his spending income to his house rent,-some say not more than a tenth. But in many cities of the States a man is thought to live well within bounds if he so expends a fourth. There can be no doubt as to Americans living in better houses than Englishmen,making the comparison of course between men of equal incomes. But the Englishman has many more incidental expenses than the American. He spends more on wine, on entertainments, on horses, and on amusements. He has a more numerous establishment, and keeps up the adjuncts and outskirts of his residence with a more finished neatness.

These houses in Cleveland were very good,—as indeed they are in most Northern towns; but some of them have been

erected with an amount of bad taste that is almost incredible. It is not uncommon to see in front of a square brick house a wooden quasi-Greek portico, with a pediment and Ionic columns, equally high with the house itself. Wooden columns with Greek capitals attached to the doorways, and wooden pediments over the windows, are very frequent. As a rule these are attached to houses which, without such ornamentation, would be simple, unpretentious, square, roomy residences. An Ionic or Corinthian capital stuck on to a log of wood called a column, and then fixed promiscuously to the outside of an ordinary house, is to my eye the vilest of architectural pretences. Little turrets are better than this; or even brown battlements made of mortar. Except in America I do not remember to have seen these vicious bits of white timber,-timber painted white,-plastered on to the fronts and sides of red-brick houses.

Again we went on by rail,-to Buffalo. I have travelled some thousands of miles by railway in the States, taking long journeys by night and longer journeys by day; but I do not remember that while doing so I ever made acquaintance with an American. To an American lady in a railway car I should no more think of speaking than I should to an unknown female in the next pew to me at a London church. It is hard to understand from whence come the laws which govern societies in this respect; but there are different laws in different societies, which soon obtain recognition for themselves. American ladies are much given to talking, and are generally free from all mauvaise honte. They are collected in manner, well instructed, and resolved to have their share of the social advantages of the world. In this phase of life they come out more strongly than English women. But on a railway journey, be it ever so long, they are never seen speaking to a stranger. English women, however, on English railways are generally willing to converse. They will do so if they be on a journey; but will not open their mouths if they be simply passing backwards and forwards between their homes and some neighbouring town. We soon learn the rules on these subjects;-but who make the rules? If you cross the Atlantic with an American lady you invariably fall in love with her before the journey is over. Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

And now for Buffalo, and the elevators. I trust I have made it understood that corn comes into Buffalo, not only from Chicago, of which I have spoken specially, but from all

the ports round the lakes; Racine, Milwaukee, Grandhaven, Port Sarnia, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and many others. At these ports the produce is generally bought and sold; but at Buffalo it is merely passed through a gateway. It is taken from vessels of a size fitted for the lakes, and placed in other vessels fitted for the canal. This is the Erie Canal, which connects the lakes with the Hudson River and with New York. The produce which passes through the Welland Canal-the canal which connects Lake Erie and the upper lakes with Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence-is not transhipped, seeing that the Welland Canal, which is less than thirty miles in length, gives a passage to vessels of 500 tons. As I have before said, 60,000,000 bushels of breadstuff were thus pushed through Buffalo in the open months of the year 1861. These open months run from the middle of April to the middle of November; but the busy period is that of the last two months,-the time that is which intervenes between the full ripening of the corn and the coming of the ice.

An elevator is as ugly a monster as has been yet produced. In uncouthness of form it outdoes those obsolete old brutes who used to roam about the semi-aqueous world, and live a most uncomfortable life with their great hungering stomachs and huge unsatisfied maws. The elevator itself consists of a big moveable trunk,-moveable as is that of an elephant, but not pliable, and less graceful even than an elephant's. This is attached to a huge granary or barn; but in order to give altitude within the barn for the necessary moving up and down of this trunk,-seeing that it cannot be curled gracefully to its purposes as the elephant's is curled,-there is an awkward box erected on the roof of the barn, giving some twenty feet of additional height, up into which the elevator can be thrust. It will be understood, then, that this big moveable trunk, the head of which, when it is at rest, is thrust up into the box on the roof, is made to slant down in an oblique direction from the building to the river. For the elevator is an amphibious institution, and flourishes only on the banks of navigable waters. When its head is ensconced within its box, and the beast of prey is thus nearly hidden within the building, the unsuspicious vessel is brought up within reach of the creature's trunk, and down it comes, like a mosquito's proboscis, right through the deck, in at the open aperture of the hole, and so into the very vitals and bowels of the ship. When there, it goes to work upon its food with a greed and an avidity that is disgusting to a beholder of any taste or imagination. And now I must ex