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ings, however, are only what I may call casual; there is no such thing as an estate bought for the purpose of leasing out in farms. Many of the owners are in debt, and pay about 8 per cent. There is very good provision for educating the children; the law requires that there should be a school every two miles. The schools are generally taught either by women or by young men just out of college and commencing their career. Many young women 'teach school' before they get married, and many distinguished men have commenced life by teaching schools. Some say that the drawback to education is apparent in the too great number of young men who seek to live by their head rather than by their hands.

The land here is all marked off into townships of six miles square, and into mile, half-mile, and quarter-mile squares, with unmetalled rectangular roads dividing the squares, and generally hedges. The houses are of wood. The farmers have not much machinery. Indian corn is not reaped by machine, and the farmers can generally hire a machine to thrash out the grain when they require it. A very common institution on the farms here is, the small American windmill; it is used for pumping water, bruising corn, and for other purposes. Water is always to be had from wells within easy distance of the surface. This not being a fruit country, large fruit trains come up from Southern Illinois in the season, and apples come from the North. Prairie chickens are very common hereabouts; they by no means affect remote prairies; on the contrary, they seem a domestic sort of creatures, frequenting the neighbourhood of roads, farms, &c. The small American rabbit is also common; the large Jack rabbit, or hare, is found only in the West. There is a great abundance of wild ducks almost everywhere in America. A small forty-acre farmer had a little sugar-mill, such as the ryots have in some parts of India, and his neighbours brought their sorghum to be crushed into molasses. Most of the farmers grow oats for their own use, but I did not see anything of peas and beans; that is, our peas. There are American peas and beans too, but they are of a different kind. In Canada I noticed that the best bacon was described as pea-fed. Barley does not seem to be a common crop in any of the States which I have visited, but there is plenty of rye and buckwheat. Illinois is par excel lence the corn State;' that is, Indian corn, which is always

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Among the uniformities of American ways I notice a uniform inferiority and saltness of butter. Americans do not seem to know bread-and-butter in our sense, and that probably affects their character. They are, I must say, very barbarous in their fashion of eating. They seem to order all their little dishes at once, and keep digging first into one dish and then into another-mixing fish and beefsteaks, and swallowing every concoction of vegetables together at the end.

From Chicago I went, by the Chicago, Fort Wayne, and Pittsburgh Railway, to Pittsburgh, crossing on the road a portion of Indiana and the northern half of Ohio. The railroad seemed a capital one, in excellent order, and very smooth. After passing the flats at the bottom of Lake Michigan we came to an undulating country, with a good deal of wood and abundant pasture. We passed a considerable town called Valparaiso, the seat apparently of a thriving woollen manufactory. Soon after the ground again became very flat-too flat for drainage and so continued for a very long way; in fact, as far as a place called Crestline. The ground was very much wooded, and only partially cleared, with a good many swamps, but no prairie-ground, except some large, open, swampy plains. The country here evidently suffers from too much moisture and want of drainage. I saw large stacks of draining-tiles at the stations. Still there was a good deal of cultivation, mixed with forest. Some of the country seemed to resemble part of what I had seen in Canada. There were some nice-enough looking places, and better gardens and orchards than in Illinois. The Indian corn an Illinois man thought not very good. There was a good deal of wheat; cattle pretty plentiful, sheep few. On some of the clearings I saw many log-huts, such as I had not yet seen in real life; but some of the towns are improving. They get a great deal of timber, and do a great deal of woodwork. Evidently in all this part of America there is very great room for much further improvement. The country drains so far as it drains at all, into Lake Erie, but there is a curious absence of running water. Crestline, where I stopped for the night, is about the highest part of the country, and immediately after passing it the drainage goes to the Ohio. I found a comfortable little hotel at Crestline. I took a walk about the town. It seemed a nice, clean country place, with

where the boys and girls do merchants' work with tokens of small value, and so learn to make and lose money. On looking into the laws of this State I find that it is optional with each county to organise into townships for administrative purposes. They generally do; as soon as the country is settled the township system comes into play. In order to avoid confusion incorporated towns, as distinguished from the district called a township, are now called either cities or villages. Any populous place of 1,000 inhabitants or upwards may become a city; any place of 300 inhabitants or upwards a village.

Το go back to the farmers: they seem to me a quiet and simple but shrewd sort of men, very like what small Scotch farmers might be. They generally take in a local weekly paper and an agricultural paper. Going into the houses, some of them struck me as really very poor and crowded; some had no separate living room, but these are the early houses first built in a newly-settled country, and they will improve, if the people are tolerably prosperous.

In these Western States I notice a good many French names of places, marking a time when, both in India and in America, the French almost outrivalled us. Ohio, too, which not so long back was a remote and unsettled territory, was the scene of French settlement and French military operations a long time ago; and the present Pittsburgh, the great iron centre in West Pennsylvania, was the Fort du Quesne of the French.

After this visit to the interior of Illinois I returned to Chicago, and there again made a short halt, and saw some more of the sights of that famous place.

I am more and more struck by the absence of the habit of drinking wine amongst the Americans. At the hotels here one sees no such thing, nor do they even have on the table at meals the lager-bier which is common in the country. The bars too seem little frequented, and to have little variety of drinks. At some of the railway stations in Illinois nothing was to be got to drink; the sale was not prohibited, but 'Murphy had been round.' There is, in fact, a strong movement against drink, which has hitherto been much taken by the lower classes in the shape of nips at odd times. Appar ently this abstinence movement has had much success. gathered that most of the intemperance was among what I may call the loafing population.

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Among the uniformities of American ways I notice a uniform inferiority and saltness of butter. Americans do not seem to know bread-and-butter in our sense, and that probably affects their character. They are, I must say, very barbarous in their fashion of eating. They seem to order all their little dishes at once, and keep digging first into one dish and then into another-mixing fish and beefsteaks, and swallowing every concoction of vegetables together at the end.

From Chicago I went, by the Chicago, Fort Wayne, and Pittsburgh Railway, to Pittsburgh, crossing on the road a portion of Indiana and the northern half of Ohio. The railroad seemed a capital one, in excellent order, and very smooth. After passing the flats at the bottom of Lake Michigan we came to an undulating country, with a good deal of wood and abundant pasture. We passed a considerable town called Valparaiso, the seat apparently of a thriving woollen manufactory. Soon after the ground again became very flat-too flat for drainage- and so continued for a very long way; in fact, as far as a place called Crestline. The ground was very much wooded, and only partially cleared, with a good many swamps, but no prairie-ground, except some large, open, swampy plains. The country here evidently suffers from too much moisture and want of drainage. I saw large stacks of draining-tiles at the stations. Still there was a good deal of cultivation, mixed with forest. Some of the country seemed to resemble part of what I had seen in Canada. There were some nice-enough looking places, and better gardens and orchards than in Illinois. The Indian corn an Illinois man thought not very good. There was a good deal of wheat; cattle pretty plentiful, sheep few. some of the clearings I saw many log-huts, such as I had not yet seen in real life; but some of the towns are improving. They get a great deal of timber, and do a great deal of woodwork. Evidently in all this part of America there is very great room for much further improvement. The country drains so far as it drains at all, into Lake Erie, but there is a curious absence of running water. Crestline, where I stopped for the night, is about the highest part of the country, and immediately after passing it the drainage goes to the Ohio. I found a comfortable little hotel at Crestline. I took a walk about the town. It seemed a nice, clean country place, with

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good shops, neat villa-residences, and a quiet, decent-looking people.

In the morning I started again. Almost immediately after leaving Crestline the ground began to undulate, and eventually became quite hilly, with a good many streams, running more or less, but for the most part somewhat sluggish. This is the character of the country till we get towards Pittsburgh. There is always a great abundance of natural wood, principally hard wood, ash and suchlike, but comparatively few pines. A very large proportion of the fields had still stumps in them, even those in the middle of considerable towns. As we got on, however, the homesteads improved and became better-looking than most of those that I had seen in Illinois. Much of the route, with fine woods scattered about, is extremely park-like, and the autumn foliage is very pretty; indeed, altogether it seemed as smiling a country as one could wish to see; that is, for a country only partially cleared and cultivated. I began to realise the beauty of the American autumn foliage of which one has heard so much. The leaves certainly turn to very bright and showy colours, such as one never sees in Europe. I saw some very good specimens of this kind of thing; but in this particular respect I am told that I am not fortunate in the season, as there has not been the sudden change to frost which causes the most brilliant hues.

PENNSYLVANIA,

In the latter part of this journey we entered the State of Pennsylvania. As we came along towns and villages became more and more populous; in fact, the last hundred miles or so into Pittsburgh was full of manufacturing places forming what might be called an American Sheffield country joined to an American Birmingham at Pittsburgh. The country here becomes very hilly. We came into the valley of the Beaver River, then into that of the Ohio, then a little way up the Alleghany river, crossing which we came into Pittsburgh.

In the train I met a talkative old Pennsylvania gentleman, very like an Englishman in voice and manner-I think Pennsylvanians are often so. He had just come back from Iowa, which he thinks a good country; but he saw there a good many emigrants moving further West, with their

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