From New York to St. Louis is already a series of towns and cities, with the country as a whole well settled up, for America. The Great West, it is soon seen, is no longer the valley of Ohio and the prairies of Illinois. It has long since crossed the Mississippi, and emigrated beyond the Missouri. What used to be called the "West" has already become the centre; and "out west" now means Kansas or Colorado, if anything at all. The Erie road, with its broad-gauge coaches, takes you through the picturesque, as well as rich and fertile regions of northern New Jersey, and western New York, whence the ride through Ohio, down the lovely valley of the Miami to Cincinnati, is substantially as through a garden. Over much of this region, it is plain to be seen, New England has left her mark, never to be effaced. Her school-houses and churches, her intelligence and thrift, are all reproduced (only slightly westernized), and one can see that he is in Yankee-land still at a glance. You might know it, by the omnipresence of white paint and green blinds, if nothing else. You see it in the average inhabitant and detect it in his speech. And yet it is Yankee-land, with enlarged freedom and independence of thought and action, and therefore doubly welcome. Southern Indiana and Illinois, you find rapidly filling up; but they still seem much behind that sunny heart of Ohio, the Miami Valley. Populated largely by the overflow from Kentucky and Tennessee--chiefly the "poor whites" of those former slave states--the results are everywhere unmistakable. Evidently, even to the passing traveller, the average Hoosier or Sucker, as yet, is much behind the average Buckeye, and he will find it a hard task to overtake him. The lineal descendant of the Cavalier and the Corncracker, how can he expect to compete successfully with the regular representative of the Roundhead and the Yankee?