From St. Louis, three hundred miles through Missouri, to Leavenworth, Kansas, you find a noble region, that needs only a live population to make it a garden. It is mostly rich rolling prairie, but with more timber and streams than in Illinois, and with limestone abounding nearly everywhere. All along the route, it was plain to be seen, Missouri had suffered sadly from slavery. Both in population and business, in town and country, clearly "the trail of the serpent" had been over her all. But the wave of immigration, now that slavery was dead, had already reached her, and we found its healthful currents everywhere overflowing her bottoms and prairies. The new-comers seemed to be largely Yankee and German, almost everywhere. France once so predominant here, was already supplanted by Germany, and the Teuton bade fair to rule Missouri soon, even then. At Hermann, where we stopped for dinner, a German Hebe tendered us excellent native wine, and the culture of the grape, we learned, had already become a leading industry of this section of the state. The sturdy Rhine-men, as true to freedom as in the days of Tacitus, were already everywhere planting vineyards, and in the near future were sure of handsome returns from petty farms, that our old time "Pikes" and "Border Ruffians" would have starved on. Throughout the ride, the Missouri or Big-Muddy, as the Indians call it, was often in sight, a broad tawny stream; and many of its bends and reaches were so beautiful, that it hardly seemed to deserve that savage criticism of Bayard Taylor's, as being "too lazy to wash itself." Its banks as a rule are higher and better, than those of the Mississippi anywhere below Cairo, and its bottom lands seemed unsurpassed in fertility.