The Ohio River flows westward past Madison, a thriving manufacturing town on the Indiana bank, and then sweeps around a grand curve to the south in its approach to the Kentucky metropolis, Louisville. The view of Louisville and Jeffersonville, opposite in Indiana, is very fine, as the visitor comes towards them down the river. The Ohio is a mile wide, and the Kentucky hills which lined it above, here recede from the bank, and do not come out to it again for twenty miles, leaving an almost level plain several miles in width, and elevated some distance above the water, upon which Louisville is built, spreading along the shore for eight miles in a graceful crescent. The rapids at the lower end of the city cover the whole width of the river, and go down twenty-six feet in two miles, making a series of foaming cascades in ordinary stages of water, but being almost entirely obliterated in times of freshet, when the steamboats can pass down them. A long canal cut through the rocks provides safe navigation around them. An expedition of thirteen families of Virginia, under Colonel George Rogers Clarke, floated down the Ohio on flatboats in 1778, and halting at the falls, settled there, at first on an island, but afterwards on the southern shore. This began the town which in 1780 was named by the Virginia Legislature in honor of the French King Louis XVI., who was then actively aiding the American Revolution. The Ohio River steamboating began the city's rapid growth, which was further swelled by the later development of railway traffic, and it now has two hundred and fifty thousand population. There is a large southern trade in provisions and supplies, and it is probably the greatest leaf-tobacco market in the world, being also the distributing depot for the Kentucky whiskies. There are, besides, other prominent branches of manufacture. Its foliage-lined and lawn-bordered streets in the residential section are very attractive and a notable feature. The chief public buildings are the Court House and the City Hall, the former adorned by a statue of the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay. Its great disaster was a frightful tornado, which swept a path of desolation through the heart of the city in March, 1900, killing seventy-six persons and destroying property estimated at $3,000,000. Its most famous citizen was George D. Prentice, poet, editor and politician, whose monument, a Grecian canopy of marble, is in Cave Hill Cemetery, prettily laid out on the hills to the eastward. The city has an environment of pleasant parks, and three fine bridges span the Ohio in front, crossing to the suburban towns of Jeffersonville and New Albany over on the Indiana shore. Five miles east of Louisville lived General Zachary Taylor, old "Rough and Ready," who commanded the army of the United States in the conquest of Mexico, and died while President in 1850. He is buried near his old home. LOUISVILLE TO NASHVILLE.