or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.'" THE WOMEN OF THE WEST _Kansas City_.--I am not so well satisfied with what I see of the women of the prairie cities. I am writing this where I sit leisurely in a store in Main street, Kansas City, a streaming crowd on the sidewalks flowing by. The ladies (and the same in Denver) are all fashionably drest, and have the look of "gentility" in face, manner and action, but they do _not_ have, either in physique or the mentality appropriate to them, any high native originality of spirit or body, (as the men certainly have, appropriate to them.) They are "intellectual" and fashionable, but dyspeptic-looking and generally doll-like; their ambition evidently is to copy their eastern sisters. Something far different and in advance must appear, to tally and complete the superb masculinity of the west, and maintain and continue it. THE SILENT GENERAL _Sept. 28, '79_.--So General Grant, after circumambiating the world, has arrived home again, landed in San Francisco yesterday, from the ship City of Tokio from Japan. What a man he is! what a history! what an illustration--his life--of the capacities of that American individuality common to us all. Cynical critics are wondering "what the people can see in Grant" to make such a hubbub about. They aver (and it is no doubt true) that he has hardly the average of our day's literary and scholastic culture, and absolutely no pronounc'd genius or conventional eminence of any sort. Correct: but he proves how an average western farmer, mechanic, boatman, carried by tides of circumstances, perhaps caprices, into a position of incredible military or civic responsibilities, (history has presented none more trying, no born monarch's, no mark more shining for attack or envy,) may steer his way fitly and steadily through them all, carrying the country and himself with credit year after year--command over a million armed men--fight more than fifty pitch'd battles--rule for eight years a land larger than all the kingdoms of Europe combined--and then, retiring, quietly (with a cigar in his mouth) make the promenade of the whole world, through its courts and coteries, and kings and czars and mikados, and splendidest glitters and etiquettes, as phlegmatically as he ever walk'd the portico of a Missouri hotel after dinner. I say all this is what people like--and I am sure I like it. Seems to me it transcends Plutarch. How those old Greeks, indeed, would have seized on him! A mere plain man--no art, no poetry--only practical sense, ability to do, or try his best to do, what devolv'd upon him. A common trader, money-maker, tanner, farmer of Illinois--general for the republic, in its terrific struggle with itself, in the war of attempted secession--President following, (a task of peace, more difficult than the war itself)--nothing heroic, as the authorities put it--and yet the greatest hero. The gods, the destinies, seem to have concentrated upon him.