There are few things more delightfully refreshing, amid the fierce fervour of midsummer, than to forsake the stifled, polluted atmosphere of the city for the cool breezes of its forest suburbs. A freshened elasticity seems gliding through the languid system, bracing up the prostrated fibres of the frame; the nerves thrill with renewed tensity, and the vital flood courses in fuller gush, and leaps onward with more bounding buoyancy in its fevered channels. Every one has experienced this; and it was under circumstances like these that I found myself one bright day, after a delay at St. Louis which began at length to be intolerably tedious, forsaking the sultry, sun-scorched streets of {155} the city, and crossing the turbid flood for a tour upon the prairies of Illinois. How delightful to a frame just freed from the feverish confinement of a sick-chamber, brief though it had been, was the fresh breeze which came careering over the water, rippling along the polished surface, and gayly riding the miniature waves of its own creation! The finest point from which to view the little "City of the French" is from beneath the enormous sycamores upon the opposite bank of the Mississippi. It is from this spot alone that anything approaching to a cosmorama can be commanded. The city, retreating as it does from the river's brink--its buildings of every diversity of form, material, and structure, promiscuously heaped the one upon the other, and the whole intermingled with the fresh green of forest-trees, may boast of much scenic beauty. The range of white limestone warehouses, circling like a crescent the shore, form the most prominent feature of the foreground, while the forest of shrub-oaks sweeps away in the rear. For some time I gazed upon this imposing view, and then, slowly turning my horse's head, was upon the dusty thoroughfare to Edwardsville. For the first time I found myself upon the celebrated "American Bottom," a tract of country which, for fertility and depth of soil, is perhaps unsurpassed in the world. A fine road of baked loam extended along my route. Crossing Cahokia Creek, which cuts its deep bed diagonally through the bottom from the bluffs some six miles distant, and threading a grove of the beautiful _pecan_, with its long trailing boughs and {156} delicate leaves, my path was soon winding gracefully away among those venerable monuments of a race now passed from the earth. The eye is struck at first by the number of these eminences, as well as by their symmetry of form and regularity of outline; and the most familiar resemblance suggested is that of gigantic hay-ricks sprinkled over the uniform surface of the prairie on every side. As you advance, however, into the plain, leaving the range of mounds upon the left, something of arrangement is detected in their relative position; and a design too palpable is betrayed to mistake them for the handiwork of Nature. Upward of one