For nothing, perhaps, have foreign tourists in our country ridiculed us more justly than for that pomposity of nomenclature which we have delighted to apply to the thousand and one towns and villages sprinkled over our maps and our land; instance whereof this same renowned representative of the Celestial Empire concerning which I have been writing. Its brevity is its sole commendation; for as to the taste or appropriateness of such a name for such a place, to say naught of the euphony, there's none. And then, besides Pekin, there are Romes, and Troys, and Palmyras, and Belgrades, Londons and Liverpools, Babels and Babylons _without account_, all rampant in the glories of log huts, with sturdy porkers forth issuing from their sties, by way, doubtless, of the sturdy knight-errants of yore caracoling from the sally-ports of their illustrious {103} namesakes. But why, in the name of all propriety, this everlasting plagiarizing of the Greek, Gothic, Gallic patronymics of the Old World, so utterly incongruous as applied to the backwoods settlements of the New! If in very poverty of invention, or in the meagerness of our "land's language," we, as a people, feel ourselves unequal to the task--one, indeed, of no ordinary magnitude--of christening all the newborn villages of our land with melodious and appropriate appellations, may it not be advisable either to nominate certain worthy dictionary-makers for the undertaking, or else to retain the ancient Indian names? Why discard the smooth-flowing, expressive appellations bestowed by the injured aborigines upon the gliding streams and flowery plains of this land of their fathers, only to supersede them by affixes most foreign and absurd? "Is this proceeding just and honourable" towards that unfortunate race? Have we visited them with so _many_ returns of kindness that this would overflow the cup of recompense? Why tear away the last and only relic of the past yet lingering in our midst? Have we too many memorials of the olden time? Why disrobe the venerable antique of that classic drapery which alone can befit the severe nobility of its mien, only to deck it out in the starched and tawdry preciseness of a degenerate taste? _Illinois River._ X "It is a goodly sight to see What Heaven hath done for this delicious land! What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree! What goodly prospects o'er the hills expand!" _Childe Harold._