The modern section of the city, with its regular streets and lofty edifices, which, within the past fifteen years, has arisen under the active hand of the northern emigrant, presents a striking contrast to the old. The site of St. Louis is elevated and salubrious, lying for some miles along the Mississippi upon two broad plateaux or steppes swelling up gently from the water's edge. Along the first of these, based upon an exhaustless bed of limestone, which furnishes material for building, are situated the lower and central portions of the city, while that above sweeps away in an extensive prairie of stunted black-jack oaks to the west. The latter section is already laid out into streets and building-lots; elegant structures are rapidly going up, and, at no distant day, this is destined to become the most courtly and beautiful portion of the city. It is at a pleasant remove from the dust and bustle of the landing, {117} while its elevation affords a fine view of the harbour and opposite shore. Yet, with all its improvements of the past few years, St. Louis remains emphatically "a little _French_ city." There is about it a cheerful village air, a certain _rus in rube_, to which the grenadier preciseness of most of our cities is the antipodes. There are but few of those endless, rectilinear avenues, cutting each other into broad squares of lofty granite blocks, so characteristic of the older cities of the North and East, or of those cities of tramontane origin so rapidly rising within the boundaries of the valley. There yet remains much in St. Louis to remind one of its village days; and a stern _eschewal_ of mathematical, angular exactitude is everywhere beheld. Until within a few years there was no such thing as a row of houses; all were disjoined and at a considerable distance from each other; and every edifice, however central, could boast its humble _stoop_, its front-door plat, bedecked with shrubbery and flowers, and protected from the inroads of intruding man or beast by its own tall stoccade. All this is now confined to the southern or French section of the city; a right Rip Van Winkle-looking region, where each little steep-roofed cottage yet presents its broad piazza, and the cosey settee before the door beneath the tree shade, with the fleshy old burghers soberly luxuriating on an evening pipe, their dark-eyed, brunette daughters at their side. There is a delightful air of "old-fashioned comfortableness" in all this, that reminds us of nothing we have seen in our own country, but much of the antiquated villages of which we have {118} been told in the land beyond the waters. Among those remnants of a former generation which are yet to be seen in St. Louis are the venerable mansions of Auguste and Pierre Chouteau, who were among the founders of the city.[100] These extensive mansions stand upon the principal street, and originally occupied, with their grounds, each of them an entire square, enclosed by lofty walls of