The prairies have already been described as well perhaps as they ever will be, because they are a sort of _lusus naturæ_, and there is nothing with which to compare them. To tell of what ingredients they are composed is easy enough, but to give a just idea of the effects of their combination, requires analogies not to be found in the other productions of nature, nor in the imagery of the mind. Although substantial realities, they present nothing but deceptions, and I believe it is beyond the power of language, almost imagination, to exaggerate the strange and beautiful combination of what is, and what is not, sporting together in perfect harmony on these boundless plains. The eye becomes at length wearied with being thus perpetually the dupe of imaginary forms, and imaginary distances, while the mind involuntary revolts at the deceptions practiced on the senses. Mr. Bryant in poetry, and Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Catlin in prose, have done all that can be done to convey to those who have never seen them an impression of the effect of these happy eccentricities of nature, and the beautiful phantasmagoria they exhibit forth to the senses and the imagination. If ever miser were pardoned for coveting his neighbors land, it might be such land as the prairies of Illinois, where man labors almost without the sweat of his brow, and the crops are so abundant that all I heard the good people complain of was having more than they knew what to do with. This is indeed a lamentable state of things, and it were I think much to be wished that some of our philosophical lecturers would discuss the relative advantages of having too much and too little of a good thing. The case of an individual being overburthened with superfluity, is easily disposed of, as he has only to turn it over to his neighbors who may be in want; but when entire communities, states and confederations of states, labor under this inconvenience, where nobody wants, and all have plenty to bestow; in other words, where all wish to sell and nobody cares to buy, it must be confessed there occurs a crisis of such deplorable difficulty, that I can conceive no effectual remedy except two or three years of famine like those which succeeded the seven years of plenty in Egypt. This would consume the mischievous surplus, and rid them of an evil which as it never before occurred, has never been provided against by the wisdom of legislation, which most people believe can perform impossibilities. But be this as it may, I passed over a vast region where the table of every man groaned under superfluities, and every brood of swine wasted more corn than would supply bread to a family of English manufacturers. Yet I found all, without exception, in the last stage of hopeless despondency, until one day I entered the log-cabin of an old negro woman, a slave, who was enjoying her pipe at ease, and upon asking the usual commonplace question of “how times went with her,” was answered with the most