It was six years before the coming of the Beechers that the famous Mrs. Trollope visited Cincinnati and thereafter wrote her ill-natured comments on the ambitious western metropolis. Harriet Martineau, coming in 1834, was possessed of a more genial spirit. She found the city so full of ambition that they were meditating on the place where the capitol building should stand when the center of the national government should be removed from Washington to the city of Ohio which was so much nearer to the center of the country. She thought this a very good idea. It seemed to her absurd for senators from Missouri and Louisiana to go so far as Washington when they might, by the mere removal of the seat of government, stop at Cincinnati. But we are most interested in hearing what Charles Dickens had to say about Cincinnati, which he visited in 1840. To this stirring city he assigned a chapter in his “American Notes,” where he gave it perhaps a more fair, certainly a more favorable, treatment than he did to some other cities that he saw. He says: “Cincinnati is a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated. I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favorably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does, with its clean houses of red and white, its well-paved roads, and footways of bright tile.” He goes on to speak of the amphitheater of hills, the comfortable houses, the elegant residences. Then he describes a great temperance convention held there on the day after his arrival. There was a procession with dramatic and symbolic floats; there was much speech-making and the school children sang in chorus. The main thing, however, was the conduct and appearance of the audience throughout the day, and that was admirable and full of promise. I do not know that this particular city was specially given to processions or that the parade is a matter of western taste. Perhaps it is a national or even an Anglo-Saxon mode of expressing exuberant vitality. However that may be, we have another description of a Cincinnati pageant that may interest us, as it is one of the things that took place while Harriet Beecher was living in the city. It is reported for us by Harriet Martineau, who saw it while she was there in 1834. It was a wonderful parade of school children--two thousand in number! Miss Martineau thought it one of the most beautiful sights that she ever saw.