Gradually Americanism made its impress. The wharf was lined with steamboats and the levee with great stores. Steam ferryboats multiplied. The city became a great river town, second in importance only to New Orleans. The lead mines to the south of the city were productive. Manufactures of various sorts sprang up. An insurance company was incorporated. Prosperity was checked by fear of the great Black Hawk, who, at the head of the Sac and Fox Indians, took the war-path in Illinois. Immigration and transportation of goods to and from the North was checked till Black Hawk was defeated and his tribe transported to the other side of the river, where the influence of Great Britain could not reach them. No sooner, however, had the city recovered from its slight panic than there came another and graver excitement, another lull in business. Jackson's bank veto was the cause. As if this were not enough to discourage the community, along came the cholera, which in five weeks destroyed four per cent. of the population. Cholera has reappeared since, from time to time, the most serious visitation being in 1866, but the city as it grew began to pay attention to the sewage question and in half a century had perfected such a sewer system as is not surpassed in any city in the world. In 1835 the City Council sold the town Commons, a tract of about two thousand acres, and devoted nine tenths of the proceeds to street improvements and one tenth to the public schools, and from this small beginning arose the system which to-day directs the education of the children of a city of 575,000 inhabitants. In 1829 the St. Louis University, a Jesuit institution, was founded, which has been since a centre of higher education for the sons of the well-to-do Roman Catholics of the entire South and Southwest. Considerably later was founded the institution now Washington University, one of the best endowed educational establishments in the country, with a manual training department famous the world over, and with its Mary Institute for girls ranking with the best seminaries of the country. At an early day the Roman Catholic religious sisterhoods of charity and instruction established branches here. The Sisters of Charity founded a hospital in 1832, aided by the liberality of John Mullanphy, which has been in continuous service ever since. The Sisters of the Visitation came later and established their convent for the higher education of girls and did for the girls of the West and South what the St. Louis University did for the boys. Still later came the establishment of medical colleges, one in connection with the St. Louis University, and later the institutions founded by McDowell and Pope, from which grew the swarm of large medical and surgical colleges which now make St. Louis one of the most important centres of medical education in the land. [Illustration WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY AS PROJECTED, NOW UNDER CONSTRUCTION.]