It happened the next day that no train started for the North till half-past four in the afternoon; and as the rain of the previous night had turned to heavy driving sleet, I congratulated myself on the accident, although it appeared so disagreeable at the time, to which I was indebted for the acquaintance of the Californian. He had known California, he said, from the first influx of gold hunters. The rogues and desperadoes of all that part of the world were collected there; but there was some good stuff that came in at the same time. Society would have been completely turned upside down, and no decent man could have remained in the place, if it had not been for Lynch law and the use of the pistol. These two things set everything quite right in five years, in a way in which no other kind of law, supported by all the churches and all the teachers in the world, could have done it in fifty years. And now the State is as orderly a community as there is on the face of the earth. After the roughness of many years of Californian life, in the early days of the State, he found the hardships of the late war mere _bagatelles_. The war seemed to him only like an exciting pastime. [Sidenote: _How the Site of Eden was Created._] The capacity of Eden, for offering a field for such talents as those of Mr. Mark Tapley, was very much diminished during the late war; for being at the junction of the Ohio with the Mississippi (the Ohio itself, not far above this point, is joined by three large streams), it became a very important military station. But it was necessary to create a site for a town, for the locality itself supplied nothing of the kind. This was done by raising a levee, forty feet high, and then, behind this, making streets in the form of embankments at right angles to the levee, these streets again being intersected by other embankments parallel to the levee. The whole space that was reclaimed was thus divided by these embankments into hollow squares, each of which is intended for a block of buildings. At present very few of these blocks have been raised, but the streets—that is, the embankments, with in some instances planked _trottoirs_ at their sides—are finished. If the water should ever rise up through the ground, or the storm-water flow into the cellars and underground parts of the houses, it will be necessary to pump it out, for there can be no drainage in such a place. So in America, where no difficulties are recognised, are towns built in swamps.