One cannot help speculating on what will be the amount of inducement required for getting people to try to live and carry on business at this city in the swamp, for the fact that the traffic of the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi join and diverge here will ensure its becoming rich and populous. And what will be the manners and customs of the place? Will it be merely that people living here will call for more whisky toddy and sherry cobblers, smoke more cigars, and play more games of billiards than they would elsewhere? How far will the beneficent railway go towards redressing the wretchedness of the place by carrying off, for the night, for Sundays, and for holidays, all who might wish to have their homes on _terra firma_? Democracies are stingy and do not build beautiful cities in these days; so, however rich it may become, it is not likely ever to become a Venice. The train in which I had left Cairo reached a place called Odin at eleven o’clock at night. We had to wait here for a St. Louis train till the next morning. This is an instance of what is called, in American railway phraseology, ‘making bad connexions.’ The gentleman who registered after me at the chief hotel at Odin happened to be my Californian acquaintance. Having entered his name, he said to the manager, pointing to me, ‘This gentleman and I will have the same bed-room.’ This was meant as a compliment; and I did not now feel as disinclined to the proposal, particularly as it came from him, as I had been a few nights before. The clerk, however, told him that the house was full, and that I was the last person he could accommodate. I was, upon this, shown to my bed-room, which turned out to be only the fourth part of a very small apartment containing four beds, three of which were already tenanted. My English inexperience and prejudices were still too strong for this, so I sallied out in search of another hotel. While thus occupied I had time to reflect, that there is not much more harm in spending the night in a room with three others, than in spending the day in a railway car with thirty or forty others. At last, chance conducted me to the same house the Californian had already reached; and we sat by the stove in the drawing-room, talking together till the small hours of the morning. There is an unconventional kind of frankness and manliness that is very pleasing in these Western men, who have gone through a great deal of rough life and hardship, and have never, for years together, been out of danger from Indians, or desperate white men, as sanguinary as Indians, and as little troubled with scruples. [Sidenote: _Be Good to Yourself._]