At St. Louis, the Mississippi is crossed by very powerful steam ferries, and a passage across the river has for this purpose to be kept open and free from ice. The Bluff has been escarped to enable vehicles to get down to the water-side. The crush and crowd were very great, and to increase the difficulty of getting down, the face of the descent was at that time coated thickly with ice. I saw two loaded waggons capsize, and the coach I was in at one time began to slip, and we were only saved by the skill of the driver. The ferry boat took over more than a dozen coaches and waggons each trip, many of them having four horses. The city of St. Louis is on the further or western bank, and all the traffic of the city and of the vast region beyond it crosses at this ferry. It will not, however, be needed much longer, for the foundations are now being laid for a bridge, which, like that at Niagara, will carry foot-passengers and all kinds of horse-drawn vehicles, as well as the railway trains. It is a strange thing that this bridge is being built, not by the people of St. Louis itself, but by capital advanced by Chicago men. The reason is not far to seek. St. Louis, regarded as a considerable place, is ten or fifteen years older than Chicago. The moneyed men therefore at St. Louis are getting into years, and so have become cautious, and indisposed to try new investments. The Chicago men are still young: the enterprise of youth in them is not yet exhausted; and so they are ready to entertain, and even to accept, new ideas; and a proposal, however grand, or novel, or costly it may be, is not on these accounts appalling to them. In America, where everything is ever moving and changing, an elderly man is unfit for business.