Of all the astonishing sights in this land of surprises, none takes one more by surprise than the town of Omaha. At home we have been taught to regard Chicago as the extremity of civilisation, and therefore as one of the wonders of the world. But when you have turned your back on Chicago, and been borne away into the western prairie by the locomotive for 500 miles, you find that you have reached a thriving town, of brick buildings and large hotels, containing now 16,000 inhabitants, and which is destined to become—probably in a very few years—a second Chicago. For, being on the Pacific Railway, the grandest of all railways, as well as on that grandest of all arterial lines of water-communication, the Missouri, which is navigable for a thousand miles beyond the town for the same steamer that might have ascended the stream from New Orleans, it must soon become the depôt for the two greatest lines of American traffic—that between the East and the West, and that between the North and the South, which will cross here. It does not appear possible that anything can arise to prevent its expanding, with a rapidity unexampled even in America, into one of the great commercial centres of this vast and rich continent. During the summer the Missouri had been crossed by a steam-ferry. But to save a little time in the transit, and the trouble of keeping a passage for the ferry free from ice during the winter, the railway had been carried across the river, as soon as the frost became severe, on two rows of piles, which rose only a few inches above the surface of the ice. This was merely intended for the three or four months during which it would be buttressed and strengthened by the ice. As soon as that should begin to break up, it would be swept away. In going westward, the train I was in was made to traverse it at a snail’s pace, for fear of shaking it to pieces, but even with this caution it wavered and groaned alarmingly. On returning some weeks afterwards, when the ice was hourly expected to break up, the train I recrossed it in was the last that used it. Again we traversed it, at a snail’s pace, feeling our way as we went; again we heard the creaking, and saw the bending and swaying of the rickety fabric, many fearing that this last journey would be the one too many, and that it would not be swept away by the ice, but shaken to pieces by use. In no other country would so reckless a disregard of risks, imperilling life, be tolerated. But here neither the public, nor the contrivers of these risks, nor the possible or actual sufferers by them, appear to give these matters a thought; or, if they do, they probably regard them from the commercial point of view—that it would be hard to interfere with anyone who was endeavouring to make money, and that the public ought to be left to decide for themselves whether it is, or is not, worth their while to run the risks to which they are invited. The day after I