Friend Amos: As thee knows I have been here now some little time, thee will trust me to give thee a fair description of the country and the people. The fertility of the land is so widely known that I need not attempt to enlarge upon that to thee. Broad tracts of gently-rolling prairie-land spread over the southern portions of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and vast pine-forests are laid under tribute in the north. The Mississippi River, which flows between the two States, sorely disappointed me. I looked for a broad and mighty mass of water, and I found a stream, here at least, and even for hundreds of miles south, by no means as imposing as our own Delaware. On either side of it rises a continuous range of limestone bluffs, showing, far up their rocky sides, the clear wearing of the ancient water-line. Among these bluffs, stretching back some miles from the river, curl beautiful and fertile valleys, planted in which, and often indeed clinging to the unpromising sides of the ragged bluffs, are the dwellings of the settlers. In the portions longest inhabited rise often pretty, and sometimes even stately, residences, but in the western portions many of the settlers are colonists from Norway and Germany, and, as these are mostly poor, they live more commonly in mere hovels, and stable their stock under masses of straw resting on frames of posts. The long and tedious winters being severe on stock, the farmers devote themselves, in a great degree, to the culture of wheat. The climate has not the evenness of our own, and the reports I know thee has heard to the contrary are mistaken. The mercury not unfrequently falls to thirty-five and forty degrees below zero in many localities, but the air is dry, and does not try one as much, perhaps, as thee would imagine: the bitter winds, however, sweep across these prairies and through and about the valleys until it verily seems, Friend Amos, that the unaccustomed limbs must freeze. The people, however, are not easily terrified, but heap on their fires such quantities of wood as seemed to me extravagant (for wood is abundant here, but coal dear), and pass the winters cheerfully. I have noticed that affections of the lungs are rarer here than in our climate, and that the most of those so afflicted brought their diseases with them from the East.