It appears that there was living at St. Louis an English gentleman named Shaw, who, having made a beautiful garden, offered it to the town on condition that it should be kept up at the public expense. The City Fathers objected to this condition. “Yes, sir, they are skinflints,” said our friend; “what we want here is about one hundred and fifty first-class funerals, then we should get along fine.” In the evening he dined with us and came to see us off at the station, where he presented each of us with a large octavo volume of three hundred and thirteen pages entitled, “St. Louis, the Future Great City of the World, by L. N. Reavis. Fourth edition.” The book is full of quotations of speeches by men of more or less, chiefly less, eminence in which the audiences of St. Louis had been flattered to the top of their bent. “Voices,” Mr. Reavis calls them, “prophetic voices.” I cannot resist copying a choice bit culled from Mr. Reavis’ own writing: “And if it be true, as I hope to establish, that St. Louis is destined to be the great city of the world, the all-directing head and central moving heart of the accumulated civilization of the great family of man, the facts of her history will in time be sought for, by citizens and writers, with an eagerness and a zeal never before called out by the interests of any other city—not even of Jerusalem nor of Rome. Henceforth St. Louis must be viewed in the light of her future, her mightiness in the Empire of the world, her sway in the rule of States and nations. Her destiny is fixed. Like a new-born Empire she is moving forward to conscious greatness, and will soon be the world’s magnet of attraction. Here will be reared great halls for art and learning; here will congregate the great men and women of future ages; here will be represented some Solon and Hamilton, giving laws for the higher and better government of the people; here will be represented some future great teachers of religion, teaching the ideal and the spiritual development of the race, and the higher allegiance of man to the Angel-world; here will live some future Plutarch, who will weigh the great men of his age; here some future Mozart will thrill the strings of a more perfect lyre; here some future Rembrandt, through his own ideal imagination, will picture for himself more perfect panoramic scenes of nature’s lovely landscapes,” etc., etc. We thanked our kind friend. The engine shrieked and we rolled away from the future great city of the world into outer darkness, illuminated at intervals by the blaze of burning forests.