Two turnpike companies once started to build a pike from Indianapolis to Lafayette, Ind., seventy miles, but when within two miles of each other there was a disagreement between the two companies and that intervening piece of road has never been finished. Although there is a great deal of travel over this splendid pike there is not public spirit sufficient to fill up this gap of two miles, and for years the traveling public have driven off the ends of these two turnpikes into two miles of the deepest mud fordable. In Illinois there are no pikes even, all dirt roads; roads that are to-day in the same condition they were when the country was first settled; not a day's work has ever been expended upon them. I passed farm after farm on which were fine houses, large substantial barns and hundreds of heads of stock, and every indication of a rich soil and worldly prosperity, and yet the road directly in front of these farm-houses has remained in such a condition for years, that for six months out of the twelve it is really dangerous for man or beast to travel after dark. I stopped one night in a fine brick house that in the East would cost four or five thousand dollars, and yet this house could only be reached by a lane in which the mud for six months in the year was hub deep, and a fine fat sow with a litter of pigs had full possession of the front yard, if such a mud hole could be called a yard. Another case I remember where the houses, barns, and stock indicated the farmer's prosperous condition, and yet there was no well, nothing but rain water to drink. The fact is, all these things--and I could keep on mentioning them to the end of the chapter--serve to illustrate the intense Western desire for display to the neglect of comfort. The stately domes of their numerous court-houses seen on all sides make a big show. Their large barns with the farmer's name painted on the side in red letters or shingled into the slate roof advertise the owner's name and financial standing. Whatever is above ground, whatever can be seen from a distance, whatever makes a great display receives the cordial support of the average Westerner, but when you look for a fine country road, free of toll gates, or a good, deep well, or a nice cool cellar, or anything, no matter how much it might add to the personal comfort of the possessor, but which is below the surface or unseen from the surrounding country, you may look in vain for these evidences of a moderately high state of civilization. The diet of Western families is simply abominable. It is pork, fried pork, every meal. Their meals are as monotonous as their scenery. A farmer, rich in money, lands, and houses, will live for weeks on pork, when beef, mutton, turkey, and chicken are in great abundance on all sides and so cheap as to be almost unsalable. And yet, probably because their stomachs are out of sight and the satisfying effect of a good square meal is quieting and not of the spread-eagle effect, the farmers live