I HAD looked forward to my journey from San Francisco to St. Louis with great anticipations, and, though I had no leisure to "stop off" on the tour, I was not disappointed. Six continuous days and nights of railway travelling carried me through such prodigious widths of land, that the mere fact of traversing so much space had fascinations. And the variations of scene are very striking--the corn and grape lands of Southern California, that gradually waste away into a hideous cactus desert, and then sink into a furnace-valley, several hundred feet below the level of the sea; the wild pastures of Texas, that seem endless, until they end in swamped woodlands; the terrific wildernesses of Arkansas, that gradually soften down into the beautiful fertility of Missouri. It was a delightful journey, and taught me in one week's panorama more than a British Museum full of books could have done. Visitors to America do not often make the journey. They are beguiled off by way of Santa Fe and Kansas City. I confess that I should myself have been very glad to have visited Santa Fe, and some day or other I intend to pitch my tent for a while in San Antonio. But if I had to give advice to a traveller, I would say:-- "Take the Southern Pacific to El Paso, and the Texan Pacific on to St. Louis, and you will get such an idea of the spaciousness of America as no other trip can give you." You will see prodigious tracts of country that are still in aboriginal savagery and you will travel through whole nations of hybrid people--Mexicans and mulattoes, graduated commixtures of Red Indian, Spaniard, and Negro--that some day or another must assume a very considerable political importance in the Union. Nothing would do Americans more good than a tour through Upper India. Nothing could do European visitors to America more good than the journey from San Francisco to St. Louis by the Southern-and-Texas route. The Gangetic Valley, the Western Ghats, the Himalayas, are all experiences that would ameliorate, improve, and impress the American. The Arizona cactus-plains, the Texan flower-prairies, the Arkansas swamps, give the traveller from Europe a more truthful estimate of America, as a whole, by their vastness, their untamed barbarism, their contrast with the civilized and domesticated States, than years of travel on the beaten tracks from city to city.