Its geographical position is indisputably a commanding one, and already the great smelting works, with one exception the busiest in the States, the splendid workshops of the Union Pacific Railway, and the thriving distillery close by, give promise of the great industries which in the future this town, with its wonderful advantages of communication, as the meeting-point of great railway high-roads, will attract to itself. Omaha has an admirable opera-house, and when its hotel is rebuilt it will be able to offer visitors good accommodation. It has also an imposing school-house imposingly advertised by being on top of a hill, and the refining grace of gardens is not completely absent, while the "stove-pipe" hat gives fragmentary evidence of advanced civilization. But all this affords encouragement for the future only; at present Omaha is a depressing spot. And so I left the town without regret; but I did not make any effort to shake off the dust of Omaha. That was impossible; it had penetrated the texture of my clothing so completely that nothing but shredding my garments into their original threads would have sufficed. Now I had read something of Omaha before I went there, had seen it called "a splendid Western city," and been invited to linger there to examine its "dozens of noble monuments to invincible enterprise," which, with "the dozen or more church spires," are supposed to break the sky-line of the view of this "metropolis of the North-western States and Territories." It is possible, therefore, that my profound disappointment with the reality, after reading such exaggerated description, may have tinged my opinion of Omaha, and, combined with the unfortunately "exceptional" day I spent there, have made me think very poorly of the former capital of Nebraska. That it has a great future before it, its position alone guarantees, and the enterprise of Nebraska puts beyond all doubt; but the sight-seer going to Omaha, and expecting to find it anything but a very new town on a very unprepossessing site, will be as greatly disappointed as I was.