We had a like though only a momentary display at the famous Karg well, an eight-million-feet well. This could only be turned on for a few seconds at a time, for it is in connection with the general system. If the gas is turned off, the fires in houses and factories would go out, and if it were turned on again without notice, the rooms would be full of gas, and an explosion follow an attempt to relight it. This danger is now being removed by the invention of an automatic valve in the pipe supplying each fire, which will close and lock when the flow of gas ceases, and admit no more gas until it is opened. The ordinary pressure for house service is about two pounds to the square inch. The Karg well is on the bank of the creek, and the discharge-pipe through which the gas (though not in its full force) was turned for our astonishment extends over the water. The roar was like that of Niagara; all the town shakes when the Karg is loose. When lighted, billows of flame rolled over the water, brilliant in color and fantastic in form, with a fury and rage of conflagration enough to strike the spectator with terror. I have never seen any other display of natural force so impressive as this. When this flame issues from an upright pipe, the great mass of fire rises eighty feet into the air, leaping and twisting in fiendish fury. For six weeks after this well was first opened its constant roaring shook the nerves of the town, and by night its flaming torch lit up the heaven and banished darkness. With the aid of this new agent anything seems possible. The feverishness of speculation will abate; many anticipations will not be realized. It will be discovered that there is a limit to manufacturing, even with fuel that costs next to nothing. The supply of natural gas no doubt has its defined limits. But nothing seems more certain to me than that gas, manufactured if not to be the fuel of the future in the West, and that the importance of this economic change in social life is greater than we can at present calculate. XII.—CINCINNATI AND LOUISVILLE. Cincinnati is a city that has a past. As Daniel Webster said, that at least is secure. Among the many places that have been and are the Athens of America, this was perhaps the first. As long ago as the first visit of Charles Dickens to this country it was distinguished as a town of refinement as well as cultivation; and the novelist, who saw little to admire, though much to interest him in our raw country, was captivated by this little village on the Ohio. It was already the centre of an independent intellectual life, and produced scholars, artists, writers, who subsequently went east instead of west. According to tradition, there seems to have been early a tendency to free thought, and a response to the movement which, for lack of a better name, was known in Massachusetts as transcendentalism.