What Cincinnati would have been, with its early culture and its increasing wealth, if it had not become so largely German in its population, we can only conjecture. The German element was at once conservative as to improvements and liberalizing, as the phrase is, in theology and in life. Bituminous coal and the Germans combined to make a novel American city. When Dickens saw the place it was a compact, smiling little city, with a few country places on the hills. It is now a scattered city of country places, with a little nucleus of beclouded business streets. The traveller does not go there to see the city, but to visit the suburbs, climbing into them, out of the smoke and grime, by steam “inclines” and grip railways. The city is indeed difficult to see. When you are in it, by the river, you can see nothing; when you are outside of it you are in any one of half a dozen villages, in regions of parks and elegant residences, altogether charming and geographically confusing; and if from some commanding point you try to recover the city idea, you look down upon black roofs half hid in black smoke, through which the fires of factories gleam, and where the colored Ohio rolls majestically along under a dark canopy. Looked at in one way, the real Cincinnati is a German city, and you can only study its true character “Over the Rhine,” and see it successfully through the bottom of an upturned beer glass. Looked at another way, it is mainly an affair of elegant suburbs, beautifully wooded hills, pleasure-grounds, and isolated institutions of art or charity. I am thankful that there is no obligation on me to depict it. It would probably be described as a city of art rather than of theology, and one of rural homes rather than metropolitan society. Perhaps the German element has had something to do in giving it its musical character, and the early culture may have determined its set more towards art than religion. As the cloud of smoke became thicker and thicker in the old city those who disliked this gloom escaped out upon the hills in various directions. Many, of course, still cling to the solid ancestral houses in the city, but the country movement was so general that church-going became an affair of some difficulty, and I can imagine that the church-going habit was a little broken up while the new neighborhoods were forming on the hills and in the winding valleys, and before the new churches in the suburbs were erected. Congregations were scattered, and society itself was more or less disintegrated. Each suburb is fairly accessible from the centre of the city, either by a winding valley or by a bold climb up a precipice, but owing to the configuration of the ground, it is difficult to get from one suburb to another without returning to the centre and taking a fresh start. This geographical hinderance must necessarily interfere with social life, and tend to isolation of families, or to merely neighborhood association.