Little Rock, already a railway centre of importance, is prosperous and rapidly improving. It has the settled, temperate, orderly society of an Eastern town, but democratic in its habits, and with a cordial hospitality which is more provincial than fashionable. I heard there a good chamber concert of stringed instruments, one of a series which had been kept up by subscription all winter, and would continue the coming winter. The performers were young Bohemians. The gentleman at whose pleasant, old-fashioned house I was entertained, a leading lawyer and jurist in the South-west, was a good linguist, had travelled in most parts of the civilized globe, had on his table the current literature of France, England, Germany, and America, a daily Paris newspaper, one New York journal (to give its name might impugn his good taste in the judgment of every other New York journal), and a very large and well-selected library, two-thirds of which was French, and nearly half of the remainder German. This was one of the many things I found in Arkansas which I did not expect to find. XIV.—ST. LOUIS AND KANSAS CITY. St. Louis is eighty years old. It was incorporated as a town in 1808, thirteen years before the admission of Missouri into the Union as a State. In 1764 a company of thirty Frenchmen made a settlement on its site and gave it its distinguished name. For nearly half a century, under French and Spanish jurisdiction alternately, it was little more than a trading post, and at the beginning of this century it contained only about a thousand inhabitants. This period, however, gave it a romantic historic background, and as late as 1853, when its population was a hundred thousand, it preserved French characteristics and a French appearance—small brick houses and narrow streets crowded down by the river. To the stranger it was the Planters’ Hotel and a shoal of big steamboats moored along an extensive levee roaring with river traffic. Crowded, ill-paved, dirty streets, a few country houses on elevated sites, a population forced into a certain activity by trade, but hindered in municipal improvement by French conservatism, and touched with the rust of slavery—that was the St. Louis of thirty-five years ago.