The levee, which now extends five or six miles around the large "bend" upon which the city stands, exhibits all the varieties of Western steamboats. It exhilarated the childish mind of the stranger to discover that the makers of school-books were practising no imposition upon the infant mind when they put down in the geography such names as the "Big Sandy." It was cheering, also, to know that one could actually go to Maysville, and see how General Jackson's veto had affected it. A traveller must indeed be difficult to please who cannot find upon the Cincinnati levee a steamboat bound to a place he would like to visit. From far back in the coal mines of the Youghiogheny (pronounced Yok-a-_gau_-ny) to high up the Red River,--from St. Paul to New Orleans, and all intermediate ports,--we have but to pay our money and take our choice of the towns upon sixteen thousand miles of navigable water. Among the rest we observed a steamboat about as large as an omnibus, fitted up like a pedler's wagon, and full of the miscellaneous wares which pedlers sell. Such little boats, it appears, steam from village to village along the shores of those interminable rivers, and, by renewing their supplies at the large towns, make their way for thousands of miles, returning home only at the end of the season. They can ascend higher up the streams than the large boats, and scarcely any "stage" of water is too low for them. Often as we had admired the four-horse pedlers' wagons of New England, with their plated harness and gorgeous paint, we resolved that, when we turned pedler, it should be in such a snug little steamboat upon the rivers of the West. Other steamboats, as probably the reader is aware, are fitted up as theatres, museums, circuses, and moral menageries, and go from town to town, announcing their arrival by that terrific combination of steam-whistles which is called in the West a Cally-_ope_. What an advance upon the old system of strolling players and the barn! "Then came each actor on his ass." On the Ohio he comes in a comfortable stateroom, to which when the performance is over he retires, waking the next morning at the scene of new triumphs. Along the summit of the steep levee, close to the line of stores, there is a row of massive posts--three feet thick and twenty high--which puzzle the stranger. The swelling of the river brings the steamboats up to the very doors of the houses facing the river, and to these huge posts they are fastened to keep them from being swept away by the rushing flood. From the summit of the levee we advance into the town, always going up hill, unless we turn to the right or left.