The writer hopes that he will not be understood as attempting to ridicule western towns, as a whole, or to throw discredit upon western merchants and bankers, as a class. Thriving villages are springing up all over the country, and many towns and cities are great centers of trade, justly depending for their future advancement upon their great advantages for interior communication, upon the matchless wealth of the soil, and upon the enlightened enterprise of their citizens. The merchants, bankers and real estate owners, are, as a class, shrewd and intelligent men, holding their credit and characters sacred and inviolable, and many families live in elegant luxury, fully justified by a permanent and reliable income. Many, here as elsewhere, have been overtaken by the recent monetary calamities, and are suffering from causes which ordinary foresight could not have foreseen. But whatever may be thought of the advantages offered by the towns of Peru and La Salle--for their destiny is one--for settlement and the investment of capital, there can be no doubt about the inducements presented to farmers and others by the surrounding country. The climate is genial and salubrious, the atmosphere invigorating and free from miasma, and the scenery delightful--alternating from green and billowy swells of prairie, varied by cultivation and improvement, to wild and romantic dells and ravines. Looking eastward up the valley of the Illinois from the observatory on the Chamber's House, no lovelier scene can be presented. The fair and beautiful city of La Salle, joined to her westerly neighbor by continuous streets and structures; the graceful spire of her cathedral rising clear and sharp against the sky; the wooded outline of the Little Vermillion, indicating its sinuous course northward until lost in the blue haze of the distance; the cultivated fields, yellow with waving wheat and oats, or dark with luxuriant corn; the quiet farm houses nestling in their bowers of foliage--homes of those whose "lines have fallen in pleasant places"--the verdant and undulating stretch of prairie bounding the vision as the waters do upon the ocean; the delicate tracery of the Central Rail Road bridge, spanning the broad chasm of the Illinois from bluff to bluff, nearly a mile in length; the silvery thread of the river, now hid by majestic elms and cotton woods, now divided by islands, and now gleaming in sun light, in the far distance; the jagged sand stone ramparts of the southern shore, in some places rearing their perpendicular sides more than an hundred feet above the waters that lave their base; the rounded and cone like tower of Buffalo Rock, rising abrupt and isolated from the valley below--all present a panorama of exceeding beauty and loveliness. Unlike some other landscapes, fair and pleasing to the eye, no deadly or unwholesome exhalations arise from the dank and luxuriant vegetation. The breezes which fan this scene come laden with health and