And yet even a casual traveler can find much to interest him in St. Louis. Let him start his inspection of the levee, let romance and sentiment and memory work within his mind. Let his fancy see the riverboats and then he, himself, inspect one of them. Here is one of them, gay in her ginger-bready architecture. Her stacks rise high above her "Texas" but they are placed ahead of her wheel-house, a fancy peculiar to the old naval architects along the Mississippi. She is driven by sidewheels and if our casual traveler goes upon her he will find that each sidewheel is driven by a separate engine, a marvelous affair painted in reds and blues and yellows. With one engine going ahead and the other reversed a really capable Mississippi pilot--and who shall doubt that a Mississippi river pilot, even in these decadent days, is ever anything less than capable--could send the boat spinning like a top upon the yellow stream. That pretty trick would hardly be possible with one of the flat-bottomed stern wheel boats, and there still are hundreds of these upon the Father of Waters and his tributaries, moving slowly and serenely up and down and all with a mighty splashing of dirty water. If you are a casual traveler and upon your first visit to the Mississippi valley, you will make a mental reservation to ride upon one of the old boats before you leave St. Louis. They may not be there so very many more years. The steel barges have begun to show themselves, and commerce is looking inquiringly at the idle stream to see if it cannot be brought into real efficiency as a transportation agent. And before you leave that levee, with the grass growing up between its ancient stones, you will find a very small and a very dirty sidewalk that leads from it up into and upon the great Eads bridge. St. Louis does not think very much of the Eads bridge these days. Yet it was only a few years ago that it was bragging about that wonderful conception of the engineer--who had finally spanned the lordly Mississippi and right at his chief city. But other bridges have come, two huge ungainly railroad structures to the north and a public bridge to the south--that is, it will be a public bridge if the voters of St. Louis ever cease quarreling about it. At the present time it is hardly a bridge, only a great span over the water and for long months absolutely unprovided with approaches because the taxpayers of St. Louis refuse to vote the funds for its completion. So it is that the Eads bridge is today but a single agency out of three or four for the spanning of the river; it, too, has grown grimy in forty years and the railroad travelers who come across through its lower deck only remember that from it there leads under the heart of the city of St. Louis one of the smokiest railroad tunnels in existence--and that is saying much.