In an hour’s time we start for Chicago. Our late host, Mr. O------, the President of the Illinois Central Kail, one of the greatest of the Western’s system of railways, has followed us here, and is going round a tour of inspection of his line, and to open 150 miles of new way for traffic. So we shall go round in an express train with him, seeing everything in the most luxurious and easiest manner--a wonderful piece of luck. It was his nice wife who persuaded him to come off and do it now at once while he could have us with him. I am sitting at my open window, outside of which is a broad verandah with a magnificent view of the Falls. I am getting what I take to be my last look at them, and for the last time the sound of many waters, the finest to be heard in the world, I suppose, is in my ears. The mid-Atlantic when the waves were highest struck me more, but nothing else I have ever seen in Switzerland or elsewhere comes near this. It is the first great hotel we have been in, and not a bad specimen I imagine. We get heaps of meals, and though the cooking is not all one could wish, there is nothing to hinder your living very well. We are waited on by some fifteen or twenty real darkies--good, grinning, curly-pated Sambos and Pompeys--so, of course, I am happy so far as service goes. Seriously, though, they are much more obliging and quite as intelligent as their white compeers here and in the States. Storm Lake, 13th. September 1870. One line from this odd little station, right in the middle of the Iowa prairies, which slope away right out of sight in every direction. It is the highest point between Fort Dodge and Sioux City. Fifteen months ago there were not three settlers’ cabins on the whole 140 miles; now they are dotted along every mile or so, sometimes turf huts, sometimes wooden, with generally a group of barefooted, healthy children tumbling about the doors. We are sitting in the little wooden post-office here, on the walls of which hang maps of the splendid town which is to be run up in the next three or four years, and notices of a meeting of the citizens of Storm Lake to hear the addresses of Captain Jackson Orr, the Republican candidate for Congress of the district, and of Governor G------, who comes to support him. The whole place at present consists of some ten or twelve wooden huts, with two more ambitious buildings running up, one an hotel and the other a big store. The settlers are a fine rough set of fellows, but full of intelligence, and determined to make their place the most important city in the State. It is a most exquisite climate, with a lake four miles by two, in which there are plenty of pickerel, and as we came along in our express train we have put up lots of coveys of prairie hens, like big tame grouse, most delicious eating too. _Express train_, you will look at with wondering eyes. Well, or rather wâàl, as they pronounce it here, that is the