It is enormous, spreading over certainly three times the space which an English city of 250,000 inhabitants would occupy. We shall see the town on our return; meantime, as we ran out of the suburbs, we saw a house of considerable size waiting at the crossing for our train to pass before it went over, as coolly as a farmer’s waggon of hay would wait in England. O------told us that all the old houses in Chicago are moved in this way. As building is very expensive, when one of the big folk wants to put up some splendid new structure--bank, store, or the like--there are always men ready to buy the old house as it stands. They then just cut away its foundation, put it on rollers, and tote it away to the site they have bought in the suburbs. We fell upon breakfast in a half-famished state as we steamed away westward, and through the whole day were kept on the stretch. Not that there was any great beauty in the scenery, but the interest of getting actually into half-settled country was exceedingly absorbing. The most notable town we passed was Galena, in Northern Illinois, from which Grant went to the war, leaving his leather yard for that purpose. The citizens of Galena have bought and presented him a good square house of red brick on the top of the hill there. Then we ran along a tributary of the Mississippi, and about 4.30 came out on the father of waters; where we struck the mighty stream it was not impressive. We came upon a mighty swamp, not a river, miles and miles of trees, some of them fine large ones, standing in the water and covered with creepers. The river was luckily high, so that we had this effect of a forest rising out of water to perfection. Then there were miles of swamp, half water, half land, dreary and horrible to look at, sometimes sound enough for cattle to pick about, and then only fit for alligators and wild-fowl; of the latter we saw a number, including a white heron. At last we came upon the river, some three-quarters of a mile wide-up there, 1600 miles from the sea, and crossed by a gossamer bridge, a real work of high art. On the opposite side we stopped for tea-dinner at Dubuque, one of the largest towns in Iowa, and the first border city we had seen,--very quaint to behold, with streets laid out as broad as Regent Street, here and there a huge block of stores full of dry goods or groceries, and then a lot of wooden hovels, a vacant plot perhaps, and then a big hotel, or another great store,--the streets all as soft as Rotten Row, and much deeper in dirt, side pavements of wood, every house placarded in huge letters with the name and business of the owner. Here, for the first time, we saw emigrants’ waggons packed with their household goods and lumber (sawed planks) for their houses, bound for the prairies beyond, on which they settle under the homestead acts. In short, the pushing slipshod character of the great West was thoroughly mirrored in the place, and above all the other buildings was