A rowdy, loafing, vagabond city, but there they have three or four fine schools (one had just cost 45,000 dollars), for which they tax the saloons mercilessly. I have no doubt the place will be quite respectable in another five years. We slept quietly and dropped down south along the Missouri to Council Bluffs, from which the earlier part of this was written. The Missouri is a doleful stream, shallow, with huge sandbanks in the middle, and great swamps at the side, but striking green bluffs rising above on the east bank under which we went; and behind them I saw the sun rise in great beauty. We just crossed the river to Omaha to say we had been in Missouri and seen the terminus of the Union-Pacific Railway, and a fine go-ahead place it is, like Dubuque, only twice as big and finely situate on hills above the Missouri River. We are now back at Chicago, having seen more frontier towns and prairies on our way here, and in five days, by the good fortune of this private train, have done more than we could have managed otherwise in nine. Chicago, September 1870. I am so afraid that I shan’t get off a letter regularly twice a week from this run in the West, that I begin this in a spare three minutes between packing and a testimonial which is to be given me here by a lot of young graduates of the American Universities at the Club at four o’clock. This place is the wonder of the wonderful West, as you know already. A gentleman I met to-day tells me he came up to this place in 1830, when it consisted of a fort with two companies, a dozen little wooden huts, and an encampment of 3000 or 4000 Indians who had come in to get their allowances under treaty with the United States. Now it is one of the handsomest cities I ever saw, with 300,000 inhabitants, and progressing at the rate of 1500 a week or thereabouts. We have had our first experience of a first-rate American hotel, the Fremont House here. It is decidedly not cheap. At present rates about fifteen shillings or four dollars a day; but you can eat and drink anything but wine and spirits all day, with the exception of one hour in the afternoon between lunch and dinner. I ordered a peach just now for lunch, and they brought me a whole plateful, not so good as our hot-house ones, but very fine fruit. Yesterday I went twice to hear Robert Collyer, a famous Unitarian minister here. He was born in Yorkshire, where he worked as a blacksmith, preaching as a Methodist, and finally, twenty years ago, came out to the West and established himself here. He has great and deserved influence, and is altogether the finest man of the kind I have ever met. His text was out of Job: “Dost thou know the springs of the deep?” I forget the exact words, but you will find them in the splendid 38th chapter, where God is showing Job who is master (as the cabman put it). He had been for his holiday at the sea, and was full of thoughts which, as he said, he wanted to get off to his people. He began by a