had been done. A close fetid smell rose from the sluggish pools of water, and fever seemed written everywhere. Along the jetty alone there were signs of life, and even that life was death-like. Long trains of empty luggage vans were drawn upon the rails on which the poorer settlers had taken refuge, when they were driven out of their dwellings by the flood, and in these wretched resting-places whole families of women and children, mostly Irish, were huddled together miserably. The great river steamboats were coming-up constantly from the camp before Corinth, bringing cargo loads of wounded and sick and disabled soldiers, who lay for hours upon the jetty, waiting for means of transport northwards. There were piles, too, of coffinsnot empty ones this time-but with the dead men's names inscribed upon them, left standing in front of the railway offices. The smoke of the great steamboat chimneys hung like a pall over the town, and all day and all night long you heard the ringing of their bells and the whistling of their steam as they moved to and fro. The inhabitants were obviously too dispirited to do what little they could have done to remedy the unhealthiness of their town. Masses of putrid offal, decaying bones, and dead dogs, lay within eye-sight (not to allude to their proximity to the nasal organ) of the best dwellings in the city. The people in the street seemed to loaf about listlessly, the very shopmen, most of whom were German Jews, had barely

energy enough to sell their goods; and in all Cairo there was not a newspaper printed, a fact which, in an American city, speaks volumes for the moral as well as the physical prostration of the inhabitants. The truth is, that the town is a mere depôt for transhipping goods and passengers at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and the great Illinois Central railroad. There is money to be made there, and therefore people are always found to come and settle at Cairo for a time. But the time, either by choice or stern necessity, is always a very short one. At first, the wounded soldiers from the army at Shiloh were sent up to Cairo, but the mortality amongst them was found to be so great, that the hospitals were closed, and the sick shipped up the river to Louisville and St. Louis, far away as they lay from the scene of action.

It had been my purpose to go on from Cairo to the camp of the western army, and the battle-field of Pittsburgh Landing. Shortly, however, before my arrival, I found that very stringent orders had been issued by General Halleck, then in command, against allowing civilians to visit the army on any pretence, and an attempt to obtain a pass would have necessitated a reference to head-quarters at Washington, and consequently a delay of many days at Cairo. There were ague and fever in the bare idea, and so unwillingly I turned my steps northwards to the States of the free West.

RACINE CITY.

OF my journey through Illinois it is not necessary that I should speak. One journey in the West is the exact counterpart of the other, and I have said already all that I have to say on the subject. The point of my destination was the city of Racine, where I happened to have friends settled. It lies just beyond the extreme northern frontier of Illinois, while Cairo is at the extreme south. I travelled straight, almost as the crow could fly, along the line of which General McClellan was chairman not long ago, with even less profit to the unfortunate shareholders than he has afforded to the American people. Yet such are the enormous distances in the West, that travelling almost without stopping, at the rate of some five-and-twenty miles an hour, my journey occupied a day and a half.

Very few of my readers will probably be aware that there is such a city in the world as Racine, still less where it is placed. It must be a map of pretty recent date to have the name inscribed on it. It will be sufficient, however, to say, that it is on the western

shore of Lake Michigan, sixty miles north of Chicago city, and if the reader does not know where the lake and the city are, he can find them by referring to his atlas. There is nothing remarkable or worthy of description about Racine, and it is for that very reason -pardon the paradox-that I wish to describe it. Years ago, there was a man who invented a machine which turned out hexameters,-real Latin ones, not nondescript ones of the Clough or Longfellow type. There was no meaning in them, but the words placed in the machine were so selected that, in whatever order they happened to turn out, they arranged themselves in hexameters. If you had wanted to give a specimen of a machine-made hexameter, you would not have picked out a line in which, by some strange chance, there was a faint glimmering of sense or poetry, but one with the true standard meaningless monotony. Now all western cities seem to have been turned out by a city-making machine, warranted to produce a city of any size, at the shortest notice, and therefore, in describing the cities of the West, any average one will stand for all the more average a one the better. Private circumstances, moreover, caused me to see a good deal of Racine; and, indeed, made my stay so pleasant there, that I shall always think gratefully of the dull little town on the shores of the great inland sea. Racine stands upon the Root river. Whether the town is named by translation from the river, or the

river from the town, is a moot point on which the historians of the place are divided. Some persons suggest that the connexion between the names of the town and river is purely accidental, and that the city was named after the great French tragedian. It may well be so. There is no limit to the eccentricities of American nomenclature, and there are probably a dozen towns in the United States named after Racine, Rousseau, and Corneille. Whatever doubt there may be about the reasons to which Racine owes its name, there is as yet no legendary uncertainty about its birth and origin. There are men of middle age, now living in the place, who have lived through the whole life of the city, and who yet came here as full-grown men. A quarter of a century ago, when General Jackson, as Democratic President, suppressed the State Bank of the Union, which owed its origin to the Whigs, hundreds of new private banks sprang into existence, and deluged the country with an extemporized currency. There followed a period of wild speculation, chiefly in the lands of the North-Western territories. Steamboats were then first coming into full use, and, through the chain of the great lakes, hundreds of thousands of emigrants from Europe and the Eastern States were carried by steamboats to the western shores of Lake Michigan. After a time the banks failed; there was a commercial crisis, the speculators were ruined, but the emigrants remained. The