"One peculiarity in travelling from East to West is, that you lose the old men. In the cars in New England you see white-headed men, and I kept one in the train up to New York, and one of grayish-tinted hair as far as Erie; but after Cleveland, no man was over forty years old.
"For hundreds of miles the prairie land stretches on the Illinois Central Railroad between Chicago and St. Louis. It may be pleasant in summer, but it is a dreary waste in winter. The space is too broad and too uniform to have beauty. The girdle of trees would be pretty, doubtless, if seen near, but in the distance and in winter it is only a black border to a brown plain.
"The State of Illinois must be capitally adapted to railroads on account of this level, and but little danger can threaten a train from running off of the track, as it might run on the soil nearly as well as on the rails.
"Our engine was uncoupled, and had gone on for nearly half a mile without the cars before the conductor perceived it.
"The time from Chicago to St. Louis is called fifteen hours and a quarter; we made it twenty-three.
"If the prairie land is good farming-land, Illinois is destined to be a great State. If its people will think less of the dollar and more of the refinements of social life and the culture of the mind, it may become the great State of the Union yet.
"March 12. Planter's Hotel, St. Louis. We visited Mercantile Hall and the Library. The lecture-room is very spacious and very pretty. No gallery hides the frescoed walls, and no painful economy has been made of the space on the floor.
"13th. I begin to perceive the commerce of St. Louis. We went upon the levee this morning, and for miles the edge was bordered with the pipes of steamboats, standing like a picket-fence. Then we came to the wholesale streets, and saw the immense stores for dry-goods and crockery.
"To-day I have heard of a scientific association called the 'Scientific Academy of St. Louis,' which is about a year old, and which is about to publish a volume of transactions, containing an account of an artesian well, and of some inscriptions just sent home from Nineveh, which Mr. Gust. Seyffarth has deciphered.
"Mr. Seyffarth must be a remarkable man; he has translated a great many inscriptions, and is said to surpass Champollion. He has published a work on Egyptian astronomy, but no copy is in this country.