One soon ceases wondering at the tropicality of the Illinoisian imagination.  Ali Baba’s eye-straining experiences were poor, compared to these every-day realities.

The “Open Sesame” in this case has been spoken through the railroad-whistle.  Railroads cannot make mines and quarries, and fat soil and bounteous rivers; yet railroads have been the making of Illinois.  Nobody who has ever seen her spring roads, where there are no rails, can ever question it.  From the very fatness of her soil, the greater part of the State must have been one Slough of Despond for three quarters of the year, and her inhabitants strangers to each other, if these iron arms had not drawn the people together and bridged the gulfs for them.  No roads but railroads could possibly have threaded the State, a large and the best portion of whose surface is absolutely devoid of timber, stone, gravel, or any other available material.  The prairies must have remained flowery deserts, visited as a curiosity every year by strangers, but without dwellings for want of wood.  The vast quarries must, of course, have lain useless, for want of transporting power,—­our friend’s coal and iron undisturbed, waiting for an earthquake,—­and the poetical pioneer’s beets and Indian corn unplanted, and therefore uncelebrated.  Well may it be said here, that iron is more valuable than gold.  Population, agriculture, the mechanic arts, literature, taste, civilization, in short, are all magnetized by the beneficent rail, and follow wherever it leads.  The whole southern portion of Illinois has been nicknamed “Egypt,” —­whether because at its utmost point, on a dampish delta, reposes the far-famed city of Cairo,—­or whether, as wicked satirists pretend, its denizens have been found, in certain particulars, rather behind our times in intellectual light.  Whatever may have been the original excuse for the sobriquet, the derogatory one exists no more.  Light has penetrated, and darkness can reign no longer.  Every day, a fiery visitant, bearing the collective intelligence of the whole world’s doings and sayings, dashes through Egypt into Cairo, giving off scintillations at every hamlet on the way,—­and every day the brilliant marvel returns, bringing northward, not only the good things of the Ohio and Mississippi, but tropic on-dits and oranges, only a few hours old, to the citizens of Chicago, far “in advance of the (New York) mail.”  With the rail comes the telegraph; and whispers of the rise and fall of fancies and potatoes, of speculations and elections, of the sale of corner-lots and the evasion of bank-officers, are darting about in every direction over our heads, as we unconsciously admire the sunset, or sketch a knot of rosy children as they come trooping from a quaint school-house on the prairie edge.  Fancy the rail gone, and we have neither telegraph, nor school-house, nor anything of all this but the sunset,—­and even that we could not be there to see in spring-time, at least, unless we could transmigrate for the time into the relinquished forms of some of these aboriginal bull-frogs, which grow to the nice size of two feet in length, destined, no doubt, to receive the souls of habitual croakers hereafter.