There is, nevertheless, potent inspiration in the resolute and occupied air of these crowds.  Hardly any one stays long among them without feeling a desire to share their excitement, and do something towards the splendid future which is evidently beckoning them on.  Preparing the future!  It is glorious business.  No wonder it makes the pulse quicken and the eye look as if it saw spirits.  It may be said, that in some sense we are all preparing the future; but in the West there is a special meaning in the expression.  In circumstances so new and wondrous, first steps are all-important.  Those who have been providentially led to become early settlers have immense power for good or evil.  One can trace in many or most of our Western towns, and even States, the spirit of their first influential citizens.  Happy is it for Chicago that she has been favored in this respect,—­and to her honor be it said, that she appreciates her benefactors.  Of one citizen, who has been for twenty years past doing the quiet and modest work of a good genius in the city of his adoption, it is currently said, that he has built a hundred miles of her streets,—­and there is no mark of respect and gratitude that she would not gladly show him.  Other citizens take the most faithful and disinterested care of her schools; and to many she is indebted for an amount of liberality and public spirit which is constantly increasing her enormous prosperity.  Happy the city which possesses such citizens!  Happy the citizens who have a city so nobly deserving of their best services!

AN EVENING WITH THE TELEGRAPH-WIRES.

My cousin Moses has made the discovery that he is a powerful magnetizer.

Like many others who have newly come into possession of a small tract in those mysterious, outlying, unexplored wildernesses of Nature, which we call by so many names, but which as yet refuse to be defined or classed, he has been naturally eager to commence operations, and exploit and farm it a little.  He is making experiments on a narrow border of his wild lands.  He is a man of will and of strong physique, with an inquiring and scientific turn of mind, which inclines him chiefly to metaphysical studies.  It is not to be wondered at, that, having lately discovered that he possesses the mesmeric gift, he should not sufficiently discriminate as to its application.  Later he will see that it is an agent not to be tampered with, and never to be used on healthy subjects, but applied only to invalids.  To-day he is like a newly-armed knight-errant, bounding off on his steed at sunrise, in search of adventures.

One afternoon, not long since, he was telling me of his extraordinary successes with somnambulists and somnoparlists,—­of old ladies cured of nervous headaches and face-twitches, and of young ones put to sleep at a distance from the magnetizer, dropping into a trance suddenly as a bird struck by a gun-shot, simply by an act of his volition,—­of water turned into wine, and wine into brandy, to the somnambulic taste,—­and so on, till we got wandering into crooked by-paths of physics and metaphysics, that seemed to lead us nowhere in particular,—­when I said, “Come, Cousin Moses, suppose you try it on me, by way of experiment.  But I have my doubts if you’ll ever put me to sleep.”