We made a short stop at Racine, prettily situated on the bank among the scattered trees of an oak opening, and another at Southport, a rival town eleven miles further south.  It is surprising how many persons travel, as way-passengers, from place to place on the shores of these lakes.  Five years ago the number was very few, now they comprise, at least, half the number on board a steamboat plying between Buffalo and Chicago.  When all who travel from Chicago to Buffalo shall cross the peninsula of Michigan by the more expeditious route of the railway, the Chicago and Buffalo line of steamers, which its owners claim to be the finest line in the world, will still be crowded with people taken up or to be set down at some of the intermediate towns.

When we awoke the next morning our steamer was at Chicago.  Any one who had seen this place, as I had done five years ago, when it contained less than five thousand people, would find some difficulty in recognizing it now when its population is more than fifteen thousand.  It has its long rows of warehouses and shops, its bustling streets; its huge steamers, and crowds of lake-craft, lying at the wharves; its villas embowered with trees; and its suburbs, consisting of the cottages of German and Irish laborers, stretching northward along the lake, and westward into the prairies, and widening every day.  The slovenly and raw appearance of a new settlement begins in many parts to disappear.  The Germans have already a garden in a little grove for their holidays, as in their towns in the old country, and the Roman Catholics have just finished a college for the education of those who are to proselyte the West.

The day was extremely hot, and at sunset we took a little drive along the belt of firm sand which forms the border of the lake.  Light-green waves came to the shore in long lines, with a crest of foam, like a miniature surf, rolling in from that inland ocean, and as they dashed against the legs of the horses, and the wheels of our carriage, the air that played over them was exceedingly refreshing.

When we set out the following day in the stage-coach for Peru, I was surprised to see how the settlement of Chicago had extended westward into the open country.  “Three years ago,” said a traveller in the coach, “it was thought that this prairie could neither be inhabited nor cultivated.  It is so level and so little elevated, that for weeks its surface would remain covered with water; but we have found that as it is intersected with roads, the water either runs off in the ditches of the highways, or is absorbed into the sand which lies below this surface of dark vegetable mould, and it is now, as you perceive, beginning to be covered with habitations.”