In my journey the next day, I was struck with the difference which five years had made in the aspect of the country.  Frame or brick houses in many places had taken the places of log-cabins; the road for long distances now passed between fences, the broad prairie, inclosed, was turned into immense fields of maize, oats, and wheat, and was spotted here and there with young orchards, or little groves, and clumps of bright-green locust-trees, and where the prairie remained open, it was now depastured by large herds of cattle, its herbage shortened, and its flowers less numerous.  The wheat harvest this year is said to have failed in northern Illinois.  The rust has attacked the fields which promised the fairest, and they are left unreaped, to feed the quails and the prairie-hens.

Another tedious day’s journey, over a specially bad road, brought us to Peru a little before midnight, and we passed the rest of the night at an inn just below the bank, on the margin of the river, in listening to the mosquitoes.  A Massachusetts acquaintance the next morning furnished us with a comfortable conveyance to this pleasant neighborhood.

Letter XXXIII.

Return to Chicago.

Chicago, August 8, 1846.

You may be certain that in returning to this place from Princeton I did not take the stage coach.  I had no fancy for another plunge into the Illinois canal, nor for being overturned upon the prairies in one of those vehicles which seem to be set high in the air in order they may more easily lose their balance.  We procured a private conveyance and made the journey in three days—­three days of extreme heat, which compelled us to travel slowly.  The quails, which had repaired for shade to the fences by the side of the road, ran from them into the open fields, as we passed, with their beaks open, as if panting with the excessive heat.

The number of these birds at the present time is very great.  They swarm in the stubble fields and in the prairies, and manifest little alarm at the approach of man.  Still more numerous, it appears to me, are the grouse, or prairie-hens, as they call them here, which we frequently saw walking leisurely, at our approach, into the grass from the road, whither they resorted for the sake of scattered grains of oats or wheat that had fallen from the loaded wagons going to Chicago.  At this season they are full fed and fearless, and fly heavily when they are started.  We frequently saw them feeding at a very short distance from people at work in the fields.  In some neighborhoods they seem almost as numerous as fowls in a poultry-yard.  A settler goes out with his gun, and in a quarter of an hour brings in half a dozen birds which in the New York market would cost two dollars a pair.  At one place where we stopped to dine, they gave us a kind of pie which seemed to me an appropriate dessert for a dinner of prairie-hens.  It was made of the fruit of the western crab-apple, and was not unpalatable.  The wild apple of this country is a small tree growing in thickets, natural orchards.  In spring it is profusely covered with light-pink blossoms, which have the odor of violets, and at this season it is thickly hung with fruit of the color of its leaves.