People here expose themselves to a draught of air with much less scruple than they do in the Atlantic states.  “We do not take cold by it,” they said to me, when I saw them sitting in a current of wind, after perspiring freely.  If they do not take cold, it is odds but they take something else, a fever perhaps, or what is called a bilious attack.  The vicissitudes of climate at Chicago and its neighborhood are more sudden and extreme than with us, but the inhabitants say that they are not often the cause of catarrhs, as in the Atlantic states.  Whatever may be the cause, I have met with no person since I came to the West, who appeared to have a catarrh.  From this region perhaps will hereafter proceed singers with the clearest pipes.

Some forty miles beyond Chicago we stopped for half an hour at Little Fort, one of those flourishing little towns which are springing up on the lake shore, to besiege future Congresses for money to build their harbors.  This settlement has started up in the woods within the last three or four years, and its cluster of roofs, two of the broadest of which cover respectable-looking hotels, already makes a considerable figure when viewed from the lake.  We passed to the shore over a long platform of planks framed upon two rows of posts or piles planted in the sandy shallows.  “We make a port in this manner on any part of the western shore of the lake,” said a passenger, “and convenient ports they are, except in very high winds.  On the eastern shore, the coast of Michigan, they have not this advantage; the ice and the northwest winds would rend such a wharf as this in pieces.  On this side too, the water of the lake, except when an east wind blows, is smoother than on the Michigan coast, and the steamers therefore keep under the shelter of this bank.”

At Southport, still further north, in the new state of Wisconsin, we procured a kind of omnibus and were driven over the town, which, for a new settlement, is uncommonly pretty.  We crossed a narrow inlet of the lake, a creek in the proper sense of the term, a winding channel, with water in the midst, and a rough growth of water-flags and sedges on the sides.  Among them grew the wild rice, its bending spikes, heavy with grain, almost ready for the harvest.

“In the northern marshes of Wisconsin,” said one of our party, “I have seen the Indian women gathering this grain.  Two of them take their places in a canoe; one of them seated in the stern pushes it with her paddle through the shallows of standing water, while the other, sitting forward, bends the heads of the rice-plant over the sides of the canoe, strikes them with a little stick and causes the grain to fall within it.  In this way are collected large quantities, which serve as the winter food of the Menomonies, and some other tribes.”  The grain of the wild rice, I was told, is of a dark color, but palatable as food.  The gentleman who gave me this account had made several attempts to