The inland sea of Michigan carries on its waters the wealth of the northern portion of the state to the Atlantic seaboard.  The Ohio, flowing south and west, unwaters the south-eastern counties, while 5500 miles of completed railroad traverse the interior of the state.  This 5500 miles of iron road is a significant fact—­5500 miles of railway in the compass of a single western state!  More than all Hindostan can boast of, and nearly half the railway mileage of the United Kingdom.  Of this immense system of interior connexion Chicago is the centre and heart.  Other great centres of commerce have striven to rival the City of the Skunk, but all have failed; and to-day, thanks to the dauntless energy of the men of Chicago, the garden state of the Union possesses this immense extent of railroad, ships its own produce, north, east, and south, and boasts a population scarcely inferior to that of many older states; and yet it is only fifty years ago since William Cobbett laboured long and earnestly to prove that English emigrants who pushed on into the “wilderness of the Illinois went straight to misery and ruin.”

Passing through Chicago, and going out by one of the lines running north along the shore of Lake Michigan, I reached the city of Milwaukie late in the evening.  Now the city of Milwaukie stands above 100 miles north of Chicago and is to the State of Wisconsin what its southern neighbour (100 miles in the States is nothing) is to Illinois.  Being, also some 100 miles nearer to the entrance to Lake Michigan, and consequently nearer by water to New York and the Atlantic, Milwaukie caries off no small share of the export wheat trade of the North-west.  Behind it lie the rolling prairies of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, the three wheat-growing states of the American Union.  Scandinavia, Germany, and Ireland have made this portion of America their own, and in the streets of Milwaukie one hears the guttural sounds of the Teuton and the deep brogue of the Irish Celt mixed in curious combinations.  This railway-station at Milwaukie is one of the great distributing points of the in-coming flood from Northern Europe.  From here they scatter far and wide over the plains which lie between Lake Michigan and the head-waters of the Mississippi.  No one stops to look at these people as they throng the wooden platform and fill the sheds at the depot, the sight is too common to cause interest now, and yet it is a curious sight this entry of the outcasts into the promised land.  Tired, travel-stained, and worn come the fair-haired crowd of men and women and many children, eating all manner of strange food while they rest, and speaking all manner of strange tongues, carrying the most uncouth shapeless boxes that trunk-maker of Bergen or Upsal can devise—­such queer oval red-and-green painted wooden cases, more like boxes to hold musical instruments than for the Sunday kit of Hans or Christian—­clothing much soiled and worn by lower-deck lodgment and spray of