pumpkin, and is much used in the States, both as a vegetable and for pies.  No vegetables in England!  Did my surprise arise from the insular ignorance and idolatrous self-worship of a Britisher, or was my American friend laboring under a delusion?  Is Covent Garden well supplied with vegetables, or is it not?  Do we cultivate our kitchen-gardens with success, or am I under a delusion on that subject?  Do I dream, or is it true that out of my own little patches at home I have enough, for all domestic purposes, of peas, beans, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, beet-root, onions, carrots, parsnips, turnips, sea-kale, asparagus, French beans, artichokes, vegetable marrow, cucumbers, tomatoes, endive, lettuce, as well as herbs of many kinds, cabbages throughout the year, and potatoes?  No vegetables!  Had the gentleman told me that England did not suit him because we had nothing but vegetables, I should have been less surprised.

From Dubuque, on the western shore of the river, we passed over to Dunleath, in Illinois, and went on from thence by railway to Dixon.  I was induced to visit this not very flourishing town by a desire to see the rolling prairie of Illinois, and to learn by eyesight something of the crops of corn or Indian maize which are produced upon the land.  Had that gentleman told me that we knew nothing of producing corn in England, he would have been nearer the mark; for of corn, in the profusion in which it is grown here, we do not know much.  Better land than the prairies of Illinois for cereal crops the world’s surface probably cannot show.  And here there has been no necessity for the long previous labor of banishing the forest.  Enormous prairies stretch across the State, into which the plow can be put at once.  The earth is rich with the vegetation of thousands of years, and the farmer’s return is given to him without delay.  The land bursts with its own produce, and the plenty is such that it creates wasteful carelessness in the gathering of the crop.  It is not worth a man’s while to handle less than large quantities.  Up in Minnesota I had been grieved by the loose manner in which wheat was treated.  I have seen bags of it upset and left upon the ground.  The labor of collecting it was more than it was worth.  There wheat is the chief crop, and as the lands become cleared and cultivation spreads itself, the amount coming down the Mississippi will be increased almost to infinity.  The price of wheat in Europe will soon depend, not upon the value of the wheat in the country which grows it, but on the power and cheapness of the modes which may exist for transporting it.  I have not been able to obtain the exact prices with reference to the carriage of wheat from St. Paul (the capital of Minnesota) to Liverpool, but I have done so as regards Indian-corn from the State of Illinois.  The following statement will show what proportion the value of the article at the place of its growth bears to the cost of the carriage; and it shows also how enormous an effect on the price of corn in England would follow any serious decrease in the cost of carriage:—­