a price, though still a low price; but corn that was not of the best quality was all but worthless.  It did for fuel, and was burned.  The fact was that the produce had re-created itself quicker than mankind had multiplied.  The ingenuity of man had not worked quick enough for its disposal.  The earth had given forth her increase so abundantly that the lap of created humanity could not stretch itself to hold it.  At Dixon, in 1861, corn cost four pence a bushel.  In Ireland, in 1848, it was sold for a penny a pound, a pound being accounted sufficient to sustain life for a day; and we all felt that at that price food was brought into the country cheaper than it had ever been brought before.

Dixon is not a town of much apparent prosperity.  It is one of those places at which great beginnings have been made, but as to which the deities presiding over new towns have not been propitious.  Much of it has been burned down, and more of it has never been built up.  It had a straggling, ill-conditioned, uncommercial aspect, very different from the look of Detroit, Milwaukee, or St. Paul.  There was, however, a great hotel there, as usual, and a grand bridge over the Rock River, a tributary of the Mississippi, which runs by or through the town.  I found that life might be maintained on very cheap terms at Dixon.  To me, as a passing traveler, the charges at the hotel were, I take it, the same as elsewhere.  But I learned from an inmate there that he, with his wife and horse, were fed and cared for and attended, for two dollars (or eight shillings and four pence) a day.  This included a private sitting-room, coals, light, and all the wants of life—­as my informant told me—­except tobacco and whisky.  Feeding at such a house means a succession of promiscuous hot meals, as often as the digestion of the patient can face them.  Now I do not know any locality where a man can keep himself and his wife, with all material comforts and the luxury of a horse and carriage, on cheaper terms than that.  Whether or no it might be worth a man’s while to live at all at such a place as Dixon, is altogether another question.

We went there because it is surrounded by the prairie, and out into the prairie we had ourselves driven.  We found some difficulty in getting away from the corn, though we had selected this spot as one at which the open rolling prairie was specially attainable.  As long as I could see a corn-field or a tree I was not satisfied.  Nor, indeed, was I satisfied at last.  To have been thoroughly on the prairie, and in the prairie, I should have been a day’s journey from tilled land.  But I doubt whether that could now be done in the State of Illinois.  I got out into various patches and brought away specimens of corn—­ears bearing sixteen rows of grain, with forty grains in each row, each ear bearing a meal for a hungry man.