favorite city haunt of the American Ceres.  The goddess seats herself there amid the dust of her full barns, and proclaims herself a goddess ruling over things political and philosophical as well as agricultural.  Not furrows only are in her thoughts, but free trade also and brotherly love.  And within her own bosom there is a boast that even yet she will be stronger than Mars.  In Chicago there are great streets, and rows of houses fit to be the residences of a new Corn-Exchange nobility.  They look out on the wide lake which is now the highway for breadstuffs, and the merchant, as he shaves at his window, sees his rapid ventures as they pass away, one after the other, toward the East.

I went over one great grain store in Chicago possessed by gentlemen of the name of Sturgess and Buckenham.  It was a world in itself, and the dustiest of all the worlds.  It contained, when I was there, half a million bushels of wheat—­or a very great many, as I might say in other language.  But it was not as a storehouse that this great building was so remarkable, but as a channel or a river-course for the flooding freshets of corn.  It is so built that both railway vans and vessels come immediately under its claws, as I may call the great trunks of the elevators.  Out of the railway vans the corn and wheat is clawed up into the building, and down similar trunks it is at once again poured out into the vessels.  I shall be at Buffalo in a page or two, and then I will endeavor to explain more minutely how this is done.  At Chicago the corn is bought and does change hands; and much of it, therefore, is stored there for some space of time, shorter or longer as the case may be.  When I was at Chicago, the only limit to the rapidity of its transit was set by the amount of boat accommodation.  There were not bottoms enough to take the corn away from Chicago, nor, indeed, on the railway was there a sufficiency of rolling stock or locomotive power to bring it into Chicago.  As I said before, the country was bursting with its own produce and smothered in its own fruits.

At Chicago the hotel was bigger than other hotels and grander.  There were pipes without end for cold water which ran hot, and for hot water which would not run at all.  The post-office also was grander and bigger than other post-offices, though the postmaster confessed to me that that matter of the delivery of letters was one which could not be compassed.  Just at that moment it was being done as a private speculation; but it did not pay, and would be discontinued.  The theater, too, was large, handsome, and convenient; but on the night of my attendance it seemed to lack an audience.  A good comic actor it did not lack, and I never laughed more heartily in my life.  There was something wrong, too, just at that time—­I could not make out what—­in the Constitution of Illinois, and the present moment had been selected for voting a new Constitution.  To us in England such a