to and fro over this great garden of the West, that is practically one continuous fertile farm from the Missouri to the Mississippi.  Passing through Des Moines on the 23d, muddy roads and hot, thunder-showery weather characterize my journey through Central Iowa, aggravated by the inevitable question, “Why don’t you ride?” one Solomon-visaged individual asking me if the railway company wouldn’t permit me to ride along one of the rails.  No base, unworthy suspicions of a cycler’s inability to ride on a two-inch rail finds lodgement in the mind of this wiseacre; but his compassionate heart is moved with tender solicitude as to whether the soulless “company” will, or will not, permit it.  Hurrying timorously through Grinnell — the city that was badly demolished and scattered all over the surrounding country by a cyclone in 1882 — I pause at Victor, where I find the inhabitants highly elated over the prospect of building a new jail with the fines nightly inflicted on graders employed on a new railroad near by, who come to town and “hilare” every evening. " What kind of a place do you call this.”  I inquire, on arriving at a queer-looking town twenty-five miles west of Iowa City.

“This is South Amana, one of the towns of the Amana Society,” is the civil reply.  The Amana Society is found upon inquiry to be a communism of Germans, numbering 15,000 souls, and owning 50,000 acres of choice land in a body, with woollen factories, four small towns, and the best of credit everywhere.  Everything is common property, and upon withdrawal or expulsion, a member takes with him only the value of what he brought in.  The domestic relations are as usual; and while no person of ambition would be content with the conditions of life here, the slow, ease-loving, methodical people composing the society seem well satisfied with their lot, and are, perhaps, happier, on the whole, than the average outsider.  I remain here for dinner, and take a look around.  The people, the buildings, the language, the food, everything, is precisely as if it had been picked up bodily in some rural district in Germany, and set down unaltered here in Iowa.  “Wie gehts,” I venture, as I wheel past a couple of plump, rosy-cheeked maidens, in the quaint, old-fashioned garb of the German peasantry.  “Wie gehts,” is the demure reply from them, both at once; but not the shadow of a dimple responds to my unhappy attempt to win from them a smile.  Pretty but not coquettish are these communistic maidens of Amana.  At Tiffin, the stilly air of night, is made joyous with the mellifluous voices of whip-poor-wills-the first I have heard on the tour-and their tuneful concert is impressed on my memory in happy contrast to certain other concerts, both vocal and instrumental, endured en route.  Passing through Iowa City, crossing Cedar River at Moscow, nine days after crossing the Missouri, I hear the distant whistle of a Mississippi steamboat.  Its hoarse voice is sweetest music to me, heralding