or, at any rate, you form no idea of how the solitary fort grew into the mighty city. To understand the process of development, you must take a baby-town just beginning to stand alone, and not the full-grown giant of a metropolis. It is for this reason, and because, in French phrase, I have "assisted" at the birth of Lanark City, that I have taken it as the specimen of a Western settlement. I was not, indeed, the first representative of the English Press who had been at Lanark. Six months before I was there, Mr. Russell had visited the place with the same friend who brought me thither; but at that time the town was an idea only, and Mr. Russell passed the day shooting over the ground on which the town now stands. I may fairly claim therefore, in a literary point of view, to have discovered Lanark, and, discoverer-like, wish to lay before the world the result of my discoveries.

Between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River lies the prairie-land of Illinois. From the river to the lakes there run a host of railroads, and amongst them there is one, now in process of construction, called the Racine and Mississippi Railroad. If you take any map of the West, and draw a straight, or what the Americans call an "air-line," from Racine to the nearest point of the Mississippi, you will have before you the exact course of the railroad in question; and twenty miles or so from the river lay the then terminus of the line, Lanark City. It was in company with Mr. George

Thomson, the English projector of the railroad and the founder of the city, that Lanark and I made acquaintance with each other. The course of emigration, naturally enough, caused the borders of the great river and lake highways to be first occupied by settlers; and it is only slowly, as population increases, that the inland districts of the Western States become settled. Thus the interior of Northern Illinois is still a great prairie country, dotted here and there with new cities. Railroads are not constructed there to connect existing towns, as much as to open out new ranges of country; and if the Racine and Mississippi had to depend upon the custom of the inhabitants settled along its route before the line was made, its chance of profit would be a small one. For miles and miles our road lay along the silent, almost deserted, prairie-every now and then a low cutting through a hillock, sometimes a short embankment over a hollow, and then a flat bridge carried on piles across a marshy stream; but as a rule, a long level track, scarcely raised above the ground, and stretching without curve or bend for miles before and miles behind you. Right in the middle of the prairie, the rail came to an end at Lanark.

Alongside the depôt there stood a sort of railway caravan, which had been the first house of Lanark. When the rail was finished, there was not a hut or covered dwelling of any kind on the spot, and so this caravan was sent down there as a shelter for the rail

road servants. By this time it had served its purpose, and I heard the order given for its transmission back to Racine, in order to be used elsewhere for a like object. Close to the station there was an hotel built already, not a pot-house or a roadside tavern, but a genuine, well-ordered inn. Of course, being in America, it had a bar-room, a public room with long tables, and public meals at fixed hours. It was clean too, and neatly furnished, as hotels in the Free States mostly are. The only national institution in which it was deficient was a gong. The first landlord-there had been three already -had levanted, taking that inevitable deafening instrument of torture with him on his departure, and happily it had not yet been replaced. There was a piano in the house, belonging to the wife of a gentleman employed on the line, and in his room I found copies of Macaulay's History, and of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall." The hotel was the property of the Company, and had been built by them to induce settlers to come to the place, and it seemed to be doing a good business. Meanwhile, the town was fast growing up around it.

Lanark, like all Western cities, is built on the simplest of plans. The owners or projectors of the settlement buy a certain number of acres, draw out a plan of the town, dividing it into streets and lots, and allow any purchaser to build any sort of dwelling on his lot he likes. The houses may be as irregular and unlike as possible; but, as the spaces allotted for the streets are not

allowed to be encroached upon, the general plan of the town must correspond with the chart. The map of the city had been drawn out by a Scotch clerk in the service of the railroad, who had undertaken the task of naming the streets. To display his nationality, he had given Scotch names - Bute, Argyle, Forth, Moray, and Macs innumerable-and had only condescended to American prejudices so far as to permit of there being a Main and a Chesnut Street. Most of these streets, however, were still streets of the future, and the influx of population had as yet only called Main and Bute Streets into existence. The first of these is the commercial thoroughfare of Lanark, and in it there were some twenty shops already established. I noticed two competing ironmongers and tinmen, whose stores seemed plentifully stocked, two or three rival groceries, two saddle and harness makers, and a couple of beer and oyster saloons-a tailor's, a shoemaker's, and a lawyer's office. Besides these, there were two large stores building, one of which was to be a furniture warehouse, and the other, I think, a dry-goods shop. Bute-street consisted of private cottages. A number of shanties, too, were scattered round the place, but not close enough yet to one another to form streets. Every house in the place was of wood, many of them two, or even three, storeys high. The majority of the houses had curtains and green veranda shutters, and even the poorest I looked into were far superior in

comfort to an ordinary English labourer's cottage, not to mention their being clean and airy. The streets were mere tracks of prairie-land, hardened by the wheels of teams, of which the town was full; but there were planked footpaths raised along Main-street.

The object, indeed, for which Lanark has been founded is to form a depôt for agricultural produce. The fertile plains of the vast prairie will produce bound"less supplies of wheat and corn. There is no clearing to be done before these plains can be cultivated. For some cause or other, which nobody appears to me to have explained as yet satisfactorily, trees do not grow spontaneously upon the prairie, fertile as it is; and for miles on every side of Lanark there was scarcely a tree to be seen. A New England farmer, who had lately removed there, told me he should never feel at home until he had brought some rocks from the Pilgrim State, and planted trees between their crevices, so as to form a miniature Massachusetts of his own. The richness of the soil is something marvellous. You have but to turn it up some three inches deep, and the land will yield crops year after year without rest or manure. An acre will bear from thirty to forty bushels, and wheat fetches from half-a-crown to three shillings a bushel. Indian corn, or "corn" as it is called there, is so plentiful that in many winters it is burnt for fuel. With such prices the only thing which stops the cultivation of wheat is the difficulty and expense of bringing