railway will carry you through the famous cities of Troy, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Amsterdam, and Geneva. As the proper names of the eastern hemisphere became exhausted, and the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Jacksons, and other popular American names had been repeated in every State, another rich supply was found in the often musical designations of the aboriginal languages. These were sometimes resorted to, even in the early history of the country. Four of the great lakes retain their ancient names of Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, and Oregon are Indian names of states. Indian chiefs and tribes have given names to hundreds of towns and rivers. Writers have animadverted upon the bad taste of some of these designations, but the Cantons and Cairos, Romes and Londons, are certainly as good names as the Smithtowns, Jonesvilles, and Pittsburgs, by which the early settlers of hundreds of obscure villages make their names immortal.
Let us return, or rather proceed, to Memphis. It was a long journey there. I was in the pretty town of Cleveland, on the south bank of Lake Erie, in Ohio, when the summons came. The distance is about 800 miles, and I had my choice of many routes. I could go for 100 miles to the head of the Ohio, and the rest of the way by steamer; I could take a steamer at Cincinnati. I could go west, by Chicago, to the Mississippi, and so down that river; or I could take the most rapid route, by rail across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Cairo, and thence on the Mississippi.
The cars, as the Americans designate their railway carriages, on the road from Cleveland to Cincinnati, are among the nicest I have ever seen. They are not only brightly painted, gilded, and upholstered, and furnished with retiring rooms, but are warmed in winter, cooled in summer, and thoroughly ventilated always, in a manner that could scarcely fail to satisfy a “Times” correspondent. In the warmest days of an American summer, with the thermometer at a hundred, and the train enveloped in clouds of dust, these cars are clean, airy, and cool. By ingenious machinery a constant current of air is cooled and washed clean from dust by being made to pass through showers of water. In winter, these cars are warmed and ventilated with hot air, supplied in great abundance by a similar apparatus.
These cars, it is true, are not very exclusive. They seat thirty or forty passengers. The “gentlemanly” conductor walks through the entire train to examine tickets, when it is in rapid motion; so the boy who sells newspapers, books, and sugar-plums, has free access, and the coloured gentleman who supplies the passengers with water, where that luxury is not kept in well-iced reservoirs in every car. But the lack of exclusiveness is compensated to the traveller, who wishes to see the people of the country he is passing through. In the car in which I was seated there were near me, as I gathered from the conversation, a judge, a member of congress, and an ex-governor of some state. They were talking politics very freely. On the seats before me were a middle-aged Chinese woman, who could speak a little English, and two children, a bright boy and girl some ten or twelve years old, who spoke nothing but Chinese, though their father was an American. They had been sent from China to Kentucky under the sole charge of their Chinese nurse, who was a queerly dressed but most estimable and trusty seeming personage, where they were to be educated under the care of their antipodal grandparents. The enterprising Kentuckian had make a fortune in China and married a Chinese wife. She could speak no English, and the children had learnt only their mother tongue. It was curious to study in the faces and actions of these two bright children the intermingled characteristics of the two races.
Two persons on the seat behind me were of scarcely less interest. One was a New York lady, young and pretty to the last degree, of the most delicate type of American beauty, with its pearly complexion, exquisite features, and little hands and feet. She was dressed for a long journey, and in a fashion that was singularly perfect. Her face was thoughtful as well as beautiful, her manner perfectly self-possessed, and a little that of a spoiled child, and she had a wonderful faculty of wrapping her pretty person in a full supply of shawls and making herself comfortable. Her travelling companion puzzled me, both in himself and in his relation to the fair lady. He called her “Mees Fannee,” and treated her with a mingled politeness and familiarity. She kept him to English as much as possible, but he shied like a restive horse into French and Spanish. He turned out to be a Mexican general, whose name I had often seen in the newspapers, on his way from New York to take part in a civil war then in progress, and his somehow cousin, Mees Fannee, was going to New Orleans under his escort to join her married sister.
Arrived at Cincinnati, we took the western road for Cairo. Forests dark and drear, newly-cleared farms, and newly-built villages, are the monotonous accompaniments of a Western American journey. The prairies have a monotony of their own. Your eye searches all round the horizon for the joyous blue peak of a far-off mountain. You cannot even see a tree. The railway itself is tiresome in its straight-lined and dead-level uniformity. A deep cut, a high embankment, a heavy grade, or a sharp curve, would be a relief. The only variety we had was that of the violent motion caused by the displacement of the ties by frost. This was so great at times as to set all the cars dancing, and almost to throw the passengers from their seats.
After six hundred miles of rail—and some of it of the roughest—we arrived at that little, forlorn, sunken fragment of a city, Cairo. It is built upon a point of land, recovered by huge embankments from the floods of the Ohio and Mississippi, which here form their junction, and it is important besides, as the Southern terminus of the Illinois Central Railroad. Here lay the steamers from Cincinnati and St. Louis, waiting for the arrival of the trains with Southern passengers. I chose the finest and fastest from St. Louis. What a luxury to the tired and dusty traveller was that great palace-like boat, with her saloon two hundred feet
