uilt, clean town, reminding you more of Philadelphia than any other
city in the Union. Situated on a hill on the banks of the Ohio, it is
surrounded by a circular phalanx of other hills; so that look up and
down the streets, whichever way you will, your eye reposes upon verdure
and forest trees in the distance. The streets have a row of trees on
each side, near the curb-stone; and most of the houses have a small
frontage, filled with luxuriant flowering shrubs, of which the Althea
Frutex is the most abundant. It is, properly speaking, a Yankee city,
the majority of its inhabitants coming from the East; but they have
intermarried, and blended with the Kentuckians of the opposite shore, a
circumstance which is advantageous to the character of both.

There are, however, a large number of Dutch and German settlers here;
they say 10,000. They are not much liked by the Americans but have
great influence, as may be conceived when it is stated that, when a
motion was brought forward, in the Municipal Court, for the city
regulations to be printed in German as well as English, it was lost by
one vote only.

I was told a singular fact, which will prove how rapidly the value of
land rises in this country as it becomes peopled. Fifty-six years ago,
the major part of the land upon which the city of Cincinnati stands, and
which is now worth many millions of dollars, was _swapped_ away by the
owner of it for a pony!! The man who made this unfortunate bargain is
now alive, and living in or near Cincinnati.

Cincinnati is the pork-shop of the Union; and in the autumnal, and early
winter months, the way they kill pigs here is, to use a Yankee phrase,
_quite a caution_. Almost all the hogs fed in the oak forests of Ohio,
Kentucky, and Western Virginia, are driven into this city, and some
establishments kill as many as fifteen hundred a day; at least so I am
told. They are despatched in a way quite surprising; and a pig is
killed upon the same principle as a pin is made,--by division, or, more
properly speaking, by combination of labour. The hogs confined in a
large pen are driven into a smaller one; one man knocks them on the head
with a sledge hammer, and then cuts their throats; two more pull away
the carcase, when it is raised by two others, who tumble it into a tub
of scalding water. His bristles are removed in about a minute and a
half by another party; when the next duty is to fix a stretcher between
his legs. It is then