ickly
and uninviting description; these he follows with sugar in various
preparations of stickiness, supplementing the whole with pea-nuts and
crackers. In the end he becomes without any doubt a terrible nuisance;
one conceives a mortal hatred for this precocious pedlar who with his
vile compounds is ever bent upon forcing you to purchase his wares. He
gets, he will tell you, a percentage on his sales of ten cents in the
dollar; if you are going a long journey, he will calculate to sell you a
dollar's worth of his stock. You are therefore worth to him ten cents.
Now you cannot do better in his first round of high moral literature than
present him at once with this ten cents, stipulating that on no account
is he to invite your attention, press you to buy, or offer you any candy,
condiment, or book during the remainder of the journey. If you do this
you will get out of the train-boy at a reasonable rate.

Going to sleep as the train works its way slowly up the grades which lead
to the higher level of the State of Iowa from the waters of Mississippi
one sinks into a state of dim consciousness of all that is going on in
the long carriage. The whistle of the locomotive--which, by the way, is
very much more melodious than the one in use in England, being softer,
deeper, and reaching to a greater distance-the roll of the train into
stations, the stop and the start, all become, as it were, blended into
uneasy sleep, until daylight sets the darkey at his work of making up the
sections. When the sun rose we were well into Minnesota, the-most
northern of the Union States. Around on every side stretched the great
wheat lands of the North-west, that region whose farthest limits lie far
within the territories where yet the red man holds his own. Here, in the
south of Minnesota, one is only on the verge of that great wheat region.
Far beyond the northern limit of the state it stretches away into
latitudes unknown, save to the fur trader and the red man, latitudes
which, if you tire not on the road, good reader, you and I may journey
into together.

The City of St. Paul, capital and chief town of the State of Minnesota,
gives promise of rising to a very high position among the great trade
centres of America. It stands almost at the head of the navigation of the
Mississippi River, about 2050 miles from New Orleans; not that the great
river has its beginning here or in the vicinity, its cradle lies far to
the north, 700 miles along the