ty where the shrubs were red with the
fruit, just beginning to ripen. The slope was sprinkled by them with
crimson spots, and the odor of the fruit was quite agreeable. I have eaten
worse plums than these from our markets, but I hear that there is a later
variety, larger and of a yellow color, which is finer.

I spoke in my last of the change caused in the aspect of the country by
cultivation. Now and then, however, you meet with views which seem to have
lost nothing of their original beauty. One such we stopped to look at from
an eminence in a broad prairie in Lee county, between Knox Grove and
Pawpaw Grove. The road passes directly over the eminence, which is round
and regular in form, with a small level on the summit, and bears the name
of the Mound. On each side the view extends to a prodigious distance; the
prairies sink into basins of immense breadth and rise into swells of vast
extent; dark groves stand in the light-green waste of grass, and a dim
blue border, apparently of distant woods, encircles the horizon. To give a
pastoral air to the scene, large herds of cattle were grazing at no great
distance from us.

I mentioned in my last letter that the wheat crop of northern Illinois has
partially failed this year. But this is not the greatest calamity which
has befallen this part of the country. The season is uncommonly sickly. We
passed the first night of our journey at Pawpaw Grove--so named from the
number of pawpaw-trees which grow in it, but which here scarcely find the
summer long enough to perfect their fruit. The place has not had the
reputation of being unhealthy, but now there was scarce a family in the
neighborhood in which one or more was not ill with an intermittent or a
bilious fever. At the inn where we stopped, the landlady, a stout
Pennsylvania woman, was just so far recovered as to be able, as she
informed us, "to poke about;" and her daughter, a strapping lass, went out
to pass the night at the bedside of one of the numerous sick neighbors.
The sickness was ascribed by the settlers to the extremely dry and hot
weather following a rainy June. At almost every place where we stopped we
heard similar accounts. Pale and hollow-eyed people were lounging about.
"Is the place unhealthy," I asked one of them. "_I_ reckon so," he
answered; and his looks showed that he had sufficient reason. At Aurora,
where we passed the second night, a busy little village, with mills and
manufactories, on the Fox River,