West; poor tired women, with worn-out, one accord to the food; but though our dirty children, and broad-shouldered, movements had been swift, we found the brown-faced young men of the Mark Tap- table almost filled, and the meal half over. ley type. There were evident signs of Such is Western expedition! kind feeling and good-fellowship amongst these poor travellers, and we noticed that each woman had two or three brownhanded chevaliers ready to carry bundles, nurse a child, or bring the weary baby and its mother tin cups of ice-water from the filter with which every car is supplied. We caught the spirit of the place, and soon established most friendly relations with our neighbours; a fat, solemn little fellow of two years old going fast asleep on my knee with the utmost readiness. My small friend had a well-shaped head and earnest little face, and I thought as I watched him that perhaps my knee pillowed the head of the future President of this wide country. I was really quite sorry when at the next stopping-place the conductor came to us, and told us that there was now room in the saloon, and he would show us the way; it seemed almost cruel to go away and leave our poor friends, and take refuge, by means of extra dollars, in the spacious, clean, comfortable saloon, the first-class of these Western trains. We found excellent places, and had our belongings stowed away around us, and then went to the dressing-room at the end of the car, where you can wash your face and hands with scented soap in ice-water, - a most refreshing occupation. "All through that bright September afternoon we rushed at express speed over the prairies, that wide green ocean of high grass. For many miles the ground was low and marshy, and covered for acres with small white water-lilies, three or four heads growing on a stem a foot high. The edge of the railway track was bordered by a little thicket of sunflowers or wild chrysanthemums, the prairie flower surely that Shawondasee fell in love with

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"Brightest green were all her garments,

And her hair was like the sunshine.'

Can you see the picture? The bright border of flaunting yellow heads, the large patches of dazzling blossoms, the glimpses of blue water, and the green plain which would have stretched away for ever had not the sky come down and stopped it in a cloud of grey-blue haze. We watched the sun set behind low lines of crimson clouds, and while the air was full of golden light, stopped at a prairie village for supper. The meal was spread in the large wooden refreshment-room of the station; we were very hungry, and rushed with

"We were soon in our seats again, whirling over the wide green earth in the grey twilight, which soon grew to darkness, made visible by two miserable lamps. I retired into a dark corner to muse and meditate, or to slumber; it was only seven o'clock, rather too early to go to bed. So I got out my book, I tried every position in our compartment, held my book at every angle to try to catch some ray of light, but in vain. Never was a helpless damsel more miserable; but help came to Andromeda before the beast, and my Perseus appeared before I was in utter despair. He came truly like an angel of light, for he bore in his hand the guard's lamp, and, approaching me with a bow, proposed to hold it for me while I read; and in five minutes we were comfortably seated, the lamp between us, he deep in his paper, I in mine. My Perseus was a broad-shouldered young man, with a handsome face, and soft Western accent. After we had read an hour or more he began to talk, and I found that my companion came from Helena, in the territory of Montana. We talked, of course, about the West and its marvellous capabilities, and he told of the wonderful growth of Helena; how it was only five years old, and had 30,000 inhabitants, and how he should have to travel 500 miles by stage before he reached it, and then how he had served in the war, and been captured and confined in the Libby Prison, and of all its horrors, and the life in a prison encampment in the woods, without shelter and almost without clothing or food, and of his escape, and fight with bloodhounds. The time passed away quite pleasantly till the conductor came to make up our berths. He pulled the seats to pieces, put down mattrasses, spread sheets and counterpanes, arranged pillows and bolsters, and hung up in front heavy woollen curtains, behind these we crept, one into the top shelf, the other into the lower. The novelty of the position, the jolting of the car, the constant and steady downfall of grit from the engine kept me awake for hours. Through the windows, just on a level with my pillow, I could see the stars swinging and rolling backwards and forwards, and the black telegraph lines dipping up and down across them. Then the train pulled up at a little shanty to take in water, and lights flashed up and down, and men shouted to each other, and then the bell rang, and away

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we rushed off again under the swinging country, lined with handsome houses, as heavens. And who can tell of the horrors fine as any you might see in Fifth Avenue, of the grit! When we awoke in the early New York. Between these lie the acres dawn we found our pillows and everything of neat white and green wooden houses, about us covered with a thick layer of this where the workmen are located. pleasant substance, and we had to call to mind the successful enterprise of Benzoni and Layard before we had the courage to attempt to arise. With much perseverance and more patience we performed our simple toilet; the only position in which this could be done, owing to the shaking of the cars, was by kneeling on your shelf, your head firmly pressed against the roof above. This over, we staggered to the rear of the car and washed our faces in the never-failing ice-water. Soon our mattrasses, pillows, and curtains disappeared, and we were seated once more on our red velvet cushions, the windows open, and the sweet fresh air pouring in, and the wide green ocean lying like a kindly future before us, mysterious in the dim, tender lights, blue, grey, and gold, of sunrise.

We have been to see an elevator, a huge wooden tower where grain is stored. We watched the cars backed under its great archway, and the yellow loads shovelled out into a trough, and whisked up over our heads in little buckets fastened on a strap; this unloading went on at the rate of ten trucks in five minutes. Then we mounted hundreds of steps to the top of the tower, where we found the little buckets hard at work tilting the grain in a yellow stream into huge bins. Here it is weighed. From these bins it is poured through wide tubes into the vessels lying at the wharf below, twenty minutes being sufficient to give out a cargo of eighteen thousand bushels. We were told that the elevator we were in had stored in the last twelve months twenty millions of bushels of grain. And these golden seeds, which have waved in the sunshine over the generous soil of Wisconsin, Iowa, or Illinois, mostly go to help to make a penny roll, to be bought by a ragged street Arab in some small shop of a dirty alley in Seven Dials.

"After breakfast our Montana friend joined us with the morning paper, and on the rolling prairies, four thousand miles away from Paris, we read the words of Jules Favre, uttered twelve hours ago, declaring for the deposition of the Emperor and the Republic of France. 'There's "And now we have seen the great river Chicago!' said our companion, in the of the West. As we stood upon the midst of the war-talk which followed. platform of the cars, suddenly among the We sped on, past acres of level ground covered with one-storeyed wooden houses, past immense lumber yards, machine-shops, gas-works, and through streets and across railways, and pulled up at last in a big, dusty, dark, wood-built, barn-like station. There on the platform stood our friends whom last we had seen in a London drawing-room looking bright, fresh, and handsome as if there were no such things as dust and cinder-grit and impossible

toilets!

trees we saw, glinting and glancing in the sunlight, the waters of the Mississippi, and soon afterwards we began to lumber over the high tresselwork bridge that is built on three islands, and spans the wide flood; but rather seems as you move across it to rise straight out of the water, and hold you without railing or protection of any kind just above the rushing river. Later on we took an exciting walk across the huge rafts that lay at the water's edge, the logs waiting to be "And now we have been for some days carried into the large wooden saw-mill, in this wonderful city, this child of the which we were told was the largest in the present, growing up on the most approved United States, and which we visited next systems. Everywhere I am struck with morning. There we saw the great trunks the perfectness of the arrangements. The of trees that had flourished in Canadian streets remind me of Paris, so evenly forests, and had floated hundreds of miles paved, so clean, and so broad, with wide down the river, drawn up as if by sidewalks and rows of trees; the pave-magic from the water, and relentlessly ment is of wood, and the carriage rolls pushed into the jaws of a great monster, over it with delightful ease and quiet. There are handsome shops and warehouses built of stone and marble, ornamented with pillars and cornices and French roofs. There are monster hotels, theatres, concert-halls, art galleries, and long boulevards going out for miles towards the

whence they reissued in a few moments transformed into white planks, to be sent off by trains that waited below to all the surrounding States.

"But our sail at sunset upon the great river! My memory of it is that we moved on noiselessly in molten goid, and that we

came to a fairy island where the trees are certainly not told, is how in this emerwere wreathed with heavy festoons of gency national and social life goes on at creepers; where there were red and pur- all. What all of us mean by life is not ple and yellow flowers bending at the the exceptional circumstances which war water's edge and reflecting themselves into double beauty; and where splendid butterflies flitted about in the sunshine that flickered and glinted through the trees. The beauty was enough to carry one out of oneself, and out of the world almost. Then the sunlight faded away like the smile from a beautiful face, and we turned our boat, and were borne swiftly homeward by the tremendous current."

From The Saturday Review. WHAT "OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT" DOES NOT TELL US.

brings with it, but the inner daily existence of the population. We want to be informed how the social machine labours and pants, and yet somehow does not altogether break down. We should like to know more about the administrative arrangements which are made, or which have shaped themselves, to meet conditions without precedent, unforeseen, and incapable of being provided against or provided for. Now, to take the case of ordinary Englishmen, for whose information, we suppose, Special Correspondents write; as a matter of fact they know but little of the domestic constitution of another country. We travel in France, or take a holiday in Paris, but we have too WE have often had occasion to complain, much to do to inform ourselves of the and others have echoed our complaint, common institutions and life of the French that "Our Own Correspondents" tell us a people. The theatres, the boulevards, the great deal which is not worth telling, and galleries and museums, pictures and statmuch that is not fit to tell, about the de- ues, and café life attracts us. We go to tails of the war. We have had more Paris for amusement, pot for instruction than enough of what is disgusting, and in dull statistics, or to learn the social at least enough of mere gossip and organization of the country. Somehow foolish personal detail. It requires no there is a system going on which, differing great stretch of imagination to picture we dare say, but how we do not much for ourselves that roughing at the out- care, from our own, produces much the posts is unpleasant, or that junketing at same results. But now we have to realize head-quarters is an agreeable change. To how France gets on with its heart paradescribe graphically the drawing of cham-lysed, what Paris is when isolated from pagne corks, or the difficulties about geta horse and carriage or to photograph the interior of a Parisian cockney's villa after it has been occupied by the Prussians, fills a column, many columns, but scarcely adds to our knowledge. We now venture to complete our bill of complaint against It is curious, but it seems to be a fact, "Our Own," and after having noted that with all the contemporaneous mewhat they have done and are doing which moirs, private diaries and letters, and they might as well have left undone, we biographies and State papers, which have proceed to point out some of their short- from time to time been published, we comings and deficiencies. France gener-know so very little how France got on ally, and Paris in particular, presents at during the great Revolution. During the this moment, and has for some weeks pre- Reign of Terror we have been told that sented, a phenomenon not only of special the salons were kept open, and that the interest, but absolutely without precedent intercourses of society were maintained; in political and national history. There is but we do not know how the courts of a remarkable combination and concurrence justice and of police discharged functions of two sets of circumstances. The coun- without which all would be chaos, how the try, or at least a great portion of it, is taxes were levied, if levied at all, how the subjected to a successful invasion, and the daily circulation of the State's life was country is also without a Government. kept up. It is so now. It is absurd to Either of these conditions of national life, imagine that there is no hitch and break, or life in death, may have occurred before; no solution of continuity, in the national but in their simultaneous occurrence con- life of France. We do know that there is sists the special interest of the hour. a forced currency, and we do know that Now what we want to know, and what we what passes for a Government finds the

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XIX. 866

the whole body politic; and reasonably enough, if we want to guess out how things are there, we begin to speculate how things would be here with us in England and London under similar circumstances.

ample, must have been annihilated. What we have to picture is London with all the masons, bricklayers, carpenters, painters, and "amalgamated trades" out of work; not merely the shipbuilding of East London annihilated and we know what came of that but all trades stopped; all the producers of articles of Paris, and all the smart shopkeepers and shopkeepers' staffs, at one blow struck down. No doubt there are compensations. All the six hundred thousand soldiers, or so-called sol

means of spending an enormous sum of money; but where the money or credit, or whatever it is that is in use, comes from, we do not know. We know that France is not altogether in a state of anarchy; but whether there are public writs, or in whose name judicial proceedings run, whether ordinary processes and suits are carried on just as they were three months ago, we can only conjecture. What becomes of appeals-if there is, as there must be, an appellate system-there may be many acquainted with the French_sys-diers, who are employed in the defense of tem who can tell us; but ordinary Eng- the city receive pay and rations. A vast lishmen, who only think that England cut deal of new and exceptional work, and off from London and Westminster would with work wages, supplied by the Governpresent a very strange spectacle, are ment, fills up some gaps in the labourmerely puzzled by thinking about it. market. Defences are thrown up. M. The monetary circulation again, and all Gambetta informs us that guns are daily the banking and all bill transactions, the cast, and an immense amount of ammuniebb and flow of bullion inside the Bank of tion produced, in Paris. Men who were France and nobody knows where the behind the counter and at work in the facBank is at this moment is a huge and tories are doing garrison work, and are inexplicable riddle to us. The national paid for it; tailors and women and millirevenues, customs and such dues, are of ners have perhaps their hands full of unicourse somehow collected; but if the capi- forms and necessaries for the defence. tal no longer exists practically, though the But the amount of labour absorbed by seat of government has been transferred Government employment cannot reach to Tours, to whom is the money for- one-tenth of the ordinary trade of the capwarded, and how is it that the whole ma-ital of France. Judging from what we all chinery of the State is not stopped, when know of the working-classes of London, it offices, archives, clerks, boards, depart- is certain that, after making the most amments, officials, and centralization cease to ple allowance for the exceptional employbe? How should we get on without the ment which the siege affords, there must Stamp Office, Somerset House, the Cus-be thousands and thousands of bread-wintom House, the Bank, the Courts at ners, as they are called, in Paris, who earn Westminster? The Ministers and a few no wages because there are no wages to officials, if London were invested, could earn. Factory hands must be dismissed establish themselves at Manchester, and when the factories cease to work; domesa Parliament might meet, as it has met tic servants must be dismissed when before, at Oxford; but how could the bus- households are broken up or reduced to iness of the country go on without the short commons. If the workman life in central machinery for carrying on the France is, as it must be, much the same as ways and means? And yet, as it seems, it is in England, what a vast horde of men or at any rate as far as we are told, there must be who merely earn their there is no fatal hitch. Of all wonders, twenty or thirty francs a week, and spend the political we mean the interna- it every week in rent and across the countional political-condition of France at this moment is to an ordinary Englishman the most wonderful.

ter for the ordinary necessaries of meat, drink, and clothing? How do they contrive to live without wages? There can And when we come to the details of ac- be no credit given; we do not hear that tual life it might be well if the pictur- Paris has relapsed into a state of barter, esque chroniclers who tell us enough and which however, would be of little use, seeto spare about the uniforms of the Mo- ing that the ouvriers having nothing to biles, and the alternate fits of gaiety and barter. We are told that Government sullenness on the boulevards, would en- has fixed the price of flour and meat, but lighten us on the daily life in Paris in a state we do not hear that Government has of siege. Of one broad aspect of life in Paris issued five-franc pieces to pay for the we do not want any assurance. Business meat and the flour. And how all the peoand manufactures and trade must be at an ple in Paris who have not a twenty-franc end; and, with trade, wages must have piece we were just going to say a Naceased to be. The building-trade, for ex-poleon-manage to get food we are not

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