high up the Red River,—from St. Paul to New Orleans, and all intermediate ports,—we have but to pay our money and take our choice of the towns upon sixteen thousand miles of navigable water. Among the rest we observed a steamboat about as large as an omnibus, fitted up like a pedler's wagon, and full of the miscellaneous wares which pedlers sell. Such little boats, it appears, steam from village to village along the shores of those interminable rivers, and, by renewing their supplies at the large towns, make their way for thousands of miles, returning home only at the end of the season. They can ascend higher up the streams than the large boats, and scarcely any "stage" of water is too low for them. Often as we had admired the four horse pedlers' wagons of New England, with their plated harness and gorgeous paint, we resolved that, when we turned pedler, it should be in such a snug little steamboat upon the rivers of the West. Other steamboats, as probably the reader is aware, are fitted up as theatres, museums, circuses, and moral menageries, and go from town to town, announcing their arrival by that terrific combination of steam-whistles which is called in the West a Cally-ope. What an advance upon the old system of strolling players and the barn! "Then came each actor on his ass." On the Ohio he comes in a comfortable stateroom, to which when the performance is over he retires, waking the next morning at the scene of new triumphs.
Along the summit of the steep levee, close to the line of stores, there is a row of massive posts—three feet thick and twenty high—which puzzle the stranger. The swelling of the river brings the steamboats up to the very doors of the houses facing the river, and to these huge posts they are fastened to keep them from being swept away by the rushing flood. From the summit of the levee we advance into the town, always going up hill, unless we turn to the right or left.
Here is Philadelphia again, with its numbered streets parallel to the river, and the cross-streets named after the trees which William Penn found growing upon the banks of the Delaware,—"Walnut," "Locust," Sycamore." Here are long blocks of wholesale stores in the streets near the river, of Philadelphian plainness and solidity; and as we ascend, we reach the showier retail streets, all in the modern style of subdued Philadelphian elegance. It is a solid, handsome town,—the newer buildings of light-colored stone, very lofty, and well built; the streets paved with the small pebbles ground smooth by the rushing Ohio, and as clean as Boston. In Fourth Street there is a dry-goods store nearly as large, and five times as handsome, as Stewart's in New York, and several other establishments on the greatest scale, equal in every respect to those of the Atlantic cities. The only difference is, that in New York we have more of them. By the time we have passed Fifth Street, which is about half a mile from the river, we have reached the end of the elegant and splendid part of the city; all beyond and around is shabby Philadelphia, begrimed with soot, and "blended in a common element" of smoke. The extensive and swarming German quarter is precisely like the German quarter of Philadelphia, (though the Cincinnati lager-bier is better,) and the wide, square, spacious old mansions are exactly such as the older houses of Philadelphia would be if Philadelphia burned bituminous coal.
Every New-Yorker supposes, of course, that there must be in a large and wealthy city one pre-eminent and illustrious street like his own Fifth Avenue, where he is wont either to survey mankind from a club window, or, as mankind, be surveyed. There is no such street in Cincinnati, and for a reason which becomes apparent during the first long walk. When the stranger has panted up the slope on which the city is built, to a point one mile from the river, he sees looming up before him an almost precipitous hill, four hundred and sixty-two feet high,
