We Travelled In A Vehicle Built After The Fashion Of The English
Post-Coach, Set High Upon Springs, Which Is The Most Absurd Kind Of
Carriage For The Roads Of This Country That Could Be Devised.
Those
stage-wagons which ply on Long Island, in one of which you sometimes see
about a score of
Quakers and Quakeresses, present a much better model.
Besides being tumbled into the canal, we narrowly escaped being overturned
in a dozen other places, where the mud was deep or the roads uneven.
In my journey the next day, I was struck with the difference which five
years had made in the aspect of the country. Frame or brick houses in many
places had taken the places of log-cabins; the road for long distances now
passed between fences, the broad prairie, inclosed, was turned into
immense fields of maize, oats, and wheat, and was spotted here and there
with young orchards, or little groves, and clumps of bright-green
locust-trees, and where the prairie remained open, it was now depastured
by large herds of cattle, its herbage shortened, and its flowers less
numerous. The wheat harvest this year is said to have failed in northern
Illinois. The rust has attacked the fields which promised the fairest, and
they are left unreaped, to feed the quails and the prairie-hens.
Another tedious day's journey, over a specially bad road, brought us to
Peru a little before midnight, and we passed the rest of the night at an
inn just below the bank, on the margin of the river, in listening to the
mosquitoes.
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