A Farm Wagon Passing At The Moment, Forded The Canal Without The Least Difficulty, And Taking The Female Passengers, Conveyed Them To The Next Farm-House, About A Mile Distant.

We got out the baggage, which was completely soaked with water, set up the carriage on its wheels, in doing which we had to stand waist high in the mud and water, and reached the hospitable farm-house about half-past nine o'clock.

Its owner was an emigrant from Kinderhook, on the Hudson, who claimed to be a Dutchman and a Christian, and I have no reason to doubt that he was either. His kind family made us free of their house, and we passed the night in drying ourselves, and getting our baggage ready to proceed the next day.

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. A Massachusetts acquaintance the next morning furnished us with a comfortable conveyance to this pleasant neighborhood.

Letter XXXIII.

Return to Chicago.

Chicago, _August_ 8, 1846.

You may be certain that in returning to this place from Princeton I did not take the stage coach. I had no fancy for another plunge into the Illinois canal, nor for being overturned upon the prairies in one of those vehicles which seem to be set high in the air in order they may more easily lose their balance. We procured a private conveyance and made the journey in three days - three days of extreme heat, which compelled us to travel slowly. The quails, which had repaired for shade to the fences by the side of the road, ran from them into the open fields, as we passed, with their beaks open, as if panting with the excessive heat.

The number of these birds at the present time is very great. They swarm in the stubble fields and in the prairies, and manifest little alarm at the approach of man. Still more numerous, it appears to me, are the grouse, or prairie-hens, as they call them here, which we frequently saw walking leisurely, at our approach, into the grass from the road, whither they resorted for the sake of scattered grains of oats or wheat that had fallen from the loaded wagons going to Chicago. At this season they are full fed and fearless, and fly heavily when they are started. We frequently saw them feeding at a very short distance from people at work in the fields. In some neighborhoods they seem almost as numerous as fowls in a poultry-yard. A settler goes out with his gun, and in a quarter of an hour brings in half a dozen birds which in the New York market would cost two dollars a pair. At one place where we stopped to dine, they gave us a kind of pie which seemed to me an appropriate dessert for a dinner of prairie-hens. It was made of the fruit of the western crab-apple, and was not unpalatable. The wild apple of this country is a small tree growing in thickets, natural orchards. In spring it is profusely covered with light-pink blossoms, which have the odor of violets, and at this season it is thickly hung with fruit of the color of its leaves.

Another wild fruit of the country is the plum, which grows in thickets, plum-patches, as they are called, where they are produced in great abundance, and sometimes, I am told, of excellent quality. In a drive which I took the other day from Princeton to the alluvial lands of the Bureau River, I passed by a declivity 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.

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