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, which here rushes swiftly over a stony bed, they confessed to the fever and ague. At Naperville, pleasantly situated among numerous groves and little prairies swelling into hills, we heard that the season was the most sickly the inhabitants had known. Here, at Chicago, which boasts, and with good reason, I believe, of its healthy site, dysenteries and bilious attacks are just now very common, with occasional cases of fever.

It is a common remark in this country, that the first cultivation of the earth renders any neighborhood more or less unhealthy. "Nature," said a western man to me, some years since, "resents the violence done her, and punishes those who first break the surface of the earth with the plough." The beautiful Rock River district, with its rapid stream, its noble groves, its banks disposed in natural terraces, with fresh springs gushing at their foot, and airy prairies stretching away from their summits, was esteemed one of the most healthy countries in the world as long as it had but few inhabitants. With the breaking up of the soil came in bilious fever and intermittents. A few years of cultivation will render the country more healthy, and these diseases will probably disappear, as they have done in some parts of western New York. I can remember the time when the "Genesee Country," as it was called, was thought quite a sickly region - a land just in the skirts of the shadow of death. It is now as healthy, I believe, as any part of the state.

Letter XXXIV.

Voyage to Sault Ste. Marie.

Sault Ste. Marie, _August_ 13, 1846.

When we left Chicago in the steamer, the other morning, all the vessels in the port had their flags displayed at half-mast in token of dissatisfaction with the fate of the harbor bill. You may not recollect that the bill set apart half a million of dollars for the construction or improvement of various harbors of the lakes, and authorized the deepening of the passages through the St. Clair Flats, now intricate and not quite safe, by which these bulky steamers make their way from the lower lakes to the upper. The people of the lake region had watched the progress of the bill through Congress with much interest and anxiety, and congratulated each other when at length it received a majority of votes in both houses. The President's veto has turned these congratulations into expressions of disappointment which are heard on all sides, sometimes expressed with a good deal of energy. But, although the news of the veto reached Chicago two or three days before we left the place, nobody had seen the message in which it was contained. Perhaps the force of the President's reasonings will reconcile the minds of people here to the disappointment of their hopes.

It was a hot August morning as the steamer Wisconsin, an unwieldy bulk, dipping and bobbing upon the small waves, and trembling at every stroke of the engine, swept out into the lake. The southwest wind during the warmer portion of the summer months is a sort of Sirocco in Illinois. It blows with considerable strength, but passing over an immense extent of heated plains it brings no coolness. It was such an air that accompanied us on our way north from Chicago; and as the passengers huddled into the shady places outside of the state-rooms on the upper deck, I thought of the flocks of quails I had seen gasping in the shadow of the rail-fences on the prairies.

People here expose themselves to a draught of air with much less scruple than they do in the Atlantic states. "We do not take cold by it," they said to me, when I saw them sitting in a current of wind, after perspiring freely. If they do not take cold, it is odds but they take something else, a fever perhaps, or what is called a bilious attack. The vicissitudes of climate at Chicago and its neighborhood are more sudden and extreme than with us, but the inhabitants say that they are not often the cause of catarrhs, as in the Atlantic states.

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