Look up ninety feet, and see the great torrent pour over the brink. Look down seventy feet from your icy little shelf, and behold it plunge into the dense mist of the boiling gulf. Through its half-transparent sheet, filtered rays of the bright sunshine struggle toward your eyes. You are in the palace of the Frost King. Ice—ice everywhere, from your slippery foothold to the huge icicles, fifty feet long and three feet thick, which overhang you like the sword of Damocles.
Admiration without comparison is vague and unsatisfactory. Less glorious, because less vast, than the matchless panorama seen from the summit of Pike's Peak, this picture is nearly as impressive, because spread right beside you, and at your very feet. Less minutely beautiful than the exquisite chambers of the Mammoth Cave, its great range and sweep make it more grand and imposing.
Along the Great Western Railway of Canada, the country closely resembles northern Ohio; but the people have uncompromising English faces. A well-dressed farmer and his wife rode upon our train all day in a second-class car, without seeming in the least ashamed of it—a moral courage not often exhibited in the United States.
At Detroit, an invalid, pale, wasted, unable to speak above a whisper, was lying on a bed hastily spread upon the floor of the railway station. Her husband, with their two little boys bending over her in tears, told us that they had been driven from New Orleans, and he was now taking his dying wife to their old home in Maine. There were few dry eyes among the lookers-on. A liberal sum of money was raised on the spot for the destitute family, whose broken pride, after some persuasion, accepted it.
Chicago Rising from the Earth.
The next morning we reached Chicago. In that breezy city upon the lake shore, property was literally rising. Many of the largest brick and stone blocks were being elevated five or six feet, by a very nice system of screws under their walls, while people were constantly pouring in and out of them, and the transaction of business was not impeded. The stupendous enterprise was undertaken that the streets might be properly graded and drained. This summoning a great metropolis to rise from its vasty deep of mud, is one of the modern miracles of mechanics, which make even geological revelations appear trivial and common-place.
Mysteries of Western Currency.
The world has many mysteries, but none more inscrutable than Western Currency. The notes of most Illinois and Wisconsin banks, based on southern State bonds, having depreciated steadily for several weeks, gold and New York exchange now commanded a premium of twenty per cent. The Michigan Central Railway Company was a good illustration of the effect of this upon Chicago interests. That corporation was paying six thousand dollars per week in premiums upon eastern exchange. Yet the hotels and mercantile houses were receiving the currency at par. One Illinois bank-note depreciated just seventy per cent., during the twelve hours it spent in my possession!
In Chicago I encountered an old friend just from Memphis. His association with leading Secessionists for some time protected him; but the popular frenzy was now so wild that they counselled him, as he valued his life, to stay not upon the order of his going, but go at once.
The Memphians were repudiating northern debts, and, with unexampled ferocity, driving out all men suspected of Abolitionism or Unionism. More than five thousand citizens had been forced or frightened away, and in many cases beggared. A secret Committee of Safety, made up of prominent citizens, was ruling with despotic sway.