Be patient with the living.
—Selected.
ABOUT ST. LOUIS.
BY THE PANSIES.
THE biggest thing in St. Louis is the bridge by which you get to it. It has three arches, each over five hundred feet long, and it makes a road over fifty feet wide. My uncle says it is a big thing, and he knows, for he is a bridge builder. There is a tunnel under it, and a railroad track. I rode into St. Louis once through this tunnel; it is a mile long. It is lighted with electricity, and they say it has ventilating shafts; but they don’t give you much air to breathe, that I know. Father had to fan mother every minute, and we were afraid she would faint. I think I should have found it hard work to breathe myself, if I hadn’t been so dreadfully worried about mother that I forgot all about it. But for all that it is a splendid thing—the tunnel is, I mean. The piers of the bridge are built on a rock, and they go down more than a hundred feet below the surface. This bridge cost over six millions of dollars. I could tell you more things, for I staid in St. Louis a whole week, but mother says my letter is long enough.
Willard J. Mooney.
All the Pansies tell how the city they are writing about got its name. I cannot find out about St. Louis, but I know the first settlement there was made by Pierre Laclede Liguest. I was wondering if they did not put pieces of his queer name together, and make a word which in time came to be St. Louis? Anyhow, I am glad they did not name the place for him, it would have been so hard to pronounce. That is only about a hundred and thirty years ago. St. Louis did not grow very fast; for a long time nobody thought it was going to be a city, and fifty years ago there were only about sixteen thousand inhabitants; but it has grown fast enough since. There are more than five hundred thousand people there now, and large, beautiful buildings, and everything which helps to make a city handsome. It is hot there, though; at least my auntie thinks so. She used to have to wait three hours in a St. Louis depot for a train every time she came home for her summer vacation, and went back in September, and she says the warmest she has ever been in her life was during those hours; and she never in five years struck a cool day! So she says she cannot help thinking that St. Louis is always warm. But probably if she had been there in January, instead of June or September, she would have thought differently. Women are apt to think that things stay always just as they happened to find them.
Robert Campbell.