I am so afraid that I shan’t get off a letter regularly twice a week from this run in the West, that I begin this in a spare three minutes between packing and a testimonial which is to be given me here by a lot of young graduates of the American Universities at the Club at four o’clock. This place is the wonder of the wonderful West, as you know already. A gentleman I met to-day tells me he came up to this place in 1830, when it consisted of a fort with two companies, a dozen little wooden huts, and an encampment of 3000 or 4000 Indians who had come in to get their allowances under treaty with the United States. Now it is one of the handsomest cities I ever saw, with 300,000 inhabitants, and progressing at the rate of 1500 a week or thereabouts. We have had our first experience of a first-rate American hotel, the Fremont House here. It is decidedly not cheap. At present rates about fifteen shillings or four dollars a day; but you can eat and drink anything but wine and spirits all day, with the exception of one hour in the afternoon between lunch and dinner. I ordered a peach just now for lunch, and they brought me a whole plateful, not so good as our hot-house ones, but very fine fruit. Yesterday I went twice to hear Robert Collyer, a famous Unitarian minister here. He was born in Yorkshire, where he worked as a blacksmith, preaching as a Methodist, and finally, twenty years ago, came out to the West and established himself here. He has great and deserved influence, and is altogether the finest man of the kind I have ever met. His text was out of Job: “Dost thou know the springs of the deep?” I forget the exact words, but you will find them in the splendid 38th chapter, where God is showing Job who is master (as the cabman put it). He had been for his holiday at the sea, and was full of thoughts which, as he said, he wanted to get off to his people. He began by a quotation from Ruskin as to the fantastic power and beauty of the sea, said that no trace of love for the sea could be found in the Bible, only fear of it. In the New Jerusalem, St. John dreamed “there shall be no more sea.” Same with all great poets, even English, illustrated by Burns and Shakespere, and Dr. Johnson’s saying, “That a ship was a prison with a chance of being drowned.” Even sailors don’t really look on sea as home, and fear it, and weave mystical notions of all kinds round it. Yet the sea has its sweet and gentle side too; it nourishes every plant and flower that grows by its exhalations, and keeps the rivers sweet and running; and look at one of the exquisite little shells which you may find after the fiercest storm, or the bit of sea-weed lying on the shore, or the limpet on the rock. The lashing of the storm has done them no harm, and there they lie as perfect as if it had never been raging. about them. So the great stormy sea of life has its gentle and loving side for every one of us so long as we trust in God and just obey His laws and do His will. I have given you the very barest outline of a very striking sermon. In the evening I went to tea with him, and there was a large bunch of grapes on my plate with the enclosed little paper, “To Mr. Hughes from the children,” which touched me much. The children are very nice. Robert Lincoln, Abe’s son, and a lot of his friends are our entertainers to-day, and in the evening we go by the night train to St. Louis. I laid aside the other sheet to go off to this club dinner with the young Chicago men, and I have never had a more hearty greeting or kinder words and looks than amongst these youngsters, all graduates of some university, most of them officers in the late war, who are settled down in the great money-making town, and are living brave and sterling and earnest lives there. I really can’t tell you the sort of things they said (they drank your health, and the proposer made one of the prettiest little speeches in proposing it I ever heard); in short, I was positively ashamed, and scarcely knew how to meet it all or what to say to them; but it was less embarrassing than it would have been with any other young men, for this kind of young American (like Holmes) is so transparently sincere that you can come out quite square with him before you have known him an hour. Our good friends of the Illinois Central gave us free passage to St. Louis, to which we travelled all night. It is the biggest town in Missouri, was a great slave-holding place in 1860, and very “secesh” during the war. A fine city it is too, with its grand quay lined with huge steamers, and its miles of fine streets. Rowdy though, still, full of low saloons and gambling-houses. The most drunken town in the United States, the gentleman who met us, and drove us about and got us free papers here to Cincinnati, told us. The most characteristic thing that happened to me was that I was shaved by a negro (and better shaved than I ever was in my life before). He had been body servant to his master, a rich Southern planter, through the first three years of the war. His master was at last shot and he managed to get taken, and so “I’se no slave now,” as he said, with all his ivories shining. His education has not been much improved, however, for he thought England was at war, as being somehow part either of France or Germany, he couldn’t just say which, and would scarcely believe me when I declared that we were separated by the sea from both. Then we travelled all night again (I sleep splendidly in these palace cars, so don’t be alarmed), and got here to the queen city of Ohio this morning, after the most glorious sunrise I ever saw. This also is a very fine city on the Ohio, with fine hills all round and a magnificent suspension bridge. The most characteristic sight I have seen here, however, was two small boys trotting along together barefooted, with a piece of sugar-cane between them, each sucking one end. I had a note to Force, one of Sherman’s generals, now a judge here, who kindly sent us round in a carriage, but was too busy to come with us. To-night we make another long run to Philadelphia. We should have gone to Washington and so worked north, but Philadelphia is the next place where I shall get letters, and I can’t do any longer without hearing from you, so that’s all about it. I have lots of friends in Philadelphia, so shall probably make two days’ stay there.