dred dollars a month, and each boat must have two. For the explosions there is no excuse; for the conflagrations, there is some; for the sinkings, there is enough. A Western steamboat is as combustible as a theatre; there is in the midst of it a raging volcano; and the whole mass of fire and fuel is rushing through the air at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. One stray spark, unobserved for ten minutes, suffices to kindle a blaze which nothing can quench but the river's rolling flood. These fires can be prevented only by a systematic and sleepless vigilance, which the Southwestern man does not take to easily. But learn it they must and will.

Recently, they have introduced upon the great rivers of the West the towboat and barge system, as we have it upon the Hudson. Tow-boats of immense power, which carry no freight, draw after them and around them, like a duck surrounded by her family, five, ten, or fifteen spacious barges, loaded with grain, cotton, and passengers. On arriving at a town, the fleet stops only long enough to let go one barge, and take on another. Nor is there any stopping for fuel, for the tow-boat is large enough to contain a supply for the voyage. Such is the saving of time, by avoiding hours' delay at each of the principal landings and the frequent stoppings for fuel, that the towboats, with ten loaded barges attached to them, make the trip from St. Louis to New Orleans in six days, which is just the time usually taken by the fastest passenger boats. In this way such commodities as grain can be conveyed in bulk, a great economy, and the voyage on the Mississippi is rendered almost as safe as upon the Delaware. It is the tow-boat, in the van of the floating mass, that incurs most of the perils of the river, and all those of the boiler. The system is a prodigious economy. One of those large passenger boats on the Mississippi is run at an expense of a thousand dollars a day, and it wastes half its time in waiting for freight. A tow-boat capable

of towing ten barges expends but two hundred dollars a day, and wastes fewer hours than a passenger boat wastes days.

That Mississippi River, dull and harmless as it usually looks, is one of the most unmanageable things in nature, and supplies the towns upon its banks with that element of peril that is a universal concomitant of human life. It never knows its own mind two years together, and rolls about in its soft bed like a sick hippopotamus. One year it floods a town, or slices off a few acres of it; the next, it threatens to leave it and seek another channel. Even St. Louis, though safe from floods, has been obliged to use considerable compulsion to keep the river from floundering over toward the Illinois shore, and leaving the Levee a dry joke to the Chicagonese forever. Every ten or fifteen years, too, the river rises high enough to pour in at the front doors of the stores at the top of the Levee, which are needlessly near the channel. The elders of the town remember the time when the flood was threatening, and Edwin Forrest was acting, both on the same evening; and, as often as the curtain went down, the men would rush out of doors to hear the last news from the river, and when the play was over, the entire audience hurried pellmell to the Levee to see for themselves whose cellars were flooded, and into whose second-story windows the water was pouring.

The ice, too, is a thing of terror at St. Louis. It does no harm while it is forming, nor as long as it remains firm. On the contrary, it furnishes a convenient bridge, over which, for a month sometimes, the heaviest loads are safely drawn. It is the breaking up that does the mischief. Along the gently curving edge of the Levee, a hundred steamboats have their noses in the sand, and their hulls fixed aslant in the thickest ice. Ropes and cables fasten some to the shore; others, for experiment's sake, are held by light ropes, or by none. In the middle of the river a few boats are anchored, also as an

experiment, and others line the opposite shore. The ice gives no warning of the coming change, and, by degrees, the vigilance of the thousands who have reason to contemplate its breaking up with dread is relaxed. Suddenly, when no one is thinking of the river, a voice is heard crying, "IT MOVES!"

All eyes are turned to the ice. It is a horrid circumstance of the breaking up, that, when the ice begins to go, it moves in an entire mass, so slowly and so silently that, for several minutes, no inexperienced person can discern the motion. The boy that first noticed the movement of the ice in 1866 was scolded by the by-standers for making a false alarm. As soon as it becomes certain that the ice has started, the fire-bells ring, and all the city hurries to the Levee, to prevent or witness the destruction of the steamboats. The broad sheet of ice, two or three feet thick, as it glides along, soon begins to bring a fearful strain upon the line of boats. Something must give way. Nothing can stop the motion of the ice, that has hundreds of miles of ice behind it, pressing it on. Suddenly the silence is broken; the ice cracks; fissures yawn; some boats are crushed like paper; others are drawn bodily under the sheet; others are thrown violently against one another; some are forced partly upon the ice. Meanwhile the owners and officers of the boats, aided by the firemen and citizens, are making desperate exertions to save their property, and the whole Levee, as far as the eye can reach, is a scene of excitement and consternation. At the breaking up of the ice in 1866, seventeen steamboats were crushed and sunk in a few minutes. It is within the compass of human ability to provide a remedy for this annual danger. St. Louis must put on its thinkingcap and consider it.

If there is any one who regards the Roman Catholic Church as an institution that has nearly played its part in this world, a short residence at St. Louis will dispel the delusion. The Catholics, French, German, and Irish, are

nearly one half the population; and the property of the Church, in buildings and lands, is estimated at fifteen millions of dollars. From the single tent in which the mass was first celebrated on the site of the city one hundred years ago, succeeded soon by a small church of logs, the number of places of worship has increased, until now there are twenty-nine Catholic churches and chapels, while no other sect has more than nine. Nor have the Catholics there wasted their resources in the erection of churches prematurely splendid. The force of the church in St. Louis is expended in the education of youth, in the care of the sick, in reclaiming the fallen, in providing refuge for the unfortunate. The following catalogue of the Roman Catholic institutions of the city tells a story that may well excite reflection in the Protestant mind.

St. Louis University. 25 professors; 322 students; libraries, 21,000 vol

umes.

Convent and Academy of the Sacred Heart. Community, 52; number of pupils, 140; pupils in the parish school,

140.

Convent and Academy of the Visitation. Community, 64; number of boarders in Academy, 107.

Ursuline Convent and Academy. Community, 42; candidates, 5; number of boarders, 70.

Mother House and Academy of Sisters of St. Joseph. Community, 66; pupils, 135.

Convent and Academy of Sisters of St. Joseph. Pupils, 250; number in schools for colored pupils, 50.

College of the Christian Brothers. 40 brothers; 500 pupils.

St. Louis Hospital, conducted by the Sisters of Charity. Number in community, 28; 400 patients.

Orphan Asylum of St. Philomena, conducted by the Sisters of Charity. Community, 11; orphans, 85.

St. Mary's Female Orphan Asylum, conducted by the Sisters of Charity. Community, 12; orphans, 150.

Biddle Infant Asylum and Lying-in Hospital, conducted by the Sisters of

Charity. Community, 13; women in asylum, 20; infants, 70.

Widows' House. Number of widows, 30.

St. Vincent's Institute for the Insane, conducted by the Sisters of Charity. 100 patients.

House of the Angel Guardian for Females, conducted by the Sisters of Charity. 83 girls.

Mulanphy Orphan Asylum for Females, conducted by the Ladies of the Sacred Heart. Orphans, 24.

Male Orphan Asylum, conducted by the Sisters of St. Joseph. Orphans, 350.

St. Vincent's German Male and Female Orphan Asylum, conducted by the Sisters of St. Joseph. 100 orphans.

St. Bridget's Half-Orphan Asylum, conducted by the Sisters of St. Joseph. 125 orphans.

Female School of St. Vincent, conducted by the Sisters of Charity. 13 in community; 100 pupils.

House of the Good Shepherd, St. Louis, to which is attached the House of the Third Order of St. Theresa, for penitents. 100 penitents; 36 Magdalens; 43 in community.

St. Joseph's Convent. 8 professed; 5 novices; 2 postulants; 4 lay sisters. House of Protection (40 inmates), and Free School, 150 children, conducted by Sisters of Mercy.

La Salle Institute, Reformatory for Boys, conducted by the Christian Brothers. 7 brothers; 30 pupils.

Convent of the Carmelite Nuns. Deaf and Dumb Asylum, conducted by the Sisters of St. Joseph.

Add to these, seventeen parish schools, of which the smallest has 165 pupils, and the largest, 1,000.

This does not look like exhaustion. A very large number of the pupils in the convent schools - fully one third, it is thought are children of Protestant parents; and an impression is made upon their minds in those pleasant and serene abodes, under that still, but effective discipline, and in the total absence of the repellent Sabbatarian

spirit, which often ends in their "conversion." We shall not soon forget a delightful hour spent in one of the great convent schools of St. Louis. How clean, how bright, how tranquil the place! We Protestants, who only see nuns passing along the streets, with their ugly bonnets, their black dresses, and their downcast eyes, are apt to conclude that a nun must be a forlorn and melancholy being. They do not appear such in their convent homes. We found the Sisters of the "Visitation" witty, high-bred, well-informed ladies, full of pleasant badinage and innocent fun. How could they, indeed, be other than very happy women, with their future secure, with an arduous, noble employment, and with that tide of young and joyous life streaming in every morning at the doors of their abode? The Catholic priests, too, they really do not appear to be the terrible creatures that some of us think them to be.

But come, reader, let us visit one of them together. It will do us good who never before spoke with a Catholic priest, still less entered a Catholic parsonage. The house is not as large nor as elegantly furnished as the residences of the Protestant preachers; but it is sufficiently comfortable. A robust and middle-aged housekeeper shows us into a library arranged for work rather than enjoyment. We notice all the familiar books, and there is nothing in the room peculiar, except a crucifix before the writing-desk and a few engravings of a Catholic cast. And what is this yellow-covered pamphlet on the table? Can it be? It is the last number of the Westminster Review! Enter, a stout, handsome, healthy-looking gentleman, in the house attire of a priest, evidently a gentleman and man of the world. The yellow-covered Review is a convenient subject of conversation, and we soon discover that the "Church" reciprocates the friendly feeling of the "Rationalists," and is duly sensible of the fairness and candor of the Westminster when it treats of the Catholic Church. Extremes meet. The intelligent and thinking portion of the Catho

lic clergy appear to be of opinion that there are but two consistent persons in the world; namely, the Roman Catholic who surrenders his reason, and the Rationalist who uses it. They are perfectly aware, also, of the immense advantage which the Catholic Church derives from the restraints imposed by the narrower Protestants upon the enjoyment of such innocent pleasures as dancing and the drama. Here again extremes meet. This excellent priest remarked upon the demoralizing influence of ascetic Protestantism and of the "moral strait-jacket" of the Evangelical school, just as Theodore Parker did in Boston, and as Robert Collyer does at Chicago. "Does the Catholic Church expect again to rule Christendom, and absorb at length all the sects, and the Westminster Review as well?"

"The Catholic Church will never cease to claim that she is the sole divinely appointed and infallible teacher of God's will to men."

"But these Western men will never surrender their understandings."

"Nor will I mine. The Church says, Use your reason so far as to examine her credentials. Nor then does she require blind submission. The Church gives a reason for all that she demands, and leaves nothing unexplained, except the unexplainable. In the teachings of the Catholic Church I find nothing contrary to my reason, though I find much that is above and beyond my reason; nor can I see any halting-place between the Catholic faith and utter unbelief."

A long and most instructive conversation with this gifted and genial clergyman confirmed us in the impression that certain Protestant practices and beliefs are giving the Catholics a considerable advantage in the Western country. The great free West, how ever, will never be Catholic; since the credible doctrines of that Church neutralize the power of its exquisite organization, and its organization is so interwoven with its doctrines that the Church cannot revise its creed without destroying itself. The Western man will never

abdicate his right to think. The priest may indeed convert the howling dervishes of the camp-meeting into orderly worshippers, and may allure the negro by the splendor of his vestments and the pomp of his ceremonies. But the intelligent and ruling minds of the West will be forever beyond his reach.

The basis of the civilization of St. Louis, then, is Catholic. But the progressive and propelling institutions are well rooted there, and no one need fear for the future of the city. The publicschool system is in vigorous operation, and is sustained by the public opinion of the State. Governor Fletcher, who presides with so much ability over the interests of Missouri, is its devoted friend. The Washington University, founded on the principle of absolute and entire toleration, has already a considerable endowment, a handsome edifice, and a most enlightened and patriotic corps of professors. It is destined to play a leading part in the higher education of the Southwest. One of the largest and most respectable of the Protestant churches in St. Louis is the

Unitarian, the pastor of which, Dr. William G. Eliot, is the ally and champion of everything that makes for the good of the Southwest. For many years there has been a Mercantile Library in the city, which has now nearly thirty thousand volumes. Its principal room, which is more a gallery than a library, contains sixty-eight works of art, all of which are interesting, and many excellent. It was at St. Louis that Harriet Hosmer found her most liberal patron, Mr. Wayman Crow, under whose auspices she studied and practised her art in the city; and it is in this Library that the largest collection of her works is to be found. St. Louis is proud of Miss Hosmer, and claims a kind of property in her fame. The chief newspapers of the city are the "Missouri Democrat," of Republican politics, and the 66 Missouri Republican," of Democratic politics, both conducted with much spirit and at great expense. The Democrat is fighting the fight of the Union in the Southwest ably and gallantly, and

in circumstances which entitle it to the special favor of Northern advertisers. To Unionize the South, all we need is a wise, kind, moderate, but thorough-going Union daily newspaper in each of the large towns. The medical profession, in which many of the calomelists still linger in all the Western cities, is undergoing at St. Louis that revolution to common sense which has been progressing all over the civilized world during the last twenty years. The leader of the new school is that brilliant young surgeon, William Tod Helmuth, who, from his habit of enlivening the banquet with humorous poems, is sometimes styled the Oliver Wendell Holmes of St. Louis. It is comforting to know that so powerful an enemy of drugs has

the largest practice west of the Alleghany Mountains, and that under his patronage a Medical School for the inculcation of anti-calomel principles has been founded.

How interesting the spectacle of those rising cities of the West! How cheering to discover that the ruling minds in them all are alive to the fact that posterity, to the remotest ages, will be affected by what the men do who control the cities that they are now forming! Why this rage to visit the Old World? Since we are assured that good Americans when they die go to Paris, why not defer Paris till then, and see in this life the seats of future empire in the West? Nothing could so cheer and expand an American citizen.