FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs ofthe presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practicalnineteenth-century populations. The people don't dream, they work.

The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outsideaspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfortthat everywhere appear.

Quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city;and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things.

But Marion City is an exception. Marion City has gone backwardsin a most unaccountable way. This metropolis promisedso well that the projectors tacked 'city' to its name in thevery beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy.

When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago,it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses.

It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin,is getting ready to follow the former five into the river.

Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy. It hadanother disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom,below high-water mark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slopeof a hill.

In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town:

and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellingsand lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings.

And there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and manyattractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges,some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with groundswhich occupy a square. The population of the city is thirty thousand.

There are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts,is done on a great scale.

La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria;was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer.

Keokuk was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857--an extraordinaryyear there in real-estate matters. The 'boom' was something wonderful.

Everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers;they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left.

Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated,was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the groundhad been sodded with greenbacks.

The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing witha healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details, for which wewere sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city.

It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced,not retrograded, in that respect.

A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now.

This is the canal over the Rapids. It is eight miles long,three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep.

Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Departmentusually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct.

The work cost four or five millions.

After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started upthe river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasionalloafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean.

I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked ofwhen I lived there. This is what was said of him--He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself--on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstonewith his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerceand the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in hisstudies by the hour, never changing his position except to drawin his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed;and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse,had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession.

In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning,and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectualhand on it whenever it was wanted.

His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except thatthey were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and thereforemore extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier.

Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice fromthe edifice itself.

He was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the trainingof experience and practice. When he was out on a canvass, his name wasa lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around.

His theme was always politics. He used no notes, for a volcano doesnot need notes. In 1862, a son of Keokuk's late distinguished citizen,Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning Dean--The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61), and a greatmass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum.

A distinguished stranger was to address the house.

After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity withsweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant--the distinguished stranger had failed to connect.

The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious.

About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone,explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him,rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to makefor the stage and save his country.

Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody'seyes sought a single point--the wide, empty, carpetless sta............