the East. It is not common anywhere. But I have observed that the inland atmosphere of the Western States lacks the magic by which the salt air of the seaside adds roses to a woman's cheek. Western men are finer looking than Western women- -a fact which I attribute to their frequent journeyings on business from climate to climate. Moreover, take a thousand Western children gathered into an audience (an experiment which I have had many opportunities to witness), and their cheeks show less bloom than the cheeks of children by the Atlantic. Still, I find that in the West as elsewhere, one's own children are regarded the handsomest in the world.

I cannot see why household music need be so scarce in Western well-to-do families. In the hundred houses which I have mentioned, I did not see five good pianos, or hear ten good players. But, as music has been the tardiest of arts to make its way through the great world, so it is peculiarly the tardiest of arts to make its way into a new country. Very little good singing is heard in the Western churches. I call no church singing good which is not done by the congregation. The Methodist church is the Christian song-bird of the West. But the Sundayschools of every sect are rapidly teaching the children to sing. There will come a day when the Americans will be as musical as the Germans: and the credit of the change will belong to the Sunday-school system. I believe that the Sunday-schools of the Republic are of far more importance to its welfare than are all its churches. "A little child shall lead them."

There is more hilarity among Western than among Eastern people. Work is more of a play here than at home. More than half the laughter done by the American people falls from the mouths of Western men. And a good deal

of it, of late (I grieve to say), has been at the expense of his Excellency Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.

I marvel that Western women do not cultivate more house-plants. Their dwellings never have so many flowerpots in the windows as an Eastern inan sees at home. The household geranium-dear, sacred plant!-seems to have few rights which Hoosier housekeepers are bound to respect. And yet, by common consent, it has a feesimple, a clear title, an undisputed right, to live in every good woman's house in all the land. Of course, the prairies are full of flowers in the summer; but this is all the more reason why the prairie-cottage should be full of flowers in the winter. I shall never forget a certain cottage on the Illinois prairie at Princeton, into which, after a long walk through the snow, I entered to find a whole bower of summer green inside! Such a house offered hospitality, not only to the body, but to the soul. And I afterward met, in a university town, a law professor in whom the sweet charities of life abounded to such a degree as to be totally inexplicable by anything belonging to his dusty and mouldy profession; and I should have gone off without an explanation had I not happened to detect his face all aglow while in the act of watering his plants! "He that watereth shall be watered also himself."

I may be pardoned for mentioning that a good woman now living in Abraham Lincoln's home at Springfield, planted, before his martyrdom, a handful of morningglory seeds at the foot of a pillar by the rear piazza, and was surprised to find the mass of growing vines flowering into three distinct stripes of color-red, white, and blue; not from any design in planting, as she told me, but from mere accident of growth; a patriotic freak of na

ture, made as if to give a beautiful proof of the indigenous loyalty of the West--the very soil of the Martyr's garden testifying what flag ought to wave over the land!

How much a bountiful storm of snow contributes to a winter's happiness! Less snow falls in the West than in the East. In Kansas a sleigh-ride is an unusual treat. In Michigan sometimes a whole winter comes and goes without the jingling of a sleigh-bell. This winter there has been snow in abundance. But I am annoyed that so many sleighing-parties go to their sport without sleighbells. It ought to be held a misdemeanor to sadden a sleigh-ride by omitting the bells. The cheery snow, the crisp air, the merry blood, all call for the accompanying music of the bells. This winter has yielded me some of the grandest of sleigh-rides, set to the tinkle of the gladdest of bells. All which has been some compensation for losing the happiness of crossing the East River on a fool's bridge of ice.

Cultivated people at the West-particularly Eastern women who are fresh residents on the prairies-yearn for New England, and weep in secret at their separation from it. But these same Eastern women, as soon as they become Westernized, partake of the same pride in the West that animates Western men. Certain fashionable people, who prefer to be ladies rather than women, and who flourish in the large Western cities, regard it as a compliment to be told that no one would suspect they had not lived all their days at the East. But when you see a Western Yankee girl who after five or ten years' residence in Illinois cannot be told from an Eastern woman,. she may be excellent and admirable, but she is not the best whom the West can produce. I say this with downright positiveness. The true Western woman, though

perhaps born at the East, would not give a sixpence to be thought fresh from Beacon street, or Fifth avenue. Moreover, I venture the prediction that the first State in the Union to acknowledge the political equality of men and women is a State west of the Mississippi. I mean Iowa. Let the golden day speed swiftly for I want Horace Greeley to see it before he dies.

One thing more. I am told by friendly critics at home that I draw my Western pictures in over-colors. No. I endeavor always to understate, rather than overstate, my admiration of the West. It is a majestic region. Its people belong to the nobility of mankind. Its prospective growth is beyond calculation. Its soul is of fire. Its ambition is to rule the land. Its opportunity is not far in the future. The West is to be the Dictator of the

Republic.

FEBRUARY 12, 1867.

MR. SEWARD'S GARDEN.

JS I peered into Mr. Seward's garden at Auburn, and saw the snow and ice cloaking his trees and shrubs, I could not but think of the still more chilling blight that has winter-killed his green old age. Of course, I do not refer to his domestic bereavements. God forbid that any criticism of a public man's character should go untempered with sympathy at a moment when his critics are looking at the shut windows of his half-empty house whose recent and chief household lights lie quenched in the grave. The late mistress of this mansion was one of the noblest women of America. I have never heard Mr. Greeley praise the character of any other woman as I have heard him always praise the character of Mrs. Seward. A few days after her death, he wrote the noblest tribute which any public pen paid to her memory.

Gazing, therefore, at this shadowed house through the haze of this irresistible sympathy, I could not but recall tenderly my early boyish enthusiasm for Mr. Sewardwhen I thought him the greatest of statesmen, and bravest of leaders; when I believed that he loved liberty better than power, and sought justice rather than office; when his calm, pure, limpid eloquence flowed like a fountain undefiled; when I ranked him as the foremost of American statesmen, and one of the chief pillars of the anti-slavery cause; and when I shed foolish but actual