g, and the great
lakes are dangerous. They tried yachting at Chicago a few years ago, but
on the experimental trip a squall capsized the vessel, and the crew had
the ignominy of spending several hours upon the keel, from which a
passing craft rescued them. Then, as to excursions, there is upon the
lakes the deadly peril of sea-sickness; upon the rivers there is no
great relief from the heat; and upon neither are there convenient places
to visit. All you can do is, to go a certain distance, turn round, and
come back; which is a flat, uncheering, pointless sort of thing. Upon
the whole, therefore, the Western waters contribute little to the relief
and enjoyment of the people who live near them. We noticed at the large
town of Erie, some years ago, that not one house had been placed so as
to afford its inmates a view of the lake, though the shores offered most
convenient sites; nor did the people ever come down to see the lake,
apparently, as there was no path worn upon the grassy bluff overlooking
it.

The Ohio River has another inconvenience. The bottom-land, as it is
called, between the water's edge and the hills, is generally low and
narrow. Nowhere is there room for a large city; nor can the hills be dug
away except by paring down a great part of Ohio and Kentucky. When the
traveller has climbed to the top of those winding mountains, he has only
reached the average summit of the country; for it is not the banks of
the river that are high, but the river itself which is low. It is an
error to say that the Ohio is a river with lofty banks. Those continuous
hills, around which this river winds and curls and bends and loops, are
simply the hills of the country through which the river had to find its
way. We were astonished, in getting to the top of Cincinnati, after a
panting walk up a zigzag road, to discover that we had only mounted to
the summit of one billow in an ocean of hills.

There is always a reason why a city is just where it is. Nothing is more
controlled by law than the planting, the growth, and the decline of
cities. Even the particular site is not a thing of chance, as we can see
in the sites of Paris, London, Constantinople, and every other great
city of the world. A town exists by supplying to the country about it
the commodities which the country cannot procure for itself. In the
infancy of the Ohio settlements, when it was still to be determined
which of them would take the lead, the commodity most in r