t is situated upon it must be upon
a bend. This river employs itself continually in writing the letter S
upon the surface of the earth. At Cincinnati, the hills recede from the
shore on each side of the river about a mile and a half, leaving space
enough for a large town, but not for the great city of two hundred and
fifty thousand inhabitants to which it has grown.

Cincinnati is an odd name for a town, whether we regard it as a genitive
singular, or as a nominative plural. The story goes, that the first
settlers appointed a committee of one to name the place. The gentleman
selected for this duty had been a schoolmaster, and he brought to bear
upon the task all the learning appertaining to his former vocation. He
desired to express in the name of the future city the fact that it was
situated opposite the mouth of the Licking River. He was aware that
_ville_ was French for "city," that _os_ was Latin for "mouth"; that
_anti_ in composition could mean "opposite to"; and that the first
letter of Licking was L. By combining these various fragments of
knowledge, he produced at length the word LOSANTIVILLE, which his
comrades accepted as the name of their little cluster of log huts, and
by this name it appears on some of the earliest maps of the Ohio. But
the glory of the schoolmaster was short-lived. When the village had
attained the respectable age of fifteen months, General St. Clair
visited it on a tour of inspection, and laughed the name to scorn.
Having laid out a county of which this village was the only inhabited
spot, he named the county Hamilton, and insisted upon calling the
village Cincinnati, after the society of which both himself and Colonel
Hamilton were members. In that summer of 1790 Cincinnati consisted of
forty log cabins, two small frame houses, and a fort garrisoned by a
company or two of troops.

We sometimes speak of "the Western cities," as though the word "Western"
was sufficiently descriptive, and as though the cities west of the
Alleghany Mountains were all alike. This is far from being the case.
Every city in the Western country, as well as every State, county, and
neighborhood, has a character of its own, derived chiefly from the
people who settled it. Berlin is not more different from Vienna, Lyons
is not more different from Marseilles, Birmingham is not more different
from Liverpool, than Cincinnati is from Chicago or St. Louis; and all
these differences date back to the origin of those citie