et; and it is hung one hundred feet above low-water mark by
two cables of wire. Seen from below and at a little distance, it looks
like gossamer work, and as though the wind could blow it away, and waft
its filmy fragments out of sight. But the tread of a drove of elephants
would not bend nor jar it. The Rock of Gibraltar does not feel firmer
under foot than this spider's web of a bridge, over which trains of cars
pass one another, as well as ceaseless tides of vehicles and
pedestrians. It is estimated that, besides its own weight of six hundred
tons, it will sustain a burden of sixteen thousand tons. In other words,
the whole population of Cincinnati might get upon it without danger of
being let down into the river. This remarkable work, constructed at a
cost of one million and three quarters, was begun nine years ago, and
has tasked the patience and the faith of the two cities severely; but
now that it is finished, Cincinnati looks forward with confidence to the
time when it will be a connecting link between Lake Erie and the Gulf of
Mexico, and when Cincinnati will be only thirty hours from Mobile.

The levee, which now extends five or six miles around the large "bend"
upon which the city stands, exhibits all the varieties of Western
steamboats. It exhilarated the childish mind of the stranger to discover
that the makers of school-books were practising no imposition upon the
infant mind when they put down in the geography such names as the "Big
Sandy." It was cheering, also, to know that one could actually go to
Maysville, and see how General Jackson's veto had affected it. A
traveller must indeed be difficult to please who cannot find upon the
Cincinnati levee a steamboat bound to a place he would like to visit.
From far back in the coal mines of the Youghiogheny (pronounced
Yok-a-_gau_-ny) to high up the Red River,--from St. Paul to New
Orleans, and all intermediate ports,--we have but to pay our money and
take our choice of the towns upon sixteen thousand miles of navigable
water. Among the rest we observed a steamboat about as large as an
omnibus, fitted up like a pedler's wagon, and full of the miscellaneous
wares which pedlers sell. Such little boats, it appears, steam from
village to village along the shores of those interminable rivers, and,
by renewing their supplies at the large towns, make their way for
thousands of miles, returning home only at the end of the season. They
can ascend higher up the streams t