ion of beauty to
a man who has seen nothing for days and nights but the hold of a
steamboat and the dull shores of the Mississippi!

The Varieties Theatre of St. Louis, therefore, is a highly flourishing
establishment, and the proprietor knows his business well enough to be
aware that indecency never pays expenses in the United States,--as all
will finally discover who try it. At Cincinnati there is also a
Varieties Theatre, but such a theatre! A vast and dirty barn, with
whitewashed walls and no ceiling, in which a minstrel band of five men
and two beauteous nymphs exerted themselves slightly to entertain an
audience of thirty men and boys. As the performers entered the building
in view of the spectators, we are able to state that beauteous
Terpsichorean nymphs go about the world disguised in dingy calico, and
only appear in their true colors upon the stage.

Cincinnati, then, affords very slight and inferior facilities for
holiday-keeping. We chanced to be in the city on the last Thanksgiving
day, and were surprised to see seven tenths of all the stores open as
usual. In the German quarter there were no signs whatever of a public
holiday: every place of business was open, and no parties of pleasure
were going out. The wholesale stores and most of the American part of
the city exhibited the Sunday appearance which an Eastern city presents
on this day; but even there the cessation of industry was not universal.
And, after all, how should it be otherwise? Where were the people to go?
What could they do? There is no Park. There are no suburbs accessible
without a severe struggle with the attraction of gravitation. There are
no theatres fit to attend. There is no "Museum," no menagerie, no
gallery of art, no public gardens, no Fifth Avenue to stroll in, no
steamboat excursion, no Hoboken. There ought to be in Cincinnati a most
exceptionally good and high social life to atone for this singular
absence of the usual means of public enjoyment; but of that a stranger
can have little knowledge.

When we turn to survey the industry of Cincinnati, we find a much more
advanced and promising state of things. Almost everything is made in
Cincinnati that is made by man. There are prodigious manufactories of
furniture, machinery, clothing, iron ware, and whatever else is
required by the six or eight millions of people who live within easy
reach of the city. The book-trade--especially the manufacturing of
school-books and other books