of the State, contained
coal enough to warm the world, and more iron than that coal would
smelt,--salt enough for all time, and marble and rich metallic ores of
various kinds besides. In one region are found inexhaustible beds of
limestone, the smoke of whose burning fills the whole spring air, and
the crevices of whose formation make very pokerish-looking caves,
which young and adventurous ladies are fond of exploring; in another
we come to quantities of that snow-white porcelain clay of which some
people suppose themselves to have been originally formed, but which
has been, in a commercial point of view, hitherto a _desideratum_ in
these United States of ours. The people at Mound City (an aspiring
rival of Cairo, on the banks of the Ohio) are about building a factory
for the exploitation of this clay, not into ladies and gentlemen,
(unpopular articles here,) but into china-ware, the quality of which
will be indisputable.

One soon ceases wondering at the tropicality of the Illinoisian
imagination. Ali Baba's eye-straining experiences were poor, compared
to these every-day realities.

The "Open Sesame" in this case has been spoken through the
railroad-whistle. Railroads cannot make mines and quarries, and fat
soil and bounteous rivers; yet railroads have been the making of
Illinois. Nobody who has ever seen her spring roads, where there are
no rails, can ever question it. From the very fatness of her soil, the
greater part of the State must have been one Slough of Despond for
three quarters of the year, and her inhabitants strangers to each
other, if these iron arms had not drawn the people together and
bridged the gulfs for them. No roads but railroads could possibly have
threaded the State, a large and the best portion of whose surface is
absolutely devoid of timber, stone, gravel, or any other available
material. The prairies must have remained flowery deserts, visited as
a curiosity every year by strangers, but without dwellings for want of
wood. The vast quarries must, of course, have lain useless, for want
of transporting power,--our friend's coal and iron undisturbed,
waiting for an earthquake,--and the poetical pioneer's beets and
Indian corn unplanted, and therefore uncelebrated. Well may it be said
here, that iron is more valuable than gold. Population, agriculture,
the mechanic arts, literature, taste, civilization, in short, are all
magnetized by the beneficent rail, and follow wherever it leads. The
who