le southern portion of Illinois has been nicknamed "Egypt,"
--whether because at its utmost point, on a dampish delta,
reposes the far-famed city of Cairo,--or whether, as wicked satirists
pretend, its denizens have been found, in certain particulars, rather
behind our times in intellectual light. Whatever may have been the
original excuse for the _sobriquet_, the derogatory one exists no
more. Light has penetrated, and darkness can reign no longer. Every
day, a fiery visitant, bearing the collective intelligence of the
whole world's doings and sayings, dashes through Egypt into Cairo,
giving off scintillations at every hamlet on the way,--and every day
the brilliant marvel returns, bringing northward, not only the good
things of the Ohio and Mississippi, but tropic _on-dits_ and oranges,
only a few hours old, to the citizens of Chicago, far "in advance of
the (New York) mail." With the rail comes the telegraph; and whispers
of the rise and fall of fancies and potatoes, of speculations and
elections, of the sale of corner-lots and the evasion of
bank-officers, are darting about in every direction over our heads, as
we unconsciously admire the sunset, or sketch a knot of rosy children
as they come trooping from a quaint school-house on the prairie edge.
Fancy the rail gone, and we have neither telegraph, nor school-house,
nor anything of all this but the sunset,--and even that we could not
be there to see in spring-time, at least, unless we could transmigrate
for the time into the relinquished forms of some of these aboriginal
bull-frogs, which grow to the nice size of two feet in length,
destined, no doubt, to receive the souls of habitual croakers
hereafter.

But if the railroads have been the making of the land, it is not to be
denied that the land has been the making of the railroads. Egyptian
minds they must have been, that grudged the tracts given by the United
States to the greatest of roads, the greatest road in the world.
Having bestowed a line of alternate sections on this immense
undertaking,--vital in importance, and impossible without such
aid,--the Government at once doubled the price of the intermediate
sections, _and sold them at the doubled price_, though they had been
years, and might have been ages, in market unsold, without means of
communication and building. Who, then, was the loser? Not the United
States; for they received for half the land just what they would
otherwise have received for the whol