,200 feet broad, and we saw in it one of those
beautiful steamboats which give so much character here to the rivers.
The Osage is navigable for these large boats for 200 miles above this
place. We passed various other rivers, among others the Gasconade, at a
spot memorable for a terrible catastrophe which happened on the day of
the opening of the railway, when the first bridge which crossed it gave
way as the train was passing, and nine out of thirteen cars were
precipitated into the bed of the river; thirty people, chiefly leading
characters of St. Louis, were killed, and many hundreds desperately
hurt.

We have little more to say of St. Louis, as the museum was the only
public building we visited. The great curiosity there is the largest
known specimen of the mastodon. It is almost entire from the tip of its
nose to the tip of its tail, and measures ninety-six feet in length. We
left St. Louis, and were glad to escape for a time at least out of a
slave state. The "institution" was brought more prominently before us
there than it has yet been, as St. Louis is the first town where we have
seen it proclaimed in gold letters on a large board in the street,
"Negroes bought and sold here." In the papers, also, yesterday, we saw
an advertisement of a "fine young man" to be sold, to pay a debt.

We took our departure in the Alton steamboat, in order to see the first
twenty-four miles of the Upper Mississippi, and the junction of that
river and the Missouri, which takes place about six miles below Alton;
both rivers, however, are very tame and monotonous, and it was only as
we were reaching Alton, that the banks of the Mississippi assumed
anything like height. Alton itself stands very high, and as it was
getting dark when we arrived, the lights along the hills had a fine
effect. We are told it is a pretty town, but it was dark when we landed,
and we had to hurry into the train that brought us to this place. The
steamboat in which we went up the river was a very fine one, but not at
all fitted up in the sumptuous manner of our Newport boat. Papa paced
the cabin, and made it 276 feet long, beyond which there was an outside
smoking cabin, and then the forecastle.

Springfield is in the midst of the Grand Prairie, and, as we are not to
leave it till the afternoon, we have been exploring the town, and, as
far as we could, the prairie which comes close up to it; but the moment
the plank pavement ceased, it was hopeless to get furt