From the gloom of Buffalo, the smoke of Cincinnati, and the dirt of Pittsburg, I should have been glad to escape as soon as might be, even had not the death from cholera of 240 persons in a single day of my visit at the “Queen City” warned me to fly north. From a stricken town, with its gutters full of chloride of lime, and fires burning in the public streets, to green Michigan, was a grateful change; but I was full of sorrow at leaving that richest and most lovely of all States—Ohio. There is a charm in the park-like beauty of the Monongahela valley, dotted with vines and orchards, that nothing in Eastern America can rival. The absence at once of stumps in the cornfields, and of untilled or unfenced land, gives the “buckeye State” a look of age that none of the “old Eastern States” can show. In corn, in meadow, in timber-land, Ohio stands alone. Her Indian corn exceeds in richness that of any other State; she has ample stores of iron, and coal is worked upon the surface in every Alleghany valley. Wool, wine, hops, tobacco, all are raised; her Catawba has inspired poems. Every river side is clothed with groves of oak, of hickory, of sugar-maple, of sycamore, of poplar, and of buckeye. But, as I said, the change to the Michigan prairie was full of a delightful relief; it was Holland after the Rhine, London after Paris.