Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 19.djvu/668

 about as large as the State-House in Boston.

There being no hindrance to the natural growth of the city, it has arranged itself in a natural manner. Along the river, as far back as Third Street, the wholesale, business of the town is done. Here are rows of tall brick stores and warehouses; here are the post-office, the exchange, the court-house; here are the mills and the factories, which must be near the river. All the bustle and clatter of the place are confined to these three or four streets nearest the water, and to the streets crossing them,—a strip of the town three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide. Fourth Street contains the principal retail stores, many of which are on the scale of Broadway. Here the ladies of St. Louis replenish at once and exhibit their charms, flitting from store to store. Fifth Street is also a street of retail business; but beyond that line the city presents little but a vast extent of residences, churches, public institutions and vacant lots; these last being so numerous that the town could double its population without taking in much more of the prairie. From the cupola of the court-house, the city appears an illimitable expanse of brick houses, covered always with a light smoke from forty thousand fires of bituminous coal. The two principal hotels are the largest in the United States, and among the best. The nearness of the city to the wilderness and the uninhabited prairie tills the markets with game. Venison is cheaper than mutton, wild turkeys, than tame. The markets of St. Louis probably furnish a greater variety and profusion of delicious food than any others in the world, and the art of cookery seems never to have been lost there.

The resemblance of this highly favored city to Philadelphia is only external. It has a character of its own, to which many elements have contributed, and which many influences have modified. The ball-clubs, playing in the fields on Sunday afternoons, the billiard-rooms open on Sunday, the great number of assemblies, balls, and parties, the existence of five elegant and expensively sustained theatres in a town of two hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, the closing of all the stores by sunset in winter, and before sunset in summer, and an indefinable something in the tone and air of the people, notify the stranger that he is in a place which was not the work exclusively of the Puritan, nor even of the Protestant. It is, indeed, a town of highly composite character. The old and wealthy families, descendants of the original French settlers, still speaking the French language and maintaining French customs, give to the place something of the style of New Orleans. As the chief city of a State that shared, and deliberately chose to share, the curse of slavery, it has much of the languor and carelessness induced by the habit of being served by slaves. The negro, too, has imparted his accent to the tongue of the people. Nearly one half of the population being Catholic, and the Catholic Church being by far the wealthiest denomination of the place, and much the most active, enterprising, and wise, the civilization of the town is essentially Catholic; and even the imitative negroes turn out on Sundays and play matches of base-ball in costume. The city being midway between the Northern Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, and offering opportunities to men of enterprise, has attracted a few thousands of Northern people, who have been, and are now, a powerful propelling force in St. Louis and in the wondrous State of Missouri. Add to these various elements sixty thousand Germans, whom the Secessionists of St. Louis compliment with the title of the "Damned Dutch,"—uttering the words with that ferocious emphasis which they usually reserve exclusively for the "Damned Yankees." Our placid and good-natured German friends arc not apt to excite the ire of their fellow-citizens; but at St. Louis they have contrived to make themselves most intensely abhorred by the "aristocracy"