Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20.djvu/242

234 and tall chimneys, from which the blackest smoke is always ascending, and spreading over the valley, and filling it with smoke. Over Cincinnati, too, a dense cloud of smoke usually hangs, every chimney contributing its quota to the mass. The universal use of the cheap bituminous coal (seventeen cents a bushel,—twenty-five bushels to a ton) is making these Western cities almost as dingy as London. Smoke pervades every house in Cincinnati, begrimes the carpets, blackens the curtains, soils the paint, and worries the ladies. Housekeepers assured us that the all-pervading smoke nearly doubles the labor of keeping a house tolerably clean, and absolutely prevents the spotless cleanliness of a Boston or Philadelphia house. A lady who wears light-colored garments, ribbons, or gloves in Cincinnati must be either very young, very rich, or very extravagant: ladies of good sense or experience never think of wearing them. Clean hearts abound in Cincinnati, but not clean hands. The smoke deposits upon all surfaces a fine soot, especially upon men's woollen clothes, so that a man cannot touch his own coat without blackening his fingers. The stranger, for a day or two, keeps up a continual washing of his hands, but he soon sees the folly of it, and abandons them to their fate. A letter written at Cincinnati on a damp day, when the Stygian pall lies low upon the town, carries with it the odor of bituminous smoke to cheer the homesick son of Ohio at Calcutta or Canton. This universal smoke is a tax upon every inhabitant, which can be estimated in money, and the sum total of which is millions per annum. Is there no remedy? Did not Dr. Franklin invent a smoke-consuming stove? Are there no Yankees in the West?

Before the traveller loitering along the levee has done wondering at the smoke, his eye is caught by the new wire suspension bridge, which springs out from the summit of the broad, steep levee to a lofty tower (two hundred feet high) near the water's edge, and then, at one leap, clears the whole river, and lands upon another tower upon the Covington side. From tower to tower the distance is one thousand and fifty-seven feet; the entire length of the bridge is two thousand two hundred and fifty-two feet; and it is hung one hundred feet above low-water mark by two cables of wire. Seen from below and at a little distance, it looks like gossamer work, and as though the wind could blow it away, and waft its filmy fragments out of sight. But the tread of a drove of elephants would not bend nor jar it. The Rock of Gibraltar does not feel firmer under foot than this spider's web of a bridge, over which trains of cars pass one another, as well as ceaseless tides of vehicles and pedestrians. It is estimated that, besides its own weight of six hundred tons, it will sustain a burden of sixteen thousand tons. In other words, the whole population of Cincinnati might get upon it without danger of being let down into the river. This remarkable work, constructed at a cost of one million and three quarters, was begun nine years ago, and has tasked the patience and the faith of the two cities severely; but now that it is finished, Cincinnati looks forward with confidence to the time when it will be a connecting link between Lake Erie and the Gulf of Mexico, and when Cincinnati will be only thirty hours from Mobile.

The levee, which now extends five or six miles around the large "bend" upon which the city stands, exhibits all the varieties of Western steamboats. It exhilarated the childish mind of the stranger to discover that the makers of school-books were practising no imposition upon the infant mind when they put down in the geography such names as the "Big Sandy." It was cheering, also, to know that one could actually go to Maysville, and see how General Jackson's veto had affected it. A traveller must indeed be difficult to please who cannot find upon the Cincinnati levee a steamboat bound to a place he would like to visit. From far back in the coal mines of the Youghiogheny (pronounced Yok-a-gau-ny) to