out more strongly than English women.  But on a railway journey, be it ever so long, they are never seen speaking to a stranger.  English women, however, on English railways are generally willing to converse:  they will do so if they be on a journey; but will not open their mouths if they be simply passing backward and forward between their homes and some neighboring town.  We soon learn the rules on these subjects; but who make the rules?  If you cross the Atlantic with an American lady you invariably fall in love with her before the journey is over.  Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

And now for Buffalo, and the elevators.  I trust I have made it understood that corn comes into Buffalo, not only from Chicago, of which I have spoken specially, but from all the ports round the lakes:  Racine, Milwaukee, Grand Haven, Port Sarnia, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and many others.  At these ports the produce is generally bought and sold; but at Buffalo it is merely passed through a gateway.  It is taken from vessels of a size fitted for the lakes, and placed in other vessels fitted for the canal.  This is the Erie Canal, which connects the lakes with the Hudson River and with New York.  The produce which passes through the Welland Canal—­the canal which connects Lake Erie and the upper lakes with Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence—­is not transhipped, seeing that the Welland Canal, which is less than thirty miles in length, gives a passage to vessels of 500 tons.  As I have before said, 60,000,000 bushels of breadstuff were thus pushed through Buffalo in the open months of the year 1861.  These open months run from the middle of April to the middle of November; but the busy period is that of the last two months—­the time, that is, which intervenes between the full ripening of the corn and the coming of the ice.

An elevator is as ugly a monster as has been yet produced.  In uncouthness of form it outdoes those obsolete old brutes who used to roam about the semi-aqueous world, and live a most uncomfortable life with their great hungering stomachs and huge unsatisfied maws.  The elevator itself consists of a big movable trunk—­movable as is that of an elephant, but not pliable, and less graceful even than an elephant’s.  This is attached to a huge granary or barn; but in order to give altitude within the barn for the necessary moving up and down of this trunk—­seeing that it cannot be curled gracefully to its purposes as the elephant’s is curled—­there is an awkward box erected on the roof of the barn, giving some twenty feet of additional height, up into which the elevator can be thrust.  It will be understood, then, that this big movable trunk, the head of which, when it is at rest, is thrust up into the box on the roof, is made to slant down in an oblique direction from the building to the river; for the