The contrast seemed to increase the smoke, and no cheerfulness was added to the scene by the dismal-looking holes in the mountain-sides I now passed.  They were the entrances to mines from which the bituminous coal was taken.  Some of them were being actively worked, and long, trough-like shoots were used to send the coal by its own gravity from the entrance of the mine to the hold of the barge or coal-ark at the steam-boat landing.  Some of these mines were worked by three men and a horse.  The horse drew the coal on a little car along the horizontal gallery from the heart of the mountain to the light of day.

During the second day the current of the Ohio became less violent.  I fought a passage among the ice-cakes, and whenever openings appeared rowed briskly along the sides of the chilly raft, with the intent of getting below the frosty zone as soon as possible.

About half-past eight o’clock in the evening, when some distance above King’s Creek, the struggling starlight enabled me to push my boat on to a muddy flat, destined soon to be overflowed, but offering me a secure resting-place for a few hours.  Upon peeping out of my warm nest under the hatch the next day, it was a cause of great satisfaction to note that a rise in the temperature had taken place, and that the ice was disappearing by degrees.

An open-air toilet, and a breakfast of about the temperature of a family refrigerator, with sundry other inconveniences, made me wish for just enough hot water to remove a little of the begriming results of the smoky atmosphere through which I had rowed.

At eleven o’clock, A. M., the first bridge that spans the Ohio River was passed.  It was at Steubenville, and the property of the Pan-Handle Railroad.

Soon after four o’clock in the afternoon the busy manufacturing city of Wheeling, West Virginia, with its great suspension bridge crossing the river to the state of Ohio, loomed into sight.

This city of Wheeling, on the left bank of the river, some eighty miles from Pittsburgh, was the most impressive sight of that dreary day’s row.  Above its masses of brick walls hung a dense cloud of smoke, into which shot the flames emitted from the numerous chimneys of forges, glass-works, and factories, which made it the busy place it was.  Ever and anon came the deafening sound of the trip-hammer, the rap-a-tap-tap of the rivet-headers’ tools striking upon the heavy boiler-plates; the screeching of steam-whistles; the babel of men’s voices; the clanging of deep-toned bells.  Each in turn striking upon my ear, seemed as a whole to furnish sufficient noise-tonic for even the most ardent upholder of that remedy, and to serve as a type for a second Inferno, promising to vie with Dante’s own.  Yet with all this din and dirt, this ever-present cloud of blackness settling down each hour upon clean and unclean in a sooty coating, I was told that hundreds of families of wealth and refinement, whose circumstances enabled them to select