labor attached to it is one which white men do not like to
encounter. Slaves are not generally employed in St. Louis for
domestic service as is done almost universally in the towns of
Kentucky. This work is chiefly in the hands of Irish and Germans.
Considerably above one-third of the population of the whole city is
made up of these two nationalities. So much is confessed; but if I
were to form an opinion from the language I heard in the streets of
the town, I should say that nearly every man was either an Irishman
or a German.

St. Louis has none of the aspects of a slave city. I cannot say
that I found it an attractive place; but then I did not visit it at
an attractive time. The war had disturbed everything, given a
special color of its own to men's thoughts and words, and destroyed
all interest except that which might proceed from itself. The town
is well built, with good shops, straight streets, never-ending rows
of excellent houses, and every sign of commercial wealth and
domestic comfort--of commercial wealth and domestic comfort in the
past, for there was no present appearance either of comfort or of
wealth. The new hotel here was to be bigger than all the hotels of
all other towns. It is built, and is an enormous pile, and would be
handsome but for a terribly ambitious Grecian doorway. It is built,
as far as the walls and roof are concerned, but in all other
respects is unfinished. I was told that the shares of the original
stockholders were now worth nothing. A shareholder, who so told me,
seemed to regard this as the ordinary course of business.

The great glory of the town is the "levee," as it is called, or the
long river beach up to which the steamers are brought with their
bows to the shore. It is an esplanade looking on to the river, not