96 THE AGUE. WISCONSIN. 



siders strangers more or less liable to it. But settlement, 

 drainage, more comfortable houses, and care in diet and clothing 

 gradually lessen its effects. In New York State, in the Gen- 

 esee valley, about twenty-five years ago, people were extremely 

 subject to ague. Now it is little known. Settlers coming 

 from Europe are most liable to it when they come in summer. 

 Arriving at the cool season in autumn, and going into a good 

 house, with care not to expose themselves to hard labour in the 

 sun, and to keep themselves well clothed, they are less likely 

 to be attacked. Old people in his opinion ought not to come 

 at all, it is very fatal to them. Salts or purgative medicines 

 taken at the commencement of the attack are very injurious, 

 and he has found that the English emigrants are generally pro- 

 vided with such medicines, and take them at once, and with- 

 out waiting for advice, on the plea that salts never did any 

 body any harm. Nothing is more difficult than to remove the 

 bad effects of this dose. The doctor said that Chicago was now 

 almost free from ague, that typhus had taken its place in a 

 greatly modified extent, and that pneumonia and rheumatism 

 were the only other diseases that were severe. 



Though I paid a second visit to Illinois before leaving the 

 Western States I have now completed all that I mean to say 

 upon it, and will ask the reader to accompany me into Wiscon- 

 sin, and thence up the Mississippi to St. Paul's in Minnesota. 

 The same railway facilities are found in the southern part of 

 Wisconsin as in Illinois. 



In the railway carriage I met a Sheffield man, who, though 

 only thirty-five, has been nine years in the country, and had 

 been previously for some years a soldier of the 1st Life Guards. 

 He had been brought up a mechanic, started in Cincinnati as a 

 maker of files when he first came out, and subsequently re- 

 moved to this State as a partner in an agricultural implement 

 factory. He has been doing a large business here, and a profit- 



