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222 equal. No one is larger, or wider, or in anyway better than another. Of course, the result of this must be that there is not a unclear of difference between one town & another, all having been cast in the same mould. It wd be laughable, were it not tiresome, to have not a thousand cities in America, but one city reproduced over & over again, wherever you go. St. Louis & Cincinnati are about the same size, & have much the same kind of site, & I believe that if a man sho had spent a week in each of them were a month? afterward carried blindfold into one of them, & set down in the middle of the town, he wd be unable to say in which of the two he was. I know no two things that are so like each other, except it be two farms on the Prairie, where every farm is just the fac-simile of every other farm, so that it is really impossible to guess how one living on the Prairie, unless he develps a new sense to meet the circumstances he is placed in, can ever distinguish his own home. I venture to think that the Americans are under another mistake about their towns; they suppose that their method of parallel Streets, not named, but enumerated & lettered, is a great help to the memory, & facilitates very much the finding of any house one is in search of. Never did fallible mortals entertain so erroneous an idea. Instead of a name, Rivoli, or Cheapside, which entirely fixes itself in the mind, you have to remember a figure & letter; & as neither figures nor letter suggest ideas, the thing is impossible. In truth you have to remember