Moines on the 23d, muddy roads and hot, thunder-showery weather characterize
my journey through Central Iowa, aggravated by the inevitable question,
"Why don't you ride?" one Solomon-visaged individual asking me if the
railway company wouldn't permit me to ride along one of the rails. No
base, unworthy suspicions of a cycler's inability to ride on a two-inch
rail finds lodgement in the mind of this wiseacre; but his compassionate
heart is moved with tender solicitude as to whether the soulless "company"
will, or will not, permit it. Hurrying timorously through Grinnell - the
city that was badly demolished and scattered all over the surrounding
country by a cyclone in 1882 - I pause at Victor, where I find the inhabitants
highly elated over the prospect of building a new jail with the fines
nightly inflicted on graders employed on a new railroad near by, who
come to town and "hilare" every evening. " What kind of a place do you
call this." I inquire, on arriving at a queer-looking town twenty-five
miles west of Iowa City.

"This is South Amana, one of the towns of the Amana Society," is the
civil reply. The Amana Society is found upon inquiry to be a communism
of Germans, numbering 15,000 souls, and owning 50,000 acres of choice
land in a body, with woollen factories, four small towns, and the best
of credit everywhere. Everything is common property, and upon withdrawal
or expulsion, a member takes with him only the value of what he brought
in. The domestic relations are as usual; and while no person of ambition
would be content with the conditions of life here, the slow, ease-loving,
methodical people composing the society seem well satisfied with their
lot, and are, perhaps, happier, on the whole, than the average outsider.
I remain here for dinner, and take a look around. The people, the
buildings, the language, the food, everything, is precisely as if it had
been picked up bodily in some rural district in Germany, and set down
unaltered here in Iowa. "Wie gehts," I venture, as I wheel past a couple