sir."

Chicago lies almost 1000 miles due west of New York. A traveller leaving
the latter city, let us say on Monday morning, finds himself on Tuesday
at eight o'clock in the evening in Chicago-one thousand miles in
thirty-four hours. In the meantime he will have eaten three meals and
slept soundly "on board" his palace-car, if he is so minded. For many
hundred miles during the latter portion of his journey he will have
noticed great tracts of swamp and forest, with towns and cities and
settlements interspersed between; and then, when these tracts of swamp
and unreclaimed forest seem to be increasing instead of diminishing, he
comes all of a sudden upon a vast, full-grown, bustling city, with tall
chimneys sending out much smoke, with heavy horses dragging great: drays
of bulky freight through thronged and busy streets, and with tall-masted
ships and whole fleets of steamers lying packed against the crowded
quays. He has begun to dream himself in the West, and lo! there rises up
a great city. "But is not this the West?" will ask the new-comer from the
Atlantic states. "Upon your own showing we are here 1000 miles from New
York, by water 1500 miles to Quebec; surely this must be the West?" No;
for in this New World the West is ever on the move. Twenty years ago
Chicago was West; ten years ago it was Omaha; then it was Salt Lake City,
and now it is San Francisco on the Pacific Ocean.

This big city, with its monster hotels and teeming traffic, was no new
scene to me, for I had spent pleasant days in it three years before. An
American in America is a very pleasant fellow. It is true that on many
social points and habits his views may differ from ours in a manner very
shocking to our prejudices, insular or insolent, as these prejudices of
ours too frequently are; but meet him with fair allowance for the fact
that there may be two sides to a question, and that a man may not tub