West, but is, oftentimes, an informed and cultivated kind of
enterprisingness, which causes Atlanta not only to "do things," but to
do things showing vision, and, furthermore, to do them with an "air."

This is illustrated in various ways. It is shown, for example, in
Atlanta's principal hotels, which are not small-town hotels, or
good-enough hotels, but would do credit to any city, however great. The
office buildings are city office buildings, and in the downtown section
they are sufficiently numerous to look very much at home, instead of
appearing a little bit exotic, self-conscious, and lonesome, as new
skyscrapers do in so many cities of Atlanta's size. Even the smoke with
which the skyscrapers are streaked is city smoke. Chicago herself could
hardly produce smoke of more metropolitan texture--certainly not on the
Lake Front, where the Illinois Central trains send up their black
clouds; for Atlanta's downtown smoke, like Chicago's, comes in large
part from railroads piercing the heart of the city. Where downtown
business streets cross the railroad tracks, the latter are depressed,
the highways passing above on steel bridges resembling the bridges over
the Chicago River. The railroad's right of way is, furthermore, just
about as wide as the Chicago River, and rows of smoke-stained brick
buildings turn their backs upon it, precisely as similar buildings turn
theirs upon Chicago's busy, narrow stream. I wonder if all travelers,
familiar with Chicago, are so persistently reminded of that portion of
the city which is near the river, as I was by that portion of Atlanta
abutting on the tracks by which the Seaboard Air Line enters the city.

Generally speaking, railroads in the South have not been so prosperous
as leading roads in the North, and with the exception of the most
important through trains, their passenger equipment is, therefore, not
so good. The Seaboard Air Line, however, runs an all-steel train between