cottage, the home of some adventurous soul who had planted his
bare hut thus far out in order to reap the small but certain
advantage which the growth of the city would bring.

The land was flat--as flat as a table--with a waning growth of
brown grass left over from the previous year, and stirring faintly
in the morning breeze. Underneath were signs of the new green--the
New Year's flag of its disposition. For some reason a crystalline
atmosphere enfolded the distant hazy outlines of the city, holding
the latter like a fly in amber and giving it an artistic subtlety
which touched him. Already a devotee of art, ambitious for
connoisseurship, who had had his joy, training, and sorrow out of
the collection he had made and lost in Philadelphia, he appreciated
almost every suggestion of a delightful picture in nature.

The tracks, side by side, were becoming more and more numerous.
Freight-cars were assembled here by thousands from all parts of
the country--yellow, red, blue, green, white. (Chicago, he recalled,
already had thirty railroads terminating here, as though it were
the end of the world.) The little low one and two story houses,
quite new as to wood, were frequently unpainted and already smoky
--in places grimy. At grade-crossings, where ambling street-cars
and wagons and muddy-wheeled buggies waited, he noted how flat the
streets were, how unpaved, how sidewalks went up and down
rhythmically--here a flight of steps, a veritable platform before
a house, there a long stretch of boards laid flat on the mud of
the prairie itself. What a city! Presently a branch of the filthy,
arrogant, self-sufficient little Chicago River came into view,
with its mass of sputtering tugs, its black, oily water, its tall,
red, brown, and green grain-elevators, its immense black coal-pockets