roofs--and amidst a clatter of trucks hauling trunks, and engines
belching steam, and passengers hurrying to and fro he made his way
out into Canal Street and hailed a waiting cab--one of a long line
of vehicles that bespoke a metropolitan spirit. He had fixed on
the Grand Pacific as the most important hotel--the one with the
most social significance--and thither he asked to be driven. On
the way he studied these streets as in the matter of art he would
have studied a picture. The little yellow, blue, green, white,
and brown street-cars which he saw trundling here and there, the
tired, bony horses, jingling bells at their throats, touched him.
They were flimsy affairs, these cars, merely highly varnished
kindling-wood with bits of polished brass and glass stuck about
them, but he realized what fortunes they portended if the city
grew. Street-cars, he knew, were his natural vocation. Even more
than stock-brokerage, even more than banking, even more than
stock-organization he loved the thought of street-cars and the
vast manipulative life it suggested.




Chapter II



A Reconnoiter

The city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of
Frank Algernon Cowperwood was soon to be definitely linked! To
whom may the laurels as laureate of this Florence of the West yet