sweeps across and about them in gusts and swirls, now dropping and now
lifting again its grimy curtain. You will often see the vista of a
gorge-like street so choked with a seeming thundercloud that you feel
sure a storm is just about to burst upon the city, until you look up at
the zenith and find it smiling and serene. Again and again a sudden
swirl of smoke across the street (like that which swept across
Fifth-avenue when the Windsor Hotel burst into flames) has led me to
prick up my ears for a cry of "Fire!" But Chicago is not so easily
alarmed. It is accustomed to having its airs from heaven blurred by
these blasts from hell. I know few spectacles more curious than that
which awaits you when you have shot up in the express elevator to the
top of the Auditorium tower--on the one hand, the blue and laughing
lake, on the other, the city belching volumes of smoke from its thousand
throats, as though a vaster Sheffield or Wolverhampton had been
transported by magic to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. What a
wonderful city Chicago will be when the commandment is honestly
enforced which declares, "Thou shalt consume thine own smoke!"

What a wonderful city Chicago will be! That is the ever-recurring burden
of one's cogitations. For Chicago is awake, and intelligently awake, to
her destinies; so much one perceives even in the reiterated complaints
that she is asleep. Discontent is the condition of progress, and Chicago
is not in the slightest danger of relapsing into a condition of inert
self-complacency. Her sons love her, but they chasten her. They are
never tired of urging her on, sometimes (it must be owned) with most
unfilial objurgations; and she, a quite unwearied Titan, is bracing up
her sinews for the great task of the coming century. I have given myself
a rendezvous in Chicago for 1925, when air-ships will no doubt make the
transit easy for my septuagenarian frame. Nowhere in the world, I am
sure, does the "to be continued in our next" interest take hold on one