n, or by the faint
odor of the Stock-yards, or by a halt to allow the longest freight-train
in the world to cross your path. You have sighted in the distance
universities, institutions, even factories; you have passed through many
inhabited portions of the endless boulevard, but you have not actually
touched hands with the city since you left it at the beginning of the
ride. Then at last, as darkness falls, you feel that you are coming to
the city again, but from another point of the compass. You have rounded
the circle of its millions. You need only think of the unkempt, shabby,
and tangled outskirts of New York, or of any other capital city, to
realize the miracle that Chicago has put among her assets ...

You descry lanes of water in the twilight, and learn that in order to
prevent her drainage from going into the lake Chicago turned a river
back in its course and compelled it to discharge ultimately into the
Mississippi. That is the story. You feel that it is exactly what
Chicago, alone among cities, would have the imagination and the courage
to do. Some man must have risen from his bed one morning with the idea,
"Why not make the water flow the other way?" And then gone, perhaps
diffidently, to his fellows in charge of the city with the suggestive
query, "Why not make the water flow the other way?" And been laughed at!
Only the thing was done in the end! I seem to have heard that there was
an epilogue to this story, relating how certain other great cities
showed a narrow objection to Chicago draining herself in the direction
of the Mississippi, and how Chicago, after all, succeeded in persuading
those whom it was necessary to persuade that, whereas her drainage was
unsuited to Lake Michigan, it would consort well with the current of the
Mississippi.

And then, in the night and in the rain, you swerve round some corner
into the straight, by Grant Park, in full sight of one of the most
dazzling spectacles that Chicago or any other city can offer--Michigan
Avenue on a wet evening. Each of the thousands of electric standards in
Michigan Avenue is a cluster of six huge globes (and yet they will tell
you in Paris that the Rue de la Paix is the best-lit street in the
world), and here and there is a red globe of warning. The two lines of
light pour down their flame into the pool which is the roadway, and you
travel continually toward an incandescent floor without ever quite
reaching it, beneath mysterious words of fire ha