have held
its skeleton, and the midnight interment would not have been a senseless
lie. The murderer and the law both take life--it is only the murderer who
hides under the midnight shadows the body of his victim.

CHAPTER FOUR.

Chicago--"Who is S. B. D.?"--Milwaukie--The Great Fusion-Wisconsin--The
Sleeping-car--The Train Boy-Minnesota--St. Paul--I start for Lake
Superior--The Future City--"Bust up" and "Gone on"--The End of the Track.

ALAS! I have to go a long way back to the city of Toronto, where I had
just completed the purchase of a full costume of a Western borderer. On
the 10th of June I crossed the Detroit River from Western Canada to the
State of Michigan, and travelling by the central railway of that state
reached the great city of Chicago on the following day. All Americans,
but particularly all Western Americans, are very proud of this big city,
which is not yet as old as many of its inhabitants, and they are justly
proud of it. It is by very much the largest and the richest of the new
cities of the New World. Maps made fifty years ago will be searched in
vain for Chicago. Chicago was then a swamp where the skunks, after whom
it is called, held undisputed revels. To-day Chicago numbers about
300,000 souls, and it is about "the livest city in our great Republic;
sir."

Chicago lies almost 1000 miles due west of New York. A traveller leaving
the latter city, let us say on Monday morning, finds himself on Tuesday
at eight o'clock in the evening in Chicago-one thousand miles in
thirty-four hours. In the meantime he will have eaten three meals and
slept soundly "on board" his palace-car, if he is so minded. For many
hundred miles during the latter portion of his journey he will have
noticed great tracts of swamp and forest, with towns and cities and
settlements interspersed between; and then, when these tracts of swamp
and unreclaimed forest seem to be increasing instead of diminishing, he
comes all of a sudden upon a vast, full-grown, bustling city, with tall
chimneys sending out much smoke, with heavy horses dragging great: drays
of bulky freight through thronged and busy streets, and with tall-masted
ships and whole fleets of steamers lying packed against the crowded
quays. He has begun to dream himself in the West, and lo! there rises up
a great city. "But is not this the West?" will ask the new-comer from the
Atlantic states. "Upon your own showing we are here 1000 miles from New
York, by wate