to
Vesuvius. The smoke of Chicago has a peculiar and aggressive
individuality, due, I imagine, to the natural clearness of the
atmosphere. It does not seem, like London smoke, to permeate and blend
with the air. It does not overhang the streets in a uniform canopy, but
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
with such a compulsive grip.

Culture is pouring into Chicago as rapidly as pork or grain, and Chicago
is insatiate in asking for more. In going over the Public Library (a not
quite sa