a tickin' them
machines. You see I thought they would be a setting and a trading across
a long, wide board like they used to do at the country stores for
counters. But them fellers down there acts like a lot of lunatics. I
don't see how they can ever come to a bargain, yelling and spewing
around that way. And then I don't see the bulls and bears that change
the market."

The stranger thought it a useless job to try to enlighten him.

When Uncle and his family came down, he went up to the doorkeeper and
asked, "Say, do you belong here?" The keeper nodded. "Did you know Bill
Simmons what lost five thousand dollars here last year?" The door keeper
shook his head. "Well, say, I just want to ask one more question. Are
them people down there the bulls and bears themselves, and are they the
Board of Trade and are they the people that the farmers are so afraid
of?" The keeper nodded.

"Well," continued Uncle, "I've got this to say; any set of farmers as is
fools enough to be afraid of them yelling idiots, aint got no backbone
at all."

Chicago was unsettling many of Uncle's ideas, and he began to decide
that the only real, bonafide thing he could swear by was his own farm,
and that the great outside world was only a great circus of art and
extravagant genius.

_CHAPTER XIV_

SIGHT-SEEING GALORE

Under promises of gorgeous sights and full protection, Fanny had
concluded to visit the chief Midway Plaisance theaters with Johnny and
Louis as escorts. The "Midway," as it is familiarly called, is
undoubtedly the most unique and interesting pleasure-walk in the world.
It is a thoroughfare of ever-shifting scenes and ever-recurring
incidents. Fanny was not sure she ought to go, and Johnny could not
comprehend why she did not go with him as readily wherever he proposed
as she did on the wild free life of the big Jersey farm. But this was to
her a supremely different existence, and she tried hard to recall all
she had seen and heard and read of etiquette and the proprieties. Uncle
and Aunt were not the only ones who were bewildered at every step by the
amazing mixture of reality and art, of fact and fancy, of nature and
imitation. They felt as if their souls were living apart, and that they
were mere automatons in a panoramic world.

Johnny had seen the Soudanese and Nubian play actors just before his
disastrous attempt to be informed concerning the Dahomey village. But
some scoffers from the South had spoiled part of