tone found in
the neighborhood, and their substantial excellence inspires a feeling
that all this prosperity is of no ephemeral character. People do not
build such country-houses until they feel settled and secure. The
lake-shore is of course the line of attraction, for it is the only
natural beauty of the place. But what trees! Several of the streets of
Chicago may easily become as beautiful drives as the far-famed Cascine
at Florence, and will be so before her population doubles
again,--which is giving but a short interval for the improvement. No
parks as yet, however. Land on the lake-shore is too precious, and the
flats west of the town are quite despised. Yet city parks do not
demand very unequal surface, and it would not require a very potent
landscape-gardener or an unheard-of amount of dollars to make a fine
driving-and riding-ground, where the new carriages of the fortunate
might be aired, and the fine horses of the gay exercised, during a
good part of the year.

To describe Chicago, one would need all the superlatives set in a row.
Grandest, flattest,--muddiest, dustiest,--hottest, coldest,--wettest,
driest,--farthest north, south, east, and west from other places,
consequently most central,--best harbor on Lake Michigan, worst harbor
and smallest river any great commercial city ever lived on,--most
elegant in architecture, meanest in hovel-propping,--wildest in
speculation, solidest in value,--proudest in self-esteem, loudest in
self-disparagement,--most lavish, most grasping,--most public-spirited
in some things, blindest and darkest on some points of highest
interest.

And some poor souls would doubtless add,--most fascinating, or most
desolate,--according as one goes there, gay and hopeful, to find
troops of prosperous friends, or, lonely and poor, with the distant
hope of bettering broken fortunes by struggling among the driving
thousands already there on the same errand. There is, perhaps, no
place in the world where it is more necessary to take a bright and
hopeful view of life, and none where this is more difficult. There is
too much at stake. Those who have visited Baden-Baden and her Kursaal
sisters in the height of the season need not be told that no
"church-face" ever equalled in solemnity the countenances of those who
surround the fatal tables, waiting for the stony lips of the croupier
to announce "_Noir perd_" or "_Rouge gagne_." At Chicago are a wider
table, higher stakes, more desperate thr