“I will not play any more,” he said, petulantly, as he arose from the table. “I never met with such a player.”
“I play the Pennsylvania game,” I complacently observed.
I landed at Muscatine, Iowa, that evening, where I remained all night. Muscatine is about thirty miles below Davenport, and is called a city. Its population is eight or ten thousand.
Next morning, I took an early train for Wilton, a flourishing town situated at the intersection of two railroads, in the interior of the State. I visited some relatives there, and passed a week or two with them very pleasantly.
CHAPTER XXXV.
John in Chicago.
EARLY in July, having visited various sections of Iowa, I started one evening for Chicago, where I arrived next morning about daylight—the distance from Wilton being a little over two hundred miles.
Chicago is styled the “Garden City,” because handsome private gardens are attached to many of the residences. There are other cities, however, which, for the same reason, are equally entitled to the sobriquet.
Chicago is much the largest city of the north-west. It has sprung up faster than any other, and has now a population of about two hundred and ten thousand. It is situated in North-eastern Illinois, on the shore of Lake Michigan. It is one of the liveliest cities in the country, and must always be the largest city of the Mississippi Valley, except Saint Louis, which will naturally stand number one, on account of the numerous advantages of its position.
An appropriate sobriquet for Chicago, I think, would be “City of Boards”—because it is built chiefly of boards. Most of the houses are frame buildings, weather-boarded; the sidewalks are nearly all composed of thick pine boards; and the streets are paved with the “Nicholson pavement.” The sidewalks are raised some feet above what was once the original height of the ground, leaving many dirty caverns beneath—an arrangement highly gratifying to the rats. The rat population of Chicago is supposed to amount to about one hundred to each inhabitant of the genus homo, which would make their whole number about twenty-one millions. As Josh Billings remarks, “This shows at a glance how many waste rats there is.” They are very playful, especially about eleven o’clock, when one is going home from the theater. One night, returning from Crosby’s Opera House, I counted all I saw on my way to my lodging-house. I had but three or four squares to go, however, and therefore only counted eighteen. Of these, I succeeded in knocking only two over with my cane, by way of amusement.
As I had done in Cincinnati and Saint Louis, I hired a lodging-room, and took my meals at a restaurant. The room was a very good one, in a house on Dearborn street, opposite the Post office.