A Little Girl in Old Chicago

by Amanda M. Douglas

I noticed then that she was very thin. You could see the blue veins in her arms and hands as well as her temples.

She made light of it, though I understood she was a little frightened, as she had never fainted before. Then Mrs. Miller suggested we take her out on the porch, where it was cooler, and we packed her in a rocking chair. I fanned her slowly. Her father placed his chair beside her. How he did love her. It shone in every line of his face, which seemed to have taken on a certain kind of refinement that had perhaps come from the invalidism. I noticed that he used great care in sitting down and getting up, and that he was very lame.

I was fain to go away, not that I really wanted to, but Mr. Gaynor insisted on my staying to supper. Dan was absent, and he plied me so with questions that we were summoned to supper before I had answered half of them. Afterward we went out again. Ruth had the chair tilted back almost like a couch. How slim and graceful she was, most like to a willow wand. And her sweet face told the story to me that she was trying to make herself happy and content in a life that did not fill her heart, and was slowly sapping her strength.

How we talked all the evening. She held her father's hand—it showed little marks of toil now and was shapely enough, but not as white as hers. And when I went away John Gaynor wrung my hand with subtle, meaning strength.

"You will come in often," he said. "We are so glad to get you back."

How had these two people come to marry? I learned some of the causes afterward. I was anxious to see her and Dan together.

I had warm enough welcomes everywhere. The interviewer had not come into existence, but I went to the office of the Prairie Farmer and saw young John. Then there was the Journal, a new friend in what was then the Saloon Building. There was a daily Tribune, rather shaky on its legs, in an old wooden shanty at Lake and Clark streets. The Hon. John Wentworth, of my father's old love, the Democrat, was on LaSalle Street in quite grand quarters, the printing room boasting a Hoe press from New York. And there was a bookstore, laying a foundation of one of the great publishing houses in years to come.

There was the old jail built, as the contract called for, "of logs firmly bolted together," and the Court House I had never seen before, on the northeast corner of the square. It had offices on the lower floor, but they were talking of a new one, as it was too small. There was gas in some of the principal streets. But the wharves and the grain elevator had improved most of all, and the packing house was quite an institution. Railroads were planned in almost every direction and the canal was an established fact.

Dan returned a few days after. He was a big, handsome animal, not gross, but with the material in every line, the intellectual in scarcely none. He was shrewd, jolly, forceful in all business matters, and had a laughing face that won more by its good humor than his argument. I had once thought he might be something of a politician, but he was all business. Ben would take up that line. Our Senators were Messrs. Douglas and Shields, the Stephen A. Douglas I had gone to hear speak long ago. They had won a grant of land from Congress for a railroad from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico.

The gold fields had not taken as many of our men as I fancied it would. The unfortunate revolutions in Germany and Hungary had sent an influx of immigrants over, many well-informed people among them, ready and anxious to work for homes in the new country, many of them farmers.