A noteworthy feature of the country, by the way, is the sudden appearance of hedge-rows. No detail of landscape that I know of makes scenery at once so English. And then we find ourselves steaming along past beds of osiers, with long waterways stretching up northwards, with here and there painted duck, like the European sheldrake, floating under the shadows of the fir-trees, and then I became aware of a great green expanse of water showing through the trees, and I asked "What is that? The water must be very deep to be such a colour." "That is Lake Michigan," was the answer, "and this is Chicago we are coming to now."

And very soon we found ourselves in the station of the great city by the lake, with the masts of shipping alongside the funnels of engines. But not a pig in sight!

I had thought that Chicago was all pigs.

And what a city it is, this central wonder of the States! As a whole, Chicago is nearly terrific. The real significance of this phoenix city is almost appalling. Its astonishing resurrection from its ashes and its tremendous energy terrify jelly-fishes like myself. Before they have got roads that are fit to be called roads, these Chicago men have piled up the new County Hall, to my mind one of the most imposing structures I have ever seen in all my wide travels.

Chicago does not altogether seem to like it, for every one spoke of it as "too solid-looking," but for my part I think it almost superb. The architect's name, I believe, is Egan; but whence he got his architectural inspiration I cannot say. It reminds me in part of a wing of the Tuileries, but why it does I could not make up my mind.

Then again, look at this Chicago which allows its business thoroughfares to be so sumptuously neglected—some of them are almost as disreputable-looking as Broadway—and goes and lays out imperial "boulevards" to connect its "system of parks." These boulevards, simply if left alone for the trees to grow up and the turf to grow thick, will before long be the finest in all the world. The streets in the city, however, if left alone much longer, would be a disgrace to—well, say Port Said. The local administration, they say, is "corrupt." But that is the standing American explanation for everything with which a stranger finds fault. I was always told the same in New York—and would you seriously tell me that the municipal administration of New York is corrupt?—to account for congestion of traffic, fat policemen, bad lamps, sidewalks blocked with packing-cases, &c., &c. And in Chicago it accounts for the streets being more like rolling prairie than streets, for cigar stores being houses of assignation, for there being so much orange peel and banana skin on the sidewalks, &c., &c. But I am not at all sure that "municipal corruption" is not a scapegoat for want of public spirit.

But let the public spirit be as it may, there can be no doubt as to the private enterprise in Chicago. Take the iron industry alone—what prodigious proportions it is assuming, and how vastly it will be increased when that circum-urban "belt line" of railways is completed! Take, again, the Pullman factories. They by themselves form an industry which might satisfy any town of moderate appetite. But Chicago is a veritable glutton for speculative trade.

The streets at all times abound with incident. Here at one corner was a Hansom cab, surely the very latest development of European science, with two small black children, looking like imps in a Drury Lane pantomime, trying to pin "April Fool" on to the cabman's dependent tails. Could anything be more incongruous? In the first place, what have negro children to do with April fooling? and in the next, imagine these small scraps in ebony taking liberties with a Hansom! A group of cowboy-and-miner looking men were grouped in ludicrous attitudes of sentimentality before a concertina-player, who was wheezing out his own version of "old country" airs. On the arm of one of the group languished a lady with a very dark skin, dressed in a rich black silk dress, with a black satin mantle trimmed with sumptuous fur, and half an ostrich on her head by way of bonnet and feathers. The men there, as in most of America, strike me as being very judicious in the arrangement of their personal appearance, especially in the trimming of their hair and moustachios; but many of the women—I speak now of Chicago—sacrificed everything to that awful American institution, the "bang."

I know of no female head-dress in Asia, Africa, or Europe so absurd in itself or so lunatic in the wearer as some of the Chicago bangs. Ugliness of face is intensified a thousandfold by "the ring-worm style" of head-dress with which they cover their foreheads and half their cheeks. Prettiness of face can, of course, never be hidden; but I honestly think that neither a black skin, nor lip-rings and nose-rings, nor red teeth, nor any other fantastic female fashion that I have ever seen in other parts of the world, goes so far towards concealing beauty of features as that curly plastering which, from ignorance of its real name, I have called "the ring worm style of bang."

Here, too, in Chicago I found a man selling "gophers." Now, I do not know the American name for this vanish-into-nothing sort of pastry, but I do know that there is one man in London who declares that he, and he alone in all the world, is aware of the secret of the gopher. And all London believes him. His is supposed to be a lost art—but for him—and I should not be surprised if some lover of the antique were to bribe him to bequeath the precious secret to an heir before he dies. But in Chicago peripatetic vendors of this cate are an every-day occurrence, and even the juvenile Ethiop sometimes compasses the gopher. What its American name is I cannot say; but it is a very delicate kind of pastry punched into small square depressions, and every mouthful you eat is so inappreciable in point of matter that you look down on your waistcoat to see if you have not dropped it, and when the whole is done you feel that you have consumed about as much solid nutriment as a fish does after a nibble at an artificial bait. Have you ever given a dog a piece of warm fat off your plate and seen him after he had swallowed it look on the carpet for it? So rapid is the transit of the delicious thing that the deluded animal fancies that he has as yet enjoyed only the foretaste of a pleasure still to be, the shadow only of the coming event, the promise of something good. It is just the same with yourself after eating a gopher.