[17] It will be observed that the above summary description applies to Chicago as it was seen by the writer in February last. While these sheets are passing through the press, the appalling intelligence has arrived from America that the magnificent city has been almost entirely destroyed by fire!
Niagara Falls—American Side.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHICAGO TO NEW YORK.
Leave Chicago—The Ice Harvest—Michigan City—The Forest—A Railway Smashed—Kalamazoo—Detroit—Crossing into Canada—American Manners—Roebling's Suspension Bridge—Niagara Falls in Winter—Goat Island—The American Fall—The Great Horse-shoe Fall—The Rapids from the Lovers' Seat—American Cousins—Rochester—New York—A Catastrophe—Return Home.
For some distance out of Chicago, the railway runs alongside the fine avenue fronting Lake Michigan. We pass a long succession of villas amidst their gardens and shrubberies, now white with snow and frost. Then we cross an inlet on a timber viaduct laid on piles driven into the bed of the lake. The ice at some parts is thrown up irregularly in waves, and presents a strange aspect. It looks as if it had been frozen solid in one moment at a time when the wind was blowing pretty hard.
At another part, where the ice is smoother, men were getting in the ice harvest between us and the shore. The snow is first cleared from the surface by means of a snow plane. Then the plough, drawn by a horse, with a man guiding the sharp steel cutter, makes a deep groove into the ice. These grooves are again crossed by others at right angles, until the whole of the surface intended to be gathered in is divided into sections of about four feet square. When that is done, several of the first blocks taken out are detached by means of hand-saws; after which the remainder are easily broken off with crow-bars. The blocks are then stored in the large ice-houses on shore, several of which are so large as to be each capable of holding some 20,000 tons of ice.