Chicago is a great place for manufactories. It seems to me as though almost everything was made there. I know they make brooms, and bricks, and boilers, and hats and caps, and saws, and scales, and nails, and paint, and gloves, and carpets, and I am sure I don’t know what else; I guess they make everything. Once I went to the car-wheel factory where they make three hundred wheels every day. It was great fun to see the men work. I like to see things made, and that is what I am going to do when I am a man.
Robbie Wilson.
[We are almost certain Robbie means that when he is a man he is going to help make things; not merely stand still and see them made. Good for Robbie! What would become of us if all the people who are hard at work making things should grow tired of their work, and conclude to—write books, for instance, instead?—Editors.]
We are reading in school about the Chicago fire, which was in 1871. I think it is perfectly dreadful to read about it. Just think! it all came from a woman milking after dark, when she ought to have done it before, I suppose; or maybe her little boy ought to have done it for her, and did not come home in time—well, the cow kicked her lamp over and set the hay in the barn on fire, and all that awful ruin came!
I think that woman must have felt dreadfully. As for the cow, I don’t suppose she cared a bit.
Laura Jones.
I know a man who was in Chicago at the time of the fire, and he paid fifteen dollars for a hack to drive him half a mile! He says a hundred thousand people were made homeless that night. Folks ran through the streets as if they were crazy. Everybody was trying to carry something of theirs to a safe place. One woman tried to save her sewing-machine; she dragged it through the streets a long distance. One man walked along quietly, carrying an ice-pitcher. He said it was all he had left in the world.