chitecturally, Chicago was no more beautiful and far less impressive
than it is now. It could not boast half a dozen buildings, public or
private, worthy of a second glance. Its tallest skyscraper stopped at
nine stories, and that towered a good two stories over its nearest
rival. The bridges across the river connecting the three divisions of
the city were turned slowly and laboriously by hand, and the joke was
current that a Chicagoan of those days could never hear a bell ring
without starting on a run to avoid being bridged. The cable-car was an
experiment on one line, and all the other street-cars were operated
with horses and stopped operation at 12.20 A.M., as Field often
learned to his infinite disgust, for he hated walking worse than he
did horses or horse-cars. In many ways Chicago reminded Field of
Denver, and in no respect more than in its primitive ways, its assumed
airs of importance, and its township politics. Despite its forty odd
years of incorporated life, Chicago, the third city of the United
States, was still a village, and Field insisted on regarding it as
such.

Transplanted from the higher altitude at the foot of the Rockies to
the level of Lake Michigan, I think nothing about Chicago struck him
more forcibly than the harshness of its variable summer climate.
Scarcely a week went by that his column did not contain some reference
in paragraph or verse to its fickle alarming changes. He had not
enough warm blood back of that large gray face to rejoice when the
mercury dropped in an hour, as it often did, from 88 or 90 degrees to
56 or 60 degrees. Such changes, which came with the whirl of the
weather vane, as the wind shifted from its long sweep over the
prairies, all aquiver with the heat, to a strong blow over hundreds of
miles of water whose temperature in dog days never rose above 60
degrees, provoked from him verses such as these, written in the
respective months they celebrate in the year 1884:

_CHICAGO IN JULY

The white-capp'd waves of Michigan break
On the beach where the jacksnipes croon--
The breeze sweeps in from the purple lake
And tempers the heat of noon:
In yonder bush, where the berries grow,
The Peewee tunefully sings,
While hither and thither the people go,
Attending to matters and things.

There is cool for all in the busy town--
For the girls in their sealskin sacques--
For the dainty dudes idling up and down,
With overcoats on their