ev. James Hartigan and his bride.
It was a long drive to Englewood; but everything that kind friends,
clear skies, and human forethought could do to make it pleasant was
fully done. For the time being, they were installed in the Hopkins
mansion--a veritable palace--and for the first time Jim had the chance
to learn how the rich folk really live. While it was intensely
interesting, he was eager to see the field of his future work. Belle,
however, agreed with their host and hostess that it would be worth while
to see a little of Chicago first.

The stockyards are either fascinating or intensely disgusting. The
Hartigans had their fill of them in five minutes. The Art Institute had
not yet been built, but there were museums and galleries and good music
in many places. Lincoln Park and the great rolling, gusty lake were
pleasant to behold; but to Jim, the biggest thing of all--the thing of
which the buildings and the crowds were mere manifestations--was the
vast concentration of human life, strife, and emotion--the throb and
compulsion of this, the one great heart of the West.

There was dirt in the street everywhere; there were hideous buildings
and disgusting vulgarities on every side, and crime in view on nearly
every corner; but still one had to feel that this was the vital spot,
this the great blood centre of a nation, young, but boiling with energy,
boundless in promise--a city with a vital fire in its heart that would
one day burn the filth and dross away and show the world the dream of
the noblest dreamers all come true--established, gigantic, magnificent.
There is thrill and inspiration--simple, natural, and earthy--in the
Canyon where the Cheyenne cut the hills; but this was a different thrill
that slowly grew to a rumble in Jim's heart as he felt the current
floods of mind, of life, of sin, of hope that flowed from a million
springs in that deep Wabash Canyon that carved in twain the coming city
of ten million hopes that are sprung from the drifted ashes of a hundred
million black and burnt despairs.

Hartigan had ever been a man of the saddle and the open field; but
gazing from the top of that tall tower above the station, sensing the
teeming life, the sullen roar, far below, he glimpsed another world--a
better thing, for it was bigger--which, in its folded mantle, held the
unborn parent, the gentler-born parent, of the mighty change--the
blessed cleanup that every wise man prays for and works to bring about.