r.

In the mean time he had letters of introduction to distinguished
Chicagoans, and these he would present. He wanted to talk to some
bankers and grain and commission men. The stock-exchange of Chicago
interested him, for the intricacies of that business he knew backward
and forward, and some great grain transactions had been made here.

The train finally rolled past the shabby backs of houses into a long,
shabbily covered series of platforms--sheds having only roofs--and
amidst a clatter of trucks hauling trunks, and engines belching steam,
and passengers hurrying to and fro he made his way out into Canal
Street and hailed a waiting cab--one of a long line of vehicles that
bespoke a metropolitan spirit. He had fixed on the Grand Pacific as
the most important hotel--the one with the most social
significance--and thither he asked to be driven. On the way he studied
these streets as in the matter of art he would have studied a picture.
The little yellow, blue, green, white, and brown street-cars which he
saw trundling here and there, the tired, bony horses, jingling bells at
their throats, touched him. They were flimsy affairs, these cars,
merely highly varnished kindling-wood with bits of polished brass and
glass stuck about them, but he realized what fortunes they portended if
the city grew. Street-cars, he knew, were his natural vocation. Even
more than stock-brokerage, even more than banking, even more than
stock-organization he loved the thought of street-cars and the vast
manipulative life it suggested.

Chapter II

A Reconnoiter

The city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of Frank
Algernon Cowperwood was soon to be definitely linked! To whom may the
laurels as laureate of this Florence of the West yet fall? This singing
flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin,
this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city! By its shimmering lake it
lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an epic in
its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar in its
mind, the dramatic force of Euripides in its soul. A very bard of a
city this, singing of high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans
buried deep in the mire of circumstance. Take Athens, oh, Greece!
Italy, do you keep Rome! This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of
a younger day. Here came the gaping West and the hopeful East to see.
Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fiel