t an artistic subtlety which touched him.
Already a devotee of art, ambitious for connoisseurship, who had had
his joy, training, and sorrow out of the collection he had made and
lost in Philadelphia, he appreciated almost every suggestion of a
delightful picture in nature.

The tracks, side by side, were becoming more and more numerous.
Freight-cars were assembled here by thousands from all parts of the
country--yellow, red, blue, green, white. (Chicago, he recalled,
already had thirty railroads terminating here, as though it were the
end of the world.) The little low one and two story houses, quite new
as to wood, were frequently unpainted and already smoky--in places
grimy. At grade-crossings, where ambling street-cars and wagons and
muddy-wheeled buggies waited, he noted how flat the streets were, how
unpaved, how sidewalks went up and down rhythmically--here a flight of
steps, a veritable platform before a house, there a long stretch of
boards laid flat on the mud of the prairie itself. What a city!
Presently a branch of the filthy, arrogant, self-sufficient little
Chicago River came into view, with its mass of sputtering tugs, its
black, oily water, its tall, red, brown, and green grain-elevators, its
immense black coal-pockets and yellowish-brown lumber-yards.

Here was life; he saw it at a flash. Here was a seething city in the
making. There was something dynamic in the very air which appealed to
his fancy. How different, for some reason, from Philadelphia! That was
a stirring city, too. He had thought it wonderful at one time, quite a
world; but this thing, while obviously infinitely worse, was better.
It was more youthful, more hopeful. In a flare of morning sunlight
pouring between two coal-pockets, and because the train had stopped to
let a bridge swing and half a dozen great grain and lumber boats go
by--a half-dozen in either direction--he saw a group of Irish
stevedores idling on the bank of a lumber-yard whose wall skirted the
water. Healthy men they were, in blue or red shirt-sleeves, stout
straps about their waists, short pipes in their mouths, fine, hardy,
nutty-brown specimens of humanity. Why were they so appealing, he
asked himself. This raw, dirty town seemed naturally to compose itself
into stirring artistic pictures. Why, it fairly sang! The world was
young here. Life was doing something new. Perhaps he had better not go
on to the Northwest at all; he would decide that question late