summer trade, or by the more credulous of the white fishermen and
farmers; men whose word on any other subject would receive
unquestioning credence will tell you they have heard the drum.

But at bottom, of course, this is only the absurdest of superstitions,
which can affect in no way men who to-day ship ore in steel bottoms to
the mills of Gary and carry gasoline-engine reaped and threshed wheat
to the elevators of Chicago. It is recorded, therefore, only as a
superstition which for twenty-years has been connected with the loss of
a great ship.

* * * * *

Storm--the stinging, frozen sleet-slash of the February norther
whistling down the floe-jammed length of the lake--was assaulting
Chicago. Over the lake it was a white, whirling maelstrom, obscuring
at midafternoon even the lighthouses at the harbor entrance; beyond
that, the winter boats trying for the harbor mouth were bellowing
blindly at bay before the jammed ice, and foghorns and sirens echoed
loudly in the city in the lulls of the storm.

Battering against the fronts of the row of club buildings, fashionable
hotels, and shops which face across the narrow strip of park to the
lake front in downtown Chicago, the gale swirled and eddied the sleet
till all the wide windows, warm within, were frosted. So heavy was
this frost on the panes of the Fort Dearborn Club--one of the staidest
of the down-town clubs for men--that the great log fires blazing on the
open hearths added appreciable light as well as warmth to the rooms.

The few members present at this hour of the afternoon showed by their
lazy attitudes and the desultoriness of their conversation the dulling
of vitality which warmth and shelter bring on a day of cold and storm.
On one, however, the storm had had a contrary effect. With swift,
uneven steps he paced now one room, now another; from time to time he
stopped abruptly by a window, scraped from it with finger nail the
frost, stared out for an instant through the little opening he had
made, then resumed as abruptly his nervous pacing with a manner so
uneasy and distraught that, since his arrival at the club an hour
before, none even among those who knew him best had ventured to speak
to him.

There are, in every great city, a few individuals who from their
fullness of experience in an epoch of the city's life come to epitomize
that epoch in the general mind; when one thinks of a city or of a
section of the country in