r the reverence rightly theirs. A
thousand miles of horizontal withdrawal into majestic forest recesses
may leave one's regard for worldly greatness unabated. A perpendicular
vantage of a hundred and fifty feet destroys it utterly.

"But look at that!" she said.

In the east, dull red on the quick blue of Lake Michigan, an ore-boat.
Low and long. A marvelously persistent and protracted boat. Might have
been christened _The Eel_. Or _The Projectile_. No masts. And, except
at her stern, under her deferred smokestack, no portholes. Forward
from that stack her body stretched five hundred feet to her bow
without excrescences and without apertures. Stripped and shut-eyed for
the fight, grimmer than a battle ship, not a waste line nor a false
motion in her, she went by, loaded with seven thousand tons of
hematite, down to the blast furnaces of South Chicago.

"But," she said, "look at this."

She turned me from the lake. We crossed the roof's tarred gravel and
looked north, west, and south abroad at the city.

Puffs of energy had raised high buildings over there; over there an
eccentric subsidence had left behind it a slum. Queer, curling
currents of trade and of lust, here, there, and everywhere, were
carrying little clutching eddies of disease and of vice across the
thoroughfares of the wholesome and of the innocent. Sweet unused earth
lay yonder in a great curve of green; within two miles of it stood
clotted houses in which children were dying for air; brown levels of
cottage and tenement, black bubbles of mill and factory, floating side
by side, meeting, mingling, life and light merged into filth and
fume--uncalculated; uncontrolled; fortuitous swirls and splutters on
senseless molten metal; a reproduction in human lives of the phantom
flurry which on simmering ladles in the steel mills they call the
Devil's Flower Garden.

"Not so clever as the ore-boat, is it?" she said. "That was making
wealth, conquering. Well done. This is using wealth, living. Done ill.
A city. Better than many. Worse than many. But none of my business.
I'm emancipated."

She waved her hand and blotted out the city from before me. In its
place I saw now only an uninhabited wilderness plain. In a moment,
however, in the side of a distant ridge, there appeared a tiny
opening. A woman sat near it, plaiting a grass mat. A mile away a man
stood, mending a bow.

It was the scene Mr. Kipling once reported:

"The man didn't begin to be tame till