self in one of the largest
cities on the face of the globe. You will also find the country
largely peopled by the same race as yourself, and everywhere you will
be addressed in your own language. You may travel for weeks from town
to town, and from city to city, until you are lost in wonder at the
vast and populous empire which English-speaking people have founded and
built up on the other side of the Atlantic.

Where is the New World of fancy and fiction so graphically described in
Indian stories and tales of backwoods life? And where are the vast
prairies and almost boundless forests of sober fact, where the bear,
the wolf, and the buffalo roamed at will--the famous hunting-grounds of
the Red Indians and the trappers of the Old World?

Where is the "Far West" of song and story? Where are the scenes of
Fenimore Cooper's charming descriptions, which have thrown a halo of
romance over the homes of the early settlers who first explored those
unknown regions?

For the most part they are gone for ever, as they appeared to the eyes
of the pioneers and pathfinders, who wandered for weeks through the
wilderness, without hearing the sound of any human voice but their own.
Now on forest and prairie land stand great cities, equal in population
and wealth to many famous places, which were grey with age before the
New World was discovered. The trading posts, once scattered over a
wide region, where Indians and white hunters met to barter the skins of
animals for fire-water and gunpowder, have disappeared before the
advances of civilisation, and the uninhabited wilderness of fifty years
ago has become the centre of busy industries of world-wide fame and
importance.

Sixty years ago, fifteen of the largest cities in the United States had
no existence. They were not born. Living men remember when they were
first staked out on the unbroken prairie, and the woodsman's axe was
busy clearing the ground for the log huts of the first settlers who
founded the cities of to-day.

At that period, Chicago, now a "Millionaire city," and the second in
America, consisted of a little fort and a few log huts. There was
scarcely a white woman in the settlement, and no roads had been
constructed. The ground on which the great city now stands could have
been bought for the sum now demanded for a few square feet in one of
its busy streets.

No wonder the American people are proud of "the Queen City of the
West." It stands far inland, a