for it is the only natural beauty of the place.  But what trees!  Several of the streets of Chicago may easily become as beautiful drives as the far-famed Cascine at Florence, and will be so before her population doubles again,—­which is giving but a short interval for the improvement.  No parks as yet, however.  Land on the lake-shore is too precious, and the flats west of the town are quite despised.  Yet city parks do not demand very unequal surface, and it would not require a very potent landscape-gardener or an unheard-of amount of dollars to make a fine driving-and riding-ground, where the new carriages of the fortunate might be aired, and the fine horses of the gay exercised, during a good part of the year.

To describe Chicago, one would need all the superlatives set in a row.  Grandest, flattest,—­muddiest, dustiest,—­hottest, coldest,—­wettest, driest,—­farthest north, south, east, and west from other places, consequently most central,—­best harbor on Lake Michigan, worst harbor and smallest river any great commercial city ever lived on,—­most elegant in architecture, meanest in hovel-propping,—­wildest in speculation, solidest in value,—­proudest in self-esteem, loudest in self-disparagement,—­most lavish, most grasping,—­most public-spirited in some things, blindest and darkest on some points of highest interest.

And some poor souls would doubtless add,—­most fascinating, or most desolate,—­according as one goes there, gay and hopeful, to find troops of prosperous friends, or, lonely and poor, with the distant hope of bettering broken fortunes by struggling among the driving thousands already there on the same errand.  There is, perhaps, no place in the world where it is more necessary to take a bright and hopeful view of life, and none where this is more difficult.  There is too much at stake.  Those who have visited Baden-Baden and her Kursaal sisters in the height of the season need not be told that no “church-face” ever equalled in solemnity the countenances of those who surround the fatal tables, waiting for the stony lips of the croupier to announce “Noir perd” or “Rouge gagne.”  At Chicago are a wider table, higher stakes, more desperate throws, and Fate herself presiding, or what seems Fate, at once partial and inexorable.

But, on this great scale, even success fails to bring smiles.  The winners sit “with hair on end at their own wonders,” and half-fearing that such golden showers have some illusion about them and may prove fairy favors at last.  Next to this fueling comes the thirst for more.  Enlarged means bring enlarged desires and ever-extending plans.  The repose and lightness of heart that were at first to be the reward of success recede farther and farther into the dim distance, until at last they are lost sight of entirely, confessed, with a sigh, to be unattainable.  How can people in this State wear cheerful countenances?  When one looks at the gay and social faces and habits