of some little German town, where are cultivated people, surrounded by the books and pictures they love, with leisure enough for music and dancing and tea-garden chat, for deep friendships and lofty musings, it would seem as if our shrewd Yankee-land and its outcroppings at the West had not yet found out everything worth knowing.  Froissart’s famous remark about the English in France—­“They take their pleasure sadly, after their fashion”—­may apply to the population of Chicago, and it will be some time yet, I fancy, before they will take it very gayly.

At a little country-town, the other day, not within a thousand miles of Chicago, a family about leaving for a distant place advertised their movables for sale at auction.  There was such a stir throughout the settlement as called forth an expression of wonder from a stranger.  “Ah!” said a good lady, “auctions are the only gayety we have here!”

Joking apart, there was a deep American truth in this seeming niaiserie.

Chicago has, as we have said, with all her wealth, no public park or other provision for out-door recreation.  She has no gallery of Art, or the beginning of one,—­no establishment of music, no public library,—­no social institution whatever, except the church.  Without that blessed bond, her people would be absolute units, as independent of each other as the grains of sand on the seashore, swept hither and thither by the ocean winds.

But even before these words have found their way to the Garden City, they will, perhaps, be inapplicable,—­so rapid is progress at the West.  The people are like a great family moving into a new house.  There is so much sweeping and dusting to do, so much finding of places for the furniture, so much time to spend in providing for breakfast, dinner, and tea, lodging and washing, that nobody thinks of unpacking the pictures, taking the books out of their boxes, or getting up drives or riding-parties.  All these come in good time, and will be the better done for a little prudent delay.

There is, to the stranger, an appearance of extreme hurry in Chicago, and the streets are very peculiar in not having a lady walking in them.  Day after day I traversed them, meeting crowds of men, who looked like the representatives of every nation and tongue and people,—­and every class of society, from the greenest rustic, or the most undisguised sharper, to the man of most serious respectability, or him of highest ton.  Yet one lady walking in the streets I saw not; and when I say not one lady, I mean that I did not meet a woman who seemed to claim that title, or any title much above that of an ordinary domestic.  Perhaps this is only a spring symptom, which passes off when the mud dries up a little,—­but it certainly gave a rather forlorn or funereal aspect to the streets for the time.