“We’ll turn into Michigan here,” said the merchant.  “Isn’t this a great thoroughfare?  Yonder is where we lived before we built our new house.  Just think what this will be when these elms are old.”  They sped along the smooth drive.  “Ho, boys!  Business is creeping out this way, and that is the reason I got over on Prairie.  See, that man has turned his residence into a sort of store.  A little farther along you will see fashionable humbuggery of all sorts.  These are women fakes along here.  Ho, boys, ho!  There’s where old man Colton lives.  We’ll meet him at the store.  In the Colossus Company he is next to me.  Smart old fellow, but he worked many years in the hammer-and-tongs way, and he probably never would have done much if he hadn’t been shoved.  Ho, boys, ho!  People ought to be arrested for piling brick in the street this way.  Colton was always afraid of venturing; shuddered at the thought of risking his money; wanted it where he could lay his hands on it at any time.  Brooks, his son-in-law, is a sort of general manager over our entire establishment, and he is one of the most active and useful men I ever saw—­bright, quick, characteristically American.  I think you’ll like him.  That place over there”—­cutting his whip toward an old frame house scalloped and corniced in fantastic flimsiness—­“was sold the other day at about thirty per cent more than it would have brought a few years ago.”

They turned into another street and were taken up, it seemed, by the swift trade currents that swirl at morning, rush through the noon, glide past the evening and rest for a time in the semi-calm of midnight.  Chicago has begun to set the pace of a nervous nation’s progress.  It is a city whose growth has proved a fatal example to many an overweaning town.  Materialistic, it holds no theory that points not to great results; adventurous, it has small patience with methods that slowness alone has stamped as legitimate.  Worshiping a deification of real estate, and with a rude aristocracy building upon the blood of the sow and the tallow of the bull, its atmosphere discourages one artist while inviting another to rake up the showered rewards of a “boom” patronage.  Feeling that naught but sleepiness and sloth should be censured, it resents even a kindly criticism.  Quick to recognize the feasibility of a scheme; giving money, but holding time as a sacred inheritance.  It is a re-gathering of the forces that peopled America and then made her great among nations; a mighty community with a growing literary force and with its culture and its real love for the beautiful largely confined to the poor in purse; grand in a thousand respects; with its history glaring upon the black sky of night; with the finest boulevards in America and the filthiest alleys—­a giant in need of a bath.

The Colossus stood as a towering island with “a tide in the affairs of men” sweeping past.  And it seemed to Henry that the buggy was cast ashore as a piece of driftwood that touches land and finds a lodgment.  At an earlier day, and not so long ago either, the flaw of unconscious irony might have been picked in the name Colossus, but now the establishment, covering almost a block and rising story upon story, filled in the outlines of its pretentious christening.