On a morning, with Mammy and Jenny in our traveling party, with Mose helping us to the boat, hiding his saddened spirit under a forced humor, with Mrs. Rutledge and many friends to see us off, we took our departure.  Again the musical whistle of the boat; again the stir and vociferous calls of the pier; again on the waters of the Ohio bound for St. Louis.  Again the great Mississippi.

But Mrs. Clayton left us at St. Louis to visit Reverdy and Sarah.  She would come to Chicago later.

CHAPTER XXXIV

I took a house in Madison Street, some two blocks from the lake.  There was first the business of having Mammy and Jenny registered, something similar to a dog license.  But Mr. Williams helped me about that.

I had not seen Abigail yet, but of course she knew that I was married.  A vague faithlessness accused me.  And yet I had never spoken a word of love to her.  It was my admiration for her and hers for me, rising up to ask me why I had married Dorothy.  Did I really know myself?

Dorothy was entranced with Chicago.  She thrived under its more bracing air.  She loved the bustle, the stir.  We were now in the midst of the presidential campaign, and Mammy and Jenny saw political enthusiasm in a new phase.  Marching men passed through the street.  There were shouts, torches, many speeches on America’s greatness.

Mrs. Clayton came to Chicago before the election and was all delight over the new life which had come to her.  The pulsations of great vitality in the rapidly growing nation were well exemplified in Chicago’s development.  The country was bursting with commercial expansion; it was lusty with the infusion of strong blood from Europe.  Nearly a million Irishmen and Germans had been added to the population since 1840.  Illinois, as a garden spot, had received her share of these virile stocks.

The iron production, which was in a primitive stage when I arrived in America, had now grown to be a great industry.  There was anthracite coal, which was first mined in Pennsylvania in 1814 on a very inconsiderable scale; and now the output was more than five million tons a year.  It was supplanting wood in the making of steam.  The Chippewas had ceded their copper lands on the south shore of Lake Superior, and the mining and manufacture of copper had become an extensive industry.  Gold was taken in large quantities from the Appalachians.  There were about five thousand miles of railroad in the country as compared with the something more than one thousand miles which it had in 1833.  The telegraph was following the railroads.  For in this very year, under the administration of President Tyler, $30,000 had been appropriated by Congress for the building of a telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington.  But above all, the country thrilled with the prospect of acquiring Texas and settling the territory of Oregon.  Douglas was at once one of the creators and one of the most conspicuous products of this great drama.