ILLINOIS HISTORICAL Round about Chicago FROM A WATER-COLOR PAINTING BY DUDLEY C. WATSON The lovliest sight the whole round year" Round about Chicago By LOUELLA CHAPIN Unity Publishing Company CHICAGO COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY LOUELLA CHAPIN PRESS OP MARSH, AITKEN & CURTIS COMPANY CHICAGO To those who have helped CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION n GLENCOE 15 RIVER FOREST 31 THORNTON 43 THE LAKE 57 SAG 69 PALOS PARK 89 THE PARKS 103 SEEING CHICAGO 119 LOTS 133 RAVINIA 143 DUNE PARK 151 SOUTH SHORE 163 PALOS PARK, AGAIN 171 THE SEASON OF FLOWERS 177 FINIS 199 Acknowledgment is due to Mr. Dudley C. Watson for his assist- ance in preparing the illustrations, which are from photographs made expressly for this book at the places described. Round about Chicago WHEN the pronoun we occurs in what is to follow, it may be understood to mean the following: Mother, a bright, happy-hearted woman, just as old as her children; her son, a big boy; her big little girl, called Daisy; and an o. m., unattached; or these with additions or subtractions. When the pronoun I is used it may be understood to mean the o. m., which may also be written in the exclamatory manner, Oh! Em! By this time it is needless to say that the o. m. is of the teaching sisterhood. Yet, gentle reader, turn not away ! We are alone this summer, that is, without masculine hindrance; for Father, the correlative of Mother, is hence, on business bent, so there are no meals to be gotten to the minute, and no reason why we should be at home except at bed, time. So we are going, all of us, not alone the o. m., to have a taste of real freedom and real joy, of the harmless country kind, I hasten to add. We may wander unafraid and unabashed. The 12 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO big boy is not big enough to be of any use as a protector, but he looks well in the party. The real protector is the o. m., who, like all her kind, is afraid of nothing that walks or crawls, and who is calm and masterful even in the presence of that bugbear to all proper womankind a time-table. She can even understand it, and without asking questions know when to get back to the train. From tender years she has gone alone. Her independence is now natural and unobtrusive. Now, Mother and I have always claimed that Chicago was much maligned; and while we have had to admit that it is dirty and sprawly, and, if you are on the lee side of the Yards, often smelly, yet we warm with enthusiasm over the grassy aisles of our stately boulevards, and the ample stretches of our splendid parks, and We know from many past summerings that the suburbs and the country round have attractions innumerable. So we are childishly happy to think that we have the whole long summer with nothing to do but enjoy Chicago. . At this point you, the gentle reader, smile; but it is a humorous, friendly, indulgent smile, and does not hurt at all. So you may come with us on our outings ! ' Winter is over, spring has begun. GLENCOE THERE is a special calendar for the child- garden. Its year begins in September, so that by April the season is far advanced. Eight months of sowing and weeding have brought too scanty a harvest. Dullness stares in at the window, and Weariness lurks behind the door. Which is all contrary to nature, whose time of beginnings is April. So it happens that if you have a child-garden and some tired morning a tot reaches up to you a bunch of pink-gray catkins on shiny brown stems, your discouraged heart gives a bound of joy. Pussy willows ! The long winter is over. Spring has begun. To your nostrils comes a whiff of bursting bud- scales and fresh-scattering pollen; to your eyes a glimpse of brown leaf mould dotted with the 15 1 6 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO downy gray buds of pink and white hepaticas; to your feet the soft touch of springy sun-warmed soil. Next Saturday the very next Saturday for then the children are free, you will go for your Easter hepaticas. Weariness has vanished, and when the garden door closes, you hasten home to tell the glad news. I hasten to tell it to Mother; but she knows already. Everybody knows ! The boys are play- ing marbles in the street. The girls are jumping rope on the walk. Mother has heard the robin's song. The big little girl has caught the crocuses peeping through the grass. It is so marvelous and so sudden, this wonderful, ever-new miracle of the opening spring ! Yes- terday it was cold, bleak winter. Today the sun shines warm, the wind is balmy. Presently it rains softly. It thunders a little. Buds swell and burst. Every green thing answers to the call. We too hear and answer, and Saturday we go to the North Shore, to one of the ravines that all the way from Winnetka to Lake Forest seam the bluffs and make the suburbs beautiful. Somehow we like Glencoe best. Up the trolley track from the station, we turn in at a gap in the fence and eagerly make for a spot where the fresher green marks the beginning of a depression GLENCOE that we know will deepen and widen as it leads us deviously down and toward the shore. At its head we bid the busy world good-bye. The first spring frogs sound their cheery greeting from a pool in the darker water ?vfe [ grass, and a single sunlit clump of pussy willows smiles upon us, their stamens grown long and tM yellow, scattering pollen to the wind and over the backs of the bees that their abounding sweetness has lured from winter quarters. Down the gully we go, and gaily climbing our first fence, we enter a gentle, grassy glade, where the baby stream runs clear and shimmering between smooth green banks in a smooth green meadow streaked with the long shadows of the tree trunks and the delicate tracery of bare branches, all so dainty that one of us uncon- i8 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO sciously begins to hum "I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows," and laughingly we fall to arranging exits and entrances for Oberon and Titania and their fairy train. And all the small mishaps of the day are laid to mischievous Puck. Reluctantly we turn our backs to this quiet scene, and set our faces toward the wilder beauty of the deepening ravine ahead. It is so steep now that to find secure footing we GLEN CO E 21 must cross and recross the winding streamlet, stepping from one to another of the bowlders that lie thick in the bottom, or balancing on an inse- cure log, or sometimes jumping and dextrously pulling ourselves up by the tough bushes. When we miss our jump, or a stone turns, we slip in the wet clay; but we are dressed to meet all emergen- cies and we are extricated with both our feelings and our skins unhurt. The big boy is in his element, leaping back and forth, making side excursions of discovery up the steep tributary rills, beating his way through the bare hazel and sumach thickets and now and then shinning up a tree, just because he can, and because nothing else will make quite so clear his masculine superiority. Occasionally a fence crosses the ravine. Nota- ble fences they are, desperate combinations of posts and boards with brush and barbed wire, but wholly unavailing ; for any one hardy enough to brave the hazards of the ravine bottom could never be stopped by a fence. We go under or over or through, according to our agility and our stature. Moreover, why should we be stopped, the o. m. would like to know? Ability to enjoy ought to count for as much as a fee-simple in giving title to a landscape. One never meets 22 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO any of the natives in the ravine bottoms. In April they are still wintering in the city, and when they do come they will stay on top, on their verandas and lawns. If it is only city tramps that care for the ravines, why impede us? Wherever there is a level spot we sit to rest and to listen to the silence. Bird notes alone break the stillness; a lilting chorus of yellow warblers, the joyous spring whistle of the blue jay or the hammer of a wood-pecker saying that life is astir under the bark. There is life astir in the ground as well. When the big boy in sheer joy of living kicks up the earth, multitudes of wee six and eight-footed folk run distractedly hither and thither. The ravine is very steep now and brown with a thick covering of dead leaves. Only the patches of velvety green moss tell that it is not winter still; for the trees have not yet declared themselves, save some of the willows and an occasional low red maple, whose glowing ruby blossoms make the air about them redolent. The sun is riding high and sending his rays down into the sheltered ravines with nearly his summer ardor. The clatter of hoofs and wheels on a bridge sounds almost over our heads, and we know we are near the Sheridan Road. GLENCOE 23 On the ravine's southward slope the delicate wood anemones, in twos and threes, have been nodding and smiling across to the northward slope, and we have been guessing that the sturdy hepaticas were there; and now, all at once, we come upon them, surrounded by their own last season's leaves, that a few days ago would have seemed as lifeless as the tawny carpet about them. To the very end of the ravine now we shall rejoice in hepaticas. We shout for joy as we look upward. Un- countable numbers of hepaticas are there, pink and white and lavender, millions of starry flowers and downy silvery stems and buds. Here and there glow patches of crimson and bronze where the sun strikes through the leaves, revived by the stirring sap to give up what nourishment is in them that the brave blossoms may unfold. Just beyond the bridge, on which the big boy stands and laughs down at us from among the tree tops, a grassy clearing rises high from the stream bank where violet leaves already form thick mats over the moist earth and May-apples are pushing up their funny tipless green umbrellas. Later in the season we picnic on the stone pile on the beach, but in April this sunny sheltered spot by the bridge is better. We idle long in the 24 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO still sunshine, watching the gay flickers brighten- ing the branches of the bare trees, and then take up our march. All at once a cold breath of wind strikes us and in a moment we are out on the sand beach at the base of a high clay bluff, with the cold gray waves breaking in a surf at our feet. We must run to keep warm, or play our favorite, time-honored game of "duck on the rock." y-, ' . ..; N W GLEN CO E 27 To the north loom the black chimneys of Waukegan, the first reminder since we entered the ravine that we are still in the busy world. In this direction the beach becomes narrow and rocky and impassable, and the bluff rises sheer and bare a hundred feet. To the south the sandy beach grows wider and the prospect is less forbidding, so we all go to look at the great glacier-scored bowlder that is sliding out of the bluff on its way to the water. As the cold wind conquers us one by one, we retreat from the wintry beach to the spring-time warmth of the ravine, and here we lie in the warm sun and dig hepaticas to take to our little wild garden. With baskets overflowing, and wonderful arm- fuls of soft gray willow and brown hazel, bright- ened by the glowing red of the maple flowers, we climb up into Sheridan Road and take the path through the woods to the station. It will take us but a few minutes to go back, although we were hours coming down the ravine. We emerge from the woods close to our golden willow clump of the morning. If we have been as slow as we should be, the sun will be sinking red behind the woods of Wilmette as we come through. It will be dusk as 28 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO we cross the bridge in the city, and we shall see the warehouses fading dull gray into a pearly sky above the dark gray water. Only the white breasts and wings of the swooping gulls give relief to the soft gray picture. If you see it, you will love the city too; and the spirit of Pan will be with you, when the big little girl has had her good-night kiss, and the big boy is sleeping the sleep of tired youth, and you and Mother are arranging your roots for tomor- row's early planting and speaking softly of two little blue-eyed girls that searched the woods for the blue hepaticas in the early spring-time a whole generation ago. " Under fresh green willows." RIVER FOREST FOR a month we have to live on the memory of the hepaticas in the ravines aided by the hepaticas in pots and in the garden; for April weather is freaky, and by some perversity of fate the warm, sunny days have come in the middle of the week, and the Saturdays and Sundays have been raw and wet. Not that we always demand sunshine. Gray days we love as well; but no petticoated person can start for the woods in a cold drizzling rain. At last a Saturday comes clear enough and bright enough for an outing, and it is high time to pay our first spring visit to the Desplaines river. The Desplaines is long and interesting and we 31 32 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO know it all the way, in spots, from the fine farms of Wheeling southward to Summit, whence, nearly lost in the broad Outlet valley, it whimpers along past Joliet, to find itself again, in the Illinois, merged with the waters of the Kankakee. And all the way, in spots, it gives charm and variety to what would otherwise be a hopelessly monot- onous region. We are greatly embarrassed on the Desplaines because the river has two banks, and from either bank we espy greater attractions on the other. But at River Forest the big boy knows where canoes are to be had. One will not hold us all, but one is very useful as a ferry and to maintain connection between the factions of our divided house, for we generally fail to agree as to which bank to follow. Sometimes we have several canoes, and then we paddle miles up the river, past green open meadows and upland farms on the one side, and splendid natural woods on the other. Sometimes there are woods on both sides and the curves of the river shut us in before and behind. Pro- tected from the wind, the placid stream makes a perfect mirror, and trees and flowers and sky encompass us above and below, as we paddle on to the unknown regions beyond the bend. RIVER FOREST 33 In a green breezy meadow, under fresh green willows, where the water riffles and shimmers in the sun, we have our lunch, and loiter about while the big boy fishes and catches nothing. We have not been alone on the river. An occa- sional canoe has floated by us, and we have passed silent fishermen, sitting on the bank singly or in little groups. And one of them caught a fish, for we saw it frying over a fire made of dry brush. Of all our country haunts this is the most fre- quented. All sorts and conditions meet on the Desplaines. Automobilists picking boughs of the crab-apples that are just coming into blossom close to the road; bicyclers trundling their wheels through the woods; young mechanics and shop girls strolling arm in arm along the path; artists sketching at a bend in the river; nursemaids wheeling babies in go-carts, to the joy of the big little girl; schoolboys playing ball in a clearing, to the envy of the big boy, and, most wonderful of all, some of the residents themselves ! The dwellers along the river do not regard visitors from the city with favor. It is only Mother who can get what she wants. The rest of us are turned back, and even refused water to drink. The o. m., stern and commanding, is utterly helpless, but when Mother asks, the most 34 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO hardened householder lets us go through his lot "this time," even while he pounds with peculiar emphasis on the staples with which he is fasten- ing up the new barbed wire. Visitors stand in their minds for wanton mis- chief. They break the trees and dig up things, thoughtlessly, I am sure, but none the less irre- parably. Oh! the pity of it, that state or city does not quickly buy these woods and protect them for the enjoyment of all the people all the time. Private ownership of a river bank seems so preposterous! You may go a long way up the river. It will be much quicker coming back. But you must always save an hour or two of the late afternoon to walk down the river path from Thatcher's Park to River Forest, while the big boy is left to enjoy himself with the canoes. As soon as you have passed the village you come into the sweet, open spring woods. The fresh tender green of the young leaves, the clear light blue of the carpeting phlox, the patches of blue-and-white innocence, the violets and buttercups, make beautiful color pictures on every hand. The big little girl sets out to look for a Jack- in-the-pulpit, and soon finds him, two of him, preaching to one another, just as they used to ' Preaching to one another" RIVER FOREST 37 preach in our childhood story-paper long years ago. Spotted adder-tongue she finds too, and red trillium and bird-foot violets. Beyond the young woods lies the crowning at- traction of River Forest, the big woods, and presently we come to them, the finest in all the country round; untouched, first-growth timber, preserved by the dear nature-lover who has long owned the land. Here are elms no two of us can span, high and flourishing as any in New England ; tall hickorys, with their swollen buds just waking up and pushing back the covers that have kept them snug and warm through the long winter; and huge gnarled oaks, trees that were never young, their sluggish blood still unstirred by the return- ing sun. They are old and wise and they sleep until all the spring chills and storms are over. But they do not see the young green shoots, or the white hawthorns like great bridal bouquets, or the pink crab-apples that make the woods so dainty today. They do not feel the gentle touch of the blue phlox and the violets and the butter- cups against their hard dark boles, or the caress- ing of the sunbeams that filter through the tree tops. The oaks are old and wise and they will outlive all the rest. But how much of life they are missing! Almost as much as if they were 38 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO men and women of the city, too sluggish to "come forth into the light of things." As we walk down the path through the thick woods by the river, the low sun bursts through a cloudbank to fleck the foliage and the ground everywhere with goldi Everybody is picking flowers to carry home. The men all take the phlox, high, bright and showy, and crowd it out of all beauty into tight bunches. The women pick the low, dark woods-violets. All woman- kind loves them best. How the springtime makes children of us all ! On the edge of the deep woods near the town, ' in a broad green clearing, rings of youths and maidens are playing some old-time game ; and we, looking from afar, and hearing their cheery voices, think of the May-day games of Merry England. But as we pass close, there is wafted over us a very breath of our own childhood, the delicious melody (do you know it?): "I won't accept your silken gown, Though every thread shall cost a pound. Madam won't walk with you, you, you; No ! Madam won't walk with you !" Alas! such fine scorn of worldly wealth belongs only to children and the very old. Through the middle years our vision is oblique. RIVER FOREST 39 The children's singing has touched a chord in our hearts. Settled in the train, while the big little girl is retying her violets with the strings that the big boy can always produce from some- where, Mother sits beside me, making her sign of perfect happiness and content. She is singing, so softly that I wonder whether I really do hear it, running old bits of songs together with im- provised melodies, very sweetly and quite un- consciously. One strain comes in again and again and all at once I recognize some bars of a song that I remember as far back as memory goes, and when it comes again I join her with all I remember of the words ; perhaps they are not right : " 'Twas down by the river, where violets were blooming, And the springtime was ever fresh and green." " The sweet, open spring woods" ._. THORNTON WHEN the mercury reaches for the ninety mark it is time to stay at home; but when it is climbing up into the eighties and the crickets and the official forecaster agree that it is to be "fair and continued warm," a picnic day in the country seems an inviting pros- pect, and we are likely to turn toward the creek and the woods at Thornton. It is a sleepy little country town, where, in early June, the honey-locusts hang their great' white clusters over the walks and roads and fairly drip fragrance, while the bees drone over them in the sunny hours, or the white moths flutter silently in the twilight with the flashing fire-flies to light them. Browsing beneath the locust trees are cows that mildly resent our coming, and stretched on the porches of the houses are sleepy dogs that rouse 43 44 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO and come running down to the gate to sniff and bristle and bark until our suspicious company is safely past, and then with a comfortable air of having performed their whole duty, trot leisurely back to their napping, giving over their responsi- bility to their canine neighbors farther on. The towns-people are still at their morning duties, and invisible, but you know there are people about, for you hear cheery out-door calls and gentle in-door murmurs, and with the human voices are mingled the chirp of robins and various drowsy barnyard noises. As you pass down the road to Thorn creek, the rippling cadence of its running water adds itself to the village sounds. We cross the bridge and turn into the creek bottom. Our feet are on the soft, cool earth, and our country day is begun ! It is a banner day for boys and we always have plenty of them along when we go to Thornton. We turn them loose upon the hapless denizens of the creek edges, and for a whole day, at inter- vals, as the spirit moves, they may dig crawfishes and catch polliwogs and poke mud-turtles and pocket garter snakes and hunt horrors to their hearts' content. I call them horrors, because in a book I must be very feminine. Really and truly I find them all wonderfully likeable and THORNTON 45 human and interesting; that is, all but the snakes ! When the vanguard of the boys finds a swim- ming hole and shouts and lifts two fingers, Mother and I and the big little girl take to the tall hard- wood timber that is one of Thornton's chief attractions, prudently carrying the lunch baskets with us to make sure that the boys will follow us up. In the woods the big little girl roams close by for flowers, while Mother and I have a long, peaceful, dreamy rest. We lie in the leaf-shadows, gazing straight up through the wavering, swaying green to the clear, steady blue above, listening to the sweet country sounds; or we sit very still against a tree trunk, watching the glint of the blue birds' wings as they flit near us through the lights and shadows, or the gleam of a sun- burnished tanager's scarlet breast among the high branches. The boys break in upon our reverie, coming fresh and noisy and hungry to show their prey and to clamor for their lunch; and fed, they are off again, this time to the stone-quarry and the crushers. On the quarry's brink they lie down flat upon their lunches, and squirming to the very edge, look down into the terrifying abyss below, with 4 6 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO the cold creeps running down, or rather, along their backs. I know, because I have done it. If it is still noon-hour and the workmen are gone, they will descend the long shaky ladders into the depths of the quarry to frisk in the pond of clear spring water, and to look for fossils and crystals, and the black "rock gum" that they would scorn to chew anywhere else, but delight in here. Perhaps the workmen, when they return, THORNTON 49 will let them loiter until the chugging drills have made the dynamite holes and the charge is in, and then rush them off to a point of safety to watch the firing of the blast. My dream-morning makes me long to be left alone where the quiet woods overlook the swing- ing curves of the creek in the green meadow pasture, and I beg Mother to take her big little girl and to go and leave me. They wander off into the country, past the farmlands where bare- $0 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO foot boys are working in the fields, and meadow- larks are singing all day, and they look for nests in the tangled bushes in the fence corners, just to see, never to disturb, the tiny eggs or the funny feathered mouths that occupy them. And I lie in the sweet summer wind and con- tinue my dreaming about the child-gardens that have made my life. They have been many and of many kinds, and some are indelibly fixed in my memory. Lately one from a far-past garden asked to come again, and as we walked together along the woods-road facing the sunset glow, there came over his face a radiance softer and brighter than that of the sun, as he sweetly and ardently told me how he had seen the Grail afar off and must go to find it. He has gone now, to carry his message of light to those that dwell in darkness on the other side of the world; to scatter much seed that one grain may sprout and flourish to bear fruit in long ages to come. It is an uncertain and far-off hope, but if you could have seen Walter's face that day, you would know that it is worth while. The children of my gardens are scattered the wide world over, blown like the down of my own thistle field. There is no continent that does not hold them. THORNTON 53 In the cool of the late afternoon we wander back to the town and linger under the honey- locusts until train time. As we return we count up the gain and the loss of the day. We have gained: an escape from a dusty west wind, a fine balmy night's sleep, a store of bodily health, a panorama of sweet pic- tures, a book of loving memories, and best of all, the sympathy and confidence and affection of our own big boy and big little girl. We have lost nothing. There is a sordid morning paper unread; there is only the simplest dinner of eggs and fruit; there is thick gray dust on our furniture; there will be an extra busy day tomorrow. But our losses are of the moment, temporal; our gains are for all our life, perhaps eternal. "Pictures she will never repeat" THE LAKE WE seldom go on the lake, the more's the pity, for one of us is not a good sailor, and the unpleasant possibilities deter us from even the one-day trips that so many of our fellow citizens believe to be the only outings of any kind that Chicago affords. So much may happen to wind and wave on Lake Michigan in a few hours ! Do we not remember one soft, warm day of a bygone summer when the lake was without a ripple and the south wind gently breathing? When we reached the Michigan shore we found the waves beating in a roaring surf, and we left the inlet harbor with our ship cavorting impishly from wave to wave. We came into Chicago at three in the morning, six hours late, all of us hungry and tired, one deathly sick. Now we take only half-day excursions and these must be along shore so that if necessary we may return by 57 58 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO rail. There are not so many such trips. Our friends tell us when they hear of one. One Saturday afternoon we attached ourselves to a certain woman's club and went on their cruise up the north shore. It was the hottest day of that summer season. The pavements and walls down town fairly sizzled. Crowds of men and boys hung over the railings of the bridges watching the vessels THE LAKE 59 come and go. They must have found altruistic refreshment in the knowledge that somewhere there was relief from the heat, for they could have found but little comfort from the slight breeze that blew over the river. On the dock at the end of the bridge was a crowd, eager to embark, but these were women and children; women of all ages and conditions, and arrayed in all possible styles, from the sternly nautical to the purely decorative. I have never been able to take a large concourse of women as seriously as one of my sex and calling should. There is always a ludicrous incongruity about it, to which men are particularly alive. Re- cently I have had this feeling explained to my own satisfaction. It is due to the entire lack of that uniformity in appearance which a gathering of men presents. How, pray, can a high-heeled maiden in trailing lace and chiffon and plumed picture hat possibly be of one mind with a matron of the broad-soled, short-skirted, severely tailor- made variety? Interspersed in the crowd were a few men, not real men perhaps, but still men, prevailed upon by great love or fear you could generally tell which by the expression of the woman who had him along to brave the feminine jam. 60 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO But now the gang plank is out, and merrily the crowd boards the ship, struggling a moment in the breathless crush at the plank, and then freely and gladsomely spreading out to occupy all points of vantage on the decks the more decorous in the quiet shade of the lower deck, the more ob- streperous in the open sunlight of the upper, now scorching hot, but soon to be swept by the cool winds of the lake. Out of the river we steam, passing other craft loading up with holiday pleasure-seekers. There is the music of bands and merry bantering calls back and forth from the decks. Then we pass the government pier, where queer fishermen roost on top the piles, and at the crib turn northward along the shore. And all in a moment we have exchanged the dusty, breathless, baking heat for the cool, clean, delicious wind that dries our sticky skins and revives our drooping spirits. We watch the Lake Shore Drive and Lincoln Park glide by us and give place to the long line of indistinguishable green that marks the land. Our course now lies farther out, for near shore tricky sand-bars abound, and as the green line recedes we turn to the seaward side. The sky has lost its dusty glare and save at the horizon, has become clear and blue, and the wide expanse THE LAKE 61 of water to the east reflects a deeper blue, un- broken save by the long divergent lines of our foaming wake. The pure, bracing air is exhilarating. You explore the ship; and if you are curious (and if not, never hope to come with us again), you go below to the water-level deck, where you knew beforehand you would find gathered together all the idle men of the crew and all the boys who were aboard without the incubus of too careful 62 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO guardians. Here, if you have the gift of invisi- bility which comes to those who have learned to stand very still and gaze straight ahead, you will not be a damper to the talk even though you be feminine. You may look out over the bound- less level stretch of blue that tells not whether you are on salt seas or fresh, in pirate ship or merchant galleon, and hear many a story, terse, picturesque and sometimes profane, told to the accompaniment of the water swashing at your feet. The wise who go on lake excursions carry a box of eatables, for the fare on the steamers is for the most part execrable. Then, too, the chil- dren get importunately hungry long before meal time. Others than children often feel like pangs ; and many a time and oft have our boxes been opened almost as soon as we were loose from our moorings. But this time the club is serving supper, and the president has invited us to her table. Won- derful president! I could best describe her by naming her name, for she is known wherever the good and the strong congregate. Keen, alert, happy, well-balanced, with a merry word and smile at the surface, whatever vexations and responsibil- ities may be underneath, she is both a sunbeam THE LAKE 63 and a rock of strength. The little mother of hundreds of helpless children, her crown of thorns has become a crown of glory. The club, like its president, has a real and practical purpose, and what is more, carries out its projects; in which particular it is different from most other clubs that I know. We were joined at the table by the one man who seemed to have come neither from love nor fear, but because he liked it ! He was interesting to look at, because he was so different, and to listen to, because of a certain dry humor. Some- one whispered to me that he was an author. Later I found this to be true. He has written a cook-book. Among other recipes it contains one for boiling spinach without water. I have tried it and found it excellent. As sunset time comes I detach myself from the company, for small talk seems so out of keeping when Nature is painting kaleidoscopic pictures which she will never repeat. The eye loses so much, while the ear gains nothing. We were off Fort Sheridan, and as the sun sank behind the clouds the tower stood black and grim against the gold of the western sky. Above, the whole canopy was wrought into cloth of gold, while be- low lay a placid golden sea. A little sailboat 64 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO loomed dark between us and the golden west, its occupants softly singing. A deep serenity and a great peace were upon me. I kept aloof for a long time, neither stirring nor speaking nor thinking; giving myself up to enjoying the glo- rious spectacle, even after the gold had died out and the west grew deep purple. Magically the water turned from gold to precious fire opal, shimmering in wonderful change of color, yet al- ways true to the purple of the sovereign sky. Un- til darkness settled, this enchantment held me, and then I reluctantly rejoined my company. Our day was nearly over. To the southward appeared the blinking red and white harbor lights, and the Watch-dog's tower, rising like a diadem amid the general illumination of the city; and as we entered the river's mouth, we saw from the prow, one of the gayest, and at the same time, one of the most mysterious of the city's sights, the river at night. The poet of the city is yet to come, working with words or color. There are signs that he is coming, he whose soul is to feel in the rush and turmoil of people, the piling of steel and stone, the panting of steam, the blurring of smoke, the din of wheels and the flash of lights, the irresisti- ble progress of humanity, and who will speak a THE LAKE language understood by the new generations of the city born and bred, to all but a few of .whom the old poetry of meadow and mountain and forest and sea will be unintelligible. Perhaps one such is the artist-poet who sees in the smoke of great chimneys "an offering as acceptable to God as was the frankincense of old." And now there is a general scurrying to and fro, to collect baggage and families, and the President 66 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO and I are left alone. We were children together, she and I, in one of the city's big, square, red- brick schoolhouses, and we are children yet, for a moment, when we meet and clasp hands. There is the charm of our childhood's fairy- land in the long, shimmering, dancing, writhing streaks of red and green and white, imprisoned by the black, deserted wharves and huge looming warehouses. It is so mysterious, so like the goblin tales of our childhood, that we feel again the lovely cold shivers run up and down our spines, and our hearts beat high with childhood's memories as we stand hand in hand at the prow together, the President and I. 1 The path through the thick woods by the river" SAG THE way to Sag lies out the "Archey Road," which is a glowing example of the power of art; for Mr. Dooley has hung over it a glamor that transcends the grime and the squalor and makes a ride along its slant-wise course become a pleasant reminiscence. One may go to Sag by train; one should go to most places by train if he values good temper; but to Sag let us go by trolley, for the sake of convenience and for the sake of Dooley, and when the outward view grows too sordid, let us use the inward eye to see behind the doors of the con- tracted homes and dingy shops, the mother-wit and the quaint philosophy of the Emerald Isle. It is these great slant-wise streets that show 69 ;o ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO what "We, the people" really means. Ride along their interminable length: Archer avenue, Blue Island avenue, Milwaukee avenue. What different visions does each conjure up ! Along Archer avenue the children, only once removed from the Auld Sod, are bare-legged, wiry, noisy, full of pranks. They will graduate into policemen and then into public officials, and rule the city tomorrow. On Blue Island avenue the little, dark, solemn-eyed babies of refugees from the dim countries of Europe, hug the protecting doorways of the shops embryo merchants of the next generation. On Milwaukee avenue the flaxen haired children of the Emperor, move slowly up and down. They are the leaven of sterling good citizenship that will leaven the whole great soggy lump in the days to come. But we are on the "Archey Road." The north end of Archer avenue has suffered an invasion from Southern Europe, and Italian names are over the doors, but farther on, toward Bridgeport, the street takes on its own true char- acter. Burke and Hogan take the place of Guarini and Cantinella. Blue eyes replace black. Carrot-tops abound. Innumerable short streets, up which one may get a glimpse in passing, empty into the main SAG 71 thoroughfare and all bespeaks the Irish settlement. Rows upon rows of tiny cottages line these side streets, telling of the ever-present longing in the heart of the homeless Irish peasant for a bit of the earth to call his own; and one ventures to say that most of the houses are owned, except for a mortgage, maybe, by those who live within. They may struggle against hardships of many sorts, but eventually they will win out, and the land will be theirs; and then, with only the taxes to pay, there will come better days. The trolley takes us across and along number- less tracks and beside the ruins of the "old red bridge" that used to span the black, scum-cov- ered, incredible slime of Bubbly Creek. Beyond Bridgeport, the houses grow more sparse, and in the open ditches bordered with willows and silver maples dappling in the wind, swim sociable geese that tell of the growing feather-beds within. Then comes the country, level as a floor. Acres and acres of vegetables, and fields tawny with squirrel-grass or greening after the mowing, lie smiling in the mid-forenoon sun, as the hot earth gives its odor to the west wind for one must go to Sag on a west-wind day. We pass through the hamlets of Summit and Willow Springs and along the attractive heights 72 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO of Mount Forest, and view on the right the gray, weather-scored flanks and bare, rocky peaks of the "Drainage Mountains"; those two long parallel ranges of debris that stand as witnesses to the upheavals of the nineties, when these quiet villages shook with the dynamite earthquakes that were to open anew the ancient waterway be- tween the Lakes and the Gulf, and as in defiance of the Great Engineer, re-establish the flow as it was when the straits to the north lay ice- dammed. We alight at Sag. The noise of the disap- pearing trolley gives place to the songs of birds and rustle of leaves as we climb the steep hill path over mossy stones and beneath cool shadows. Reaching the top, we pass through the quiet garden of the parish house into the churchyard, and as we turn to shut the gate, our surprised eyes rest upon a shrine built against a tree trunk. There is a snow-white figure of a saint, and on the little shelf below are bowls of fresh flowers placed there no doubt by the sweet-faced nuns whom we presently meet in the peaceful paths of the little churchyard. There the flowers and vines grow untrained over the graves and head- stones. The wooden crosses of the humble and the stone memorials of the well-to-do show whence "Across the west fork of the great valley." SAG 75 and when Sag's first inhabitants came. The names are all true Irish, and the dates go back to 1849, a great antiquity to a Chicagoan. Beyond the churchyard is a rolling upland pasture, backed by woods now in their mid- summer green. On the edge of the wood is a wild crab-apple tree, and you may rest there from the heat of the sun and see in imagina- tion what we have often seen in reality, this pas- ture and wood lot in the springtime, the crab- apple tree a glory of coral buds and delicate pink blossoms, their deeper color accenting the pink of the young oak shoots, and itself accented by the flash of a scarlet tanager, the whole making a lacery of tender pink and green through which one might look across the broad valley to another just such screen made purple by the distance. Once there was another big boy, and one day as we sat under the crab-apple tree, he came to 7 6 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO us across the upland, bareheaded, his coat open to the wind. The noon-day sun fell full upon him, making him so bright and beautiful that he seemed a very part of the springtime. He called out to us as he came and the distance sent us his voice in a clear spring song. A month later we gave him back to his mother earth. Sag is doubly dear since then. Two great valleys meet at Sag and where they join is the high point of land on which the church stands and from which the view stretches far SAG 77 away, across and along both. Great valleys they are, bearing witness to the immense streams of icy water that once rushed past to warm itself in the southern gulf. Now there is but the little Desplaines in the one, and the tiny Feeder in the other. Wander back into the woods and you will find rolling pasture land, a small pond where the cattle find refreshment, and steepsided pictur- esque ravines where little brooks run down to the great valley. Here, far from prying eyes, you may sit on a bowlder and deliciously dabble your hands and your feet in the cool water, while those of the swimming sex escape to one of the old quarry holes a mile away in the valley bottom. Two articles of raiment I hate with a most un- Christian hatred. They are hats and shoes. A hat I can never regard as anything but an un- pleasant joke, and I am revelling in the fad that now permits a woman to go about with- out millinery and not be accounted insane. May it prove more than a fad! Shoes I regard as an atrocity impervious boxes, shaped without refer- ence to that which they are to contain. From them, alas, there seems to be only the present temporary escape. ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO Swimming makes one hungrier than dabbling; so stop in good time, and going back to the edge of the wood, where is the great sweeping view, have the lunch ready to spread at sight of the returning swimmers. The town of Sag has fallen into decrepitude. If you have an old time-table you will find on it Sag Bridge, and the change in name gives a clew to the decadence of the town. Once upon a time, before the Drainage upheaval, there was a bridge here across the his- toric Illinois and Michigan canal and the Desplaines river, and an important road across the valley. But every great improvement brings its small catastrophes. The bridge is gone and the glory of Sag has departed. The big boy went scouting to see if in any way we might get sight of the drainage canal, and returned triumphant, but a most curious spectacle. For he was covered from collar to shoes with a SAG 79 mat of flat green burs. He had found a way for us; not through the burs, he hastened to explain. We sat a while to let the big boy rest, while we all fell upon him, picking burs off one by one, a process not completed until two days later. Then we followed our guide along a little path between tangles of weeds head-high, to where he had discovered a flat boat, in which we crossed the inky, evil-smelling Styx of the Illinois and Mich- igan canal to the wondering owner who dwelt on the farther side. A few words and a coin satisfied him, and the alert among us proceeded to climb the insecure slope of the South Drainage Range, from whose summit we surveyed the country round. Descending on the other side we found ourselves on the edge of the rock- walled 8o ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO Sanitary canal, whose clear, swift-flowing current will soon rout the deadly typhoid of our great city. We retrace our way to the foot of the church hill, and there turn across the west fork of the i ,, great valley. Here deserted quarries, decaying derricks and idle slips tell of the departed industry. The little houses are still inhabited by barefoot foreign women with shawls pinned over their heads and numerous unkempt little ones huddling SAG 83 about them. Geese paddle serenely in the quarry holes and in the creek. On the other side of the valley we ascend, quaff deeply of the fine artesian water, turn to note the picturesque view and to bid fare- well to the church's heaven-pointing spire, and then turn westward along the road that leads over the upland. Presently we climb over a fence, stop to laugh at a nest of young wood- peckers deep in a hollowed stump, and pass along the edge of a delicious field of red clover in per- fection of bloom to the head of one of the ravines that everywhere cut the sides of the great valleys. Birds of many kinds seek nestings in these quiet places, and in the late afternoon, with the shadows falling long, flecking the bowlders lying thick in the streamlet, we lovingly and quietly follow it to its outlet into the great valley. When some one from the effete East tells you that Chicago is uninteresting because it has no history and no scenery, take him to Sag; set him on the edge of the pasture back of the church- yard; show him the quarries of limestone age- long accumulations of tiny wornout bodies ; tell him the story of the great glaciers and the icy rivers that once flowed here ; show him the long, placid, mir- rored vistas of the old canal where once pioneers 84 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO came thronging from the Mississippi and Ohio to try their fortunes in the new commercial village of Chicago; show him the prophetic new Drainage canal, soon to assure us pure water and later to make a triumphant waterway to the Gulf. Let him look across the miles of smiling bottom-lands to the purple bluffs beyond. Let him walk over the rolling uplands and down the sweet cool ravines. Show him the flower-grown church- yard and the shrine and the long, narrow, shaded stairway by which the worshipers descend to the road. Show him the Feeder, splattering over its rocky bed, and the cottages, half-hidden by willow clumps, half-lost in their own shadows, touched with the glory of the sunset clouds. Long ago one from my child-garden stood with SAG 85 me in the churchyard and exclaimed reverently, "Oh, Miss Emily! I think that Sag is just like heaven." To her it was; to me it was not; but to both of us it is very sweet and beautiful. PALOS PARK NOW and then after we have had a day of especially keen enjoyment, we are oppressed by a feeling that we are very selfish to keep so much pleasure to ourselves. We are bursting with a desire to share our joys with the world, and so, heedless of former experiences, we invite our neighbors, one or many, as the spirit is weaker or stronger at the time. It never occurs to us that the railroads and trolleys are common carriers and that the way to the country is as open to any one else as to ourselves. We invite our friends, and take them under our wing. There is one of our neighbors who is full of fads one at a time. Just now it is golf. He has invested heavily in golf sticks and golf clothes and goes often to the links. So he believes that 89 QO ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO he likes the country; and it follows as a matter of course that his long-suffering wife and Only Child like the country too. The Only Child is a girl of twelve. To be sure, there is another one in the family, a baby of two, but she came too late to affect in the least the character of the elder, who is and always will be to all intents and pur- poses an Only Child. They must go with us on our rambles; and go they did, just once, to their discomfiture and ours, and to our everlasting amusement, not theirs. We knew the end as soon as we saw them at our door ready to join us, and ran our eyes down to their shoes. You can always tell by the shoes. Theirs were neither old nor easy. The Only Child was filmy and decorated, the mother was starched and spotless. We groaned inwardly. Our country tramps are neither over stone pave- ments nor over golf sward, and clothes must be old and stout and brown and woodsey. This day we had elected to go to Palos Park, perhaps the favorite of all our resorts. It is real country, with high, rolling wooded hills and a babbly creek; real country, for its beauty is still unknown to the multitude. We had no special objective point, but meant merely to wander PA LOS PARK 91 through the woods and along the less frequented roads to the south and west of the village. There was a delicious breeze blowing as we tramped merrily along, sucking the honey sweet- ness from the blossoms of the deep red wayside clover, spying out the scarlet "star flowers" as we named them, or noting the exquisite shadings of innumerable greens or the flash of early red- dening sumachs as we marched over a wooded hill. We were just getting in tune for the day when we heard a cry from our friend. Her foot had gone into a grass-covered hole and she had nearly fallen. We looked and saw misery depicted on her countenance. "If it is much farther," she groaned, "I should think they would have a bus at the station." We glanced at one another and understood. She was expecting to be led into a city park ! Mother looked helpless. The o. m. spoke: "My dear Mrs , this is it, all around us. We are already there." Incredulity was in her eyes. Scorn rode on the brow of the Only Child. Both were indignant, warm and weary. The clothes and the shoes were getting in their work. To take them on and on all day would be cruelty; to go back to the 92 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO city was impossible. There was no train for hours. Our big little girl was looking solemnly sympa- thetic. Our big boy was covertly glaring and mak- ing faces at the Only Child. Mother and I sat down by the woods road and held council apart. Our friend declined to sit on "weeds and bugs" and the Only Child stood loyally by. Clearly we must change our day's plans. We remembered View Cottage and its hospitable inhabitant. It was but a little way off. So we turned back to the road that winds through the woods to the west, and presently were cordially ushered into the cheery little sitting room. There is no place like it ! View Cottage from the outside is unattractive enough, just a box with doors and windows cut out. But on enter- ing, one fairly gasps with unforeseen delight, for the house stands on the edge of a level- topped moraine hill and you enter it from flat ground. The sitting room is on the steep side and you find yourself among the treetops near at hand, and above the treetops in the great bowl-shaped valley beneath, looking through a spray of green over a sea of green to the deep green hills beyond. The view is beautiful at all times, but in the autumn it is glorious. All Palos 'Exquisite shadings of innumerable greens" PALOS PARK 95 Park is glorious then, for it is far enough inland to escape the only blight of our splendid Michi- gan the dampness that makes the leaves in Chicago merely turn brown and wither up, and brings mourning to the color-lover. And I am a color-lover. Sending the children that is, our children on by themselves, we tarried here. Our hostess loves to tell of her simple life, and of her joy in the ever-changing views from her breezy windows. Summer and winter, year after year, she lives here quite alone, cultivating her garden of vege- tables in summer, and her garden of books in the winter. Her valley is very dear to her and she knows it well. Her eyes smile as she points out the trees that mark the summer and winter limits of the sun or as she describes the rosy tintings of the dawns and the gorgeous sunset hues, or the gray, mysterious morning mists that fill the valley like still water, blotting out its trees and converting it into a fairy, fleeting lake. She loves the winter best of all, when snug and snow-bound, she looks out over a solitude of branches bent under a weight of snow or clad in ice armor that flashes back a thousand colors from the sun as it crackles and snaps in the wind. She is not like the old Irishman from farther 9 6 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO west who has just passed on the road. We walked along the creek through his orchard and his house- lot one day, and he came out to call off the dogs. He chatted and cracked his jokes as he led us down to the spring-house for a cold drink. He proudly showed us his chickens and his ducks, his portulacca and his poppies and led us around to the unused and pathless front of the house to PA LOS PARK 97 see the great crimson ramblers that nearly hid it from view. He was cheerful as a grig until we asked him about the winter. Then he threw up his hands. "Lonely?" he exclaimed. "I do be tired talkin' to the trees." For the first time he seemed old to us. We thought him seventy. He is ninety. Long may he flourish like his own rose tree! The people of Palos are as interesting as the country is beautiful. There is the long-haired artist who carves his face in the clay of the bluffs, and attracts to himself numerous beauty-lovers from the city, so that the artist colony of Chicago is beginning to know Palos; and there are the inhabitants of the school teachers' haven, all o. m.'s, some of whom came to call on our hostess in the little sitting room. Here, a merry party, we blithely spent our country day. And while the big boy and the big little girl wandered along the creek and played up and down the stairs at the spring, we enjoyed the pure air and the view and the cheerful femi- nine gossip, and as evening dusk came on we bade our hostess good-bye and started back to the station. Our neighbor was entirely happy at View 98 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO Cottage but the strangeness of the road in the gathering darkness terrified her, and she spoke in no uncertain terms of the danger and the impropriety of being on a country road alone at night. The big boy bristled with indignation. She could not see what we found to enjoy in such things, and all the way home she was glum as a thunder cloud. So, of course, was the Only Child. We should have been angry had we not been amused. They reached home despondent and pale, vowing that they hated the country. We have been to Palos many times since. They have not. Indeed, we notice a changed manner. They are not as cordial as formerly. A certain church club includes both Mother and our neighbor. It was the latter's turn to preside at a meeting not long ago, and in her best gown and sweetest millinery she spoke feelingly to the ladies of their unfortunate city children, pining for fresh air and having only the streets to play in. (This is a figure of speech, for they live in a neighborhood of large yards and vacant blocks and clean lake breezes.) She urged that mothers take their children to the country, where they could be "alone with human nature." Mother was convulsed at the words and aghast PA LOS PARK 99 at the hypocrisy. The presiding lady never blinked. She is down in our catalogue of mis- takes along with a friend who kept exclaiming, as we gathered maiden-hair at Lakeside, "But there are so many crawling things ! When is the next train back?" It will be a long time now before any but the tried and true go with us on our trampings. ...... "Now only the convent and the yacht basin attract. THE PARKS OF all Chicago's summer days, the blue days are the best. If you are of Chicago you know the blue days well. It has been warm and wilting perhaps, but all of a sudden the wind has changed to the north-east, and the pure cool air rolls in from the lake, a delicious tonic full of ozone. Humanity revives, and again there is joy in life. The sky is deep blue and cloudless, and in the afternoon the water is the same deep blue, touched with restless white caps. If you are feminine you put on your fresh blue dress with the white fixings (nothing else will do for complete happi- ness) and gathering your family together you hasten to Jackson Park to answer the clear call of the water. As you catch the first glimpse of the lake, a band of deep blue between the green of the trees 103 104 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO and the green of the lawns, and hear the booming waves dashing high into spray, your pace quickens. Leaving the others to do as they like, you go, brisk and bare-headed, the whole length of the sea wall, filling your lungs with the bracing air till they ache, happy in the joy of combating and conquer- ing the stiff wind that whistles impishly across your ears, touzles your hair, and flaps your skirts. The big little girl takes off her shoes and stock- ings, gathers up her dress, and joins the group of tots who are wading and splashing on the little beach by the German building, adding their merry shouts to the noise of the surf as THE PARKS 105 they rush pell-mell back from the pursuing rollers. It is quite like a bit of the seashore. All Chicago might enjoy such a beach for miles. Alas! for a city that sells her birthright for a mess of pottage. Not until we are both really cold, and that is what we presently shall be, even in August, do we leave the lake and go in search of Mother and the big boy, who are on the golf links. Daisy and I do not play, so we add ourselves to the row of onlookers, to be entertained quite as much by their comments as by the sight of the gay golfers moving over the perfect sward. Jackson Park has a character totally different from other parks. Unless it is Sunday or a holiday (when you, gentle reader, should on no account be there) it is quite like a summer resort; there is no crowd, but just people enough are scattered about to prevent solitude and give a comfortable sense of human fellowship. There is a wonderful quiet beauty in the la- goons, with their long stretches of shadowy water framed in green of willows undergrown with shrubbery and wild flowers of many sorts and seasons. One may wind in and out among the islands for hours at a time, now enlivened by the gay launches plying about with their merry loads, io6 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO now lulled by the quiet caresses of the water against the keel, or by the calls of the innumer- able birds of rest or of passage that find a safe refuge on the wooded island, even the fairy Wooded Island of eighteen ninety-three. Over Jackson Park still hovers a faint shadow of regret for the departed glory of the Dream City. Go rowing with one who can be very quiet, when the band is playing, and the harvest- moon hangs over the park, and as you float among the shadows of some sequestered nook, there will rise before your reverie the whole exquisite picture of the most beautiful creation that man has ever made to grace this great round ball. One must go to Jackson Park many times in THE PARKS 107 many ways to know it even a little. To walk from end to end will exhaust any but the most sturdy. That, of course, are we, yet we seldom walk. One has less ability to appreciate and enjoy beauty when his strength is all going into his legs. Being unconventional and independent (the result, quite needless to say, of the influence of the o. m.), we occasionally revert to our old ways and go bicycling. Being possessed of friends who are conventional and kind-hearted, we some- times go in an automobile. Having a few shekels we now and then go behind a horse. When we go in the evening in the borrowed automobile, the big boy is in his element. With the eye of a hawk he espies every pair of bench - lovers hidden in the shrubbery and he turns the searchlight full upon them. Instantly the single variegated spot widens out into a dark figure of a man and a white figure of a woman. The big boy laughs gaily as we fly past. The o. m. does not laugh. To her a love affair is a very sweet and solemn thing. Once the big boy called out to a spot that did not widen, "Having a good time?" and a frank, manly voice faded as it fol- lowed us, "You bet your life!" I liked that spot better than the others. As the north end of the park speaks of the past, lo8 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO the south end speaks of the future. The trees are merely sprouting sticks, and the tall Lombardy poplars stand guard over grass that is sparse and yields under the feet, and over walks that are too gravelly for walking; but in a decade it will be splendid. Before the Fair this part of the park was in a state of nature and many a picnic table have we spread among low cleft phlox and violets beneath the oaks. After the Fair the foundation holes were left unfilled and the debris of buildings re- mained in hideous heaps until the wind-sown summer flowers covered it with a mantle of gold and purple and green. Then again we gathered blossoms there. But now it is only the convent of La Rabida and the yacht basin that attract. On a fine Saturday afternoon the basin is all astir with life. Gay groups of young people are rowed out to the yachts. Anchors are lifted, sails are set, and one by one the boats slip through the channel past La Rabid a 's granite sea wall. There is wholesome exhilaration for those aboard and there is quiet pleasure for those on shore watching the gleaming white of the sails diminish into the blue of the lake and the sky. La Rabida is beautiful by moonlight. A launch will take you from the boathouse out into Lake Michigan and along the park front, and you may THE PARKS 109 see the convent from the water-side, perched on a grim rock wall, all silver light and dark im- penetrable shadows. Come out from the park to the westward out on the old Midway. Where once was din and clatter and gay confusion of tongues, there stretches now a wide, green, peace- ful mile of roadways and sward and elms. Dear old Midway ! We love you, both past and present. At the other end of the Midway Plai- sance is Wash- ington Park, more frequented than Jackson Park, but far less attractive to a nature-lover. Things are more set in Washington Park and great liberties have been taken with the face of no ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO nature. The lagoons look stiff and artificial, and the flower beds are in awful geometrical patterns and of conglomerations of plants which were never made to grow together. Only when they flame with tulips and hyacinths in the early spring, or with geraniums and cannas in the late fall, are they endurable. In other respects Washington Park does not suffer by comparison. Indeed, the finest thing in all our park system is here, the great meadow, stretching for a good quarter of a mile in every direction, just green, open space, close mown of late summers by a picturesque flock of fine sheep. In the middle of the day it is a great playground where boys, big and little, may en- joy wholesome athletic sports. Some May morn- ing when the lilacs around its border are in full flower and fragrance, walk across it and bless the artistic genius who laid out the park and left this open space where the long far view rests the eye as the solitude rests the ear. I heard lately of a prominent man who was being urged to assist the project of the outer park belt. After seeing the meadow, he declined, saying, "What do you want of any more parks when all this isn't planted yet?" From such may the South Park Commissioners be delivered ! THE PARKS in If the great meadow of Washington Park is the finest thing in the system, the rose garden of Washington Park is the most exquisite. It is so sequestered that even devotees of the park do not know of its existence. I had the delight of discovering it for myself; a thing which you, dear reader, cannot now enjoy. Nevertheless, enter the park some June day at the old cable power house, and within a stone's throw you will come upon a gateway in a hedge, and passing through it, find yourself in a French garden of roses and roses and nothing but roses, all aglow with pink and crimson. No disfiguring gravel paths are here; just grassy green spaces between the rose beds; and all around is the greenest terrace, where two great cottonwoods stand as sentinels at the gateways. The garden is so retired and elegant and daintily artificial that you imagine yourself in the grounds of some French palace of bygone days, in old brocade and paniers, powdered wig and perfumed lace, carrying a staff and followed by a group of courtiers. For all your vision tells, you might be in any part of the world. Beyond the hedge is nothing but tall shrubbery and tree tops and sky. Sit through a summer morning in the rose garden in blissful quiet, under the shade of the H2 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO sentinel trees, with a book you love, dreaming, and drinking in beauty and fragrance, and you will go home sweetened and refreshed. Espe- cially if you take your way past the lily ponds, to add a picture of delicious coolness: tall lotus, white pond-lilies, yellow water poppies, and blue water hyacinths. Washington Park is not Jackson Park, but it has beauties of its own. Over the West Parks it is well to draw a veil until, well, until things are different. But our children and our neighbors' children would feel cheated and abused if we did not go each summer to Lincoln Park, where they spend hours glued to the nettings around the monkey cages or deliciously trembling before the roaring lions. Mother and I used to stay dutifully by, to tell them things they did not wish to hear, and re- fused to remember. But we found out that they could have more fun without us and we could have more fun without them. So now we escape the smells of the zoo and wait at the lily ponds. They spend their nickels for pop- corn on their way back, and we all sit and munch, careless of our dignity. This is one of the rites and ceremonies pertaining to Lincoln Park. We never do it anvwhere else. THE PARKS 113 Lincoln Park has a holiday air of gaiety that suggests some European capital, rather than business-like Chicago. The park is fairly over- flowing with people, mostly of two types heavy German families that have sat bare spots in the grass, and chance visitors in eager haste to see everything there is to be seen and to do everything it is possible to do. There is zeal for accomplishment rather than for enjoyment. Infected by it, the o. m.'s peda- gogical spirit becomes rampant, and the children are dragged into the Academy of Sciences, and made to look at bones and bugs. Gentle reader, tell me why? In Jackson Park is the Field Museum, much ampler and more attractive, yet never on a sunny picnic day is she moved to visit it. At other times Art goads her on and she marshals the children off to the park's chief glory, the St. Gaudens' figure of the Great Eman- cipator. As we sit on the stone bench surrounding the statue, and gaze at the great kind face kissed by the afternoon sunbeams that glint through the trees, we find quiet and momentary repose. But soon the children demand the statue of their own Hans Christian Andersen and his ugly-duckling swan, and we snub Schiller and Franklin and the other dignitaries to go to find it. From this swan 114 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO to the ridiculous foot-propelled swan-boats that make the circuit of the lagoons and canals, is an easy descent, so the children run off for a ride, while Mother and I walk around the warm, sunny, blessed, old-fashioned garden in front of the greenhouses, hunting this and that old favorite and finding them all. Then we march down to the lake shore drive, and from the shade of the great old trees watch the passing show of glittering equipages and holiday promenaders, while the children play hide-and-seek up and down and around the im- posing Grant monument. THE PARKS 115 * The beach allures us, especially the women's beach, made gay by bright suits and caps and much frolicking of children. I am sure that no- where else can there be so much humanity to the gallon. Farther north is the fresh air sanitarium, built out over the water. Here Daisy must go, for her little mother-heart takes in and loves the sick babies that are brought by the hundred for the healing that is in fresh air, wholesome food, and friendly human sympathy, and that is to be had here without money and without price. Surely this and the La Rabida sanitarium in Jack- son Park are the city's sweetest charities. Blessed be the great daily paper that does so much for the bodily betterment of Chicago's babies. If another great paper would as vigorously concern itself with the moral health of the community, the city would be regenerated. In the late afternoon the sanitarium is all gentle stir. The nurses are giving the babies their last attentions, and the physicians are rngving about with their last friendly advice. The mothers take their departure in the omnibuses that convey them and their precious burdens to the cars. We are warned that we too must face home- n6 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO ward and not tarry, although the beach grows cooler and more inviting, unless perchance we have brought our supper and are to stay for the concert. But that is not likely; certainly not with so many children along. The day has been too strenuous. Little feet are flagging and little eyes are drooping. They will be tight shut long before we are home. A ten mile walk in the country tires our family not at all, but a day in Lincoln Park costs us two days apiece. 'Sells her birthright for a mess oj pottage. SEEING CHICAGO A PLEASANT way to spend a bright afternoon that finds you down town, is to take passage in one of the numer- ous automobiles that make the circuit of the boulevards and parks. If you happen to have visitors with you from out of town, who must be duly impressed with the vastness of everything pertaining to Chicago, risk your life in one of the huge amphitheatres that load up before the restaurants and hotels, and go south. If you can get a gallery seat, choose it by all means, for it gives you a unique point of view. Even the hurrying crowds on State street have a gala air from this bad eminence, and as you always have to wait an unconscionable time for 119 120 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO the thing to start, you will need all the entertain- ment possible to keep you and your guests in good humor. When finally the monster takes its lumbering course through the crowds, too heavy and cumbersome to turn to right or left, your heart clogs up your throat, and your hands clutch the railing as you pray silently, or perhaps audibly, that you may escape unmaimed, and that the grace of common sense may be given you, if ever you are moved to mount the like again. But the thing itself is serene in the knowledge that everything on wheels or legs will either shy or stop at sight of it, and once out of the mazes of car tracks and the alarming clang of gongs and rumblings of trains overhead, and imo Michigan boulevard, you breathe easier. Presently your attention becomes riveted upon the young and innocent-looking megaphone man who is assailing your ears with stale jokes and original lies. You wonder that the men do not rise and slay him, until you look over your fellow- passengers and discover that you are the only native aboard, and that their trusting and bu- colic minds are all unaware of his wickedness. You long to slay him yourself, or at least to rise and denounce him. But in most people the de- SEEING CHICAGO 121 mand for propriety is much keener than the de- mand for truth, and you are no exception. So on he goes, pointing out residences of millionaire packers and brewers and car magnates where you know they do not live, and peopling long blocks where there is nothing to tell, with million- aires of his own invention. Where the boulevard is closed for repairs, your vehicle makes a perilous turn into Indiana avenue, and as you pass old Trinity Church the mega- phone roars out "ruins of All Souls' Roman Catholic Church." Now, Chicago has an All Souls' Church, but it is as far as possible from being Roman Catholic; and who so ignorant as not to know that the great, rich Mother Church would never let one of her edifices lie in ruins for years to the detriment of the souls of the parish? But no one objects. When, on our return trip, we pass the real home of All Souls' Church in the brand-new Abraham Lincoln Center, we are electrified by the stentorian sentence, "Lincoln Center, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his presidential address." Even to this there was no demur. From then on, we fell to picturing punishments to fit the crime in a future world. But by the time we have turned from Michigan boulevard into Grand boulevard our stentor 122 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO shows signs of weariness, and our attention is less distracted. Grand boulevard's triple roadway grows grander every year. Little by little the branches are reaching up and across. Already the lawns on either side of the main road have become gothic cloisters where one may walk miles, and meditate alone. No shrubbery, no irritating flower beds, just perfect grass and growing elms. The next generation will see Grand boulevard one of the world's most stately drives. The only addition possible to it will be beautiful statuary. Already one piece has appeared, the great equestrian statue of Washington at the entrance to the park that bears his name. Along the shady drives of Washington park and the sunny stretch of the Midway and into Jackson park we roll, and stop in front of the German building. Here the passengers alight to seek refreshment or to rest their limbs by strolling up and down in the splendid willow grove or along the sea wall. A little Italian newsboy, evidently a protege of the megaphone man, by which token I can forgive him a little, has come all the way out with us, sitting way down on the front edge, very still and open-eyed. SEEING CHICAGO 123 An old lady who has not disembarked demands a glass of water, and calls to some boys near at hand, offering a dime to the one that brings it. Our tiny Italian starts, but it is a demand and an offer outside the range of his experience. And he who hesitates is lost. There is a race into the German building and immediately one long- legged lad has emerged with a glass and filled it at a fountain near by. By the time the next urchin issues from the building the old lady has the refreshing draught, and as she fumbles for her purse the lad runs off laughing, and is out of sight before she can even thank him. 124 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO The Italian infant looks at us all in hopeless wonder. This too, is beyond his experience. The lad is a fool! He himself is wiser, and he takes largess for returning the glass, with open hand and heart. I should like to know the long boy when he has grown up. Think of wilfully giving up two ice cream sodas on a warm day! Again the great engine is in motion, along the lake drive, up East End avenue, past our gayest of hotels and into beautiful Drexel boulevard, a narrow mile and a half of park, set bountifully with shrubbery. Here and there are clearings for flower beds, but one easily and thankfully forgets them in the enjoy- ment of the memory of the thickets of great old lilacs and syringas that make the boulevard glorious. If you have ridden your bicycle close up along the park edge some warm evening in lilac time, with the fragrance enveloping you like a cloud, and the bushes gleaming like great bouquets among the dancing black leaf shadows that the arc lights conjure, or if you have walked on a balmy moonlight night along the gravel paths close under the laden branches to let the great blossom clusters brush your cheeks as you pass, SEEING CHICAGO 125 you have had one of your life's best feasts of beauty and fragrance. As your huge vehicle bears you back along the lake front, soon to be another beautiful South Park, and turns into the business streets to reach its starting point, grazing the footboard of one trolley car and the fender of another, your guest assures you of his conviction that Chicago is really the biggest, the most astonishing, and most 126 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO superlatively but you do not listen! You are singing paeans of thanksgiving for your safe return, and as you descend from your lofty pinnacle, you vow a solemn vow that never will you set foot in one of these fearsome juggernauts again. But if there is no guest and the city's reputation is not at stake, and what you want is to get out of the noise and dust and to give a brief time to your soul's refreshment, take one of the small machines that go to Lincoln Park. Back seats are best here too, because you are out of range of the fool talk of the chauffeur. Once over the river, your way leads up one of the quiet avenues that were once Chicago's pride, but have suffered their inevitable fate from the city's growth. They are a pride no longer. The old residents have migrated farther out and the old residences are turned into "genteel" boarding houses most vulgar but expressive adjective! They stretch along, row after row of three-story and basement bricks, whose high steps are thronged after dinner with gaily-chat- tering melancholy multitudes of the city's un- attached population, mostly young clerks and sales-people. In the afternoon, however, these shaded streets are very restful. We meet a grocer's wagon SEEING CHICAGO 127 here and there; a hurdy-gurdy passes not too near, a carriage appears now and then. At Chicago avenue we turn east and enter the Lake Shore drive at the old water works. I can never pass the water works without a thrill of delightful memories. One of my childish wonder-journeys was from the West Side over to this then-used water tower. We went, a bevy of children, unattended, and each way we must cross the river twice! The going was a wonderful Arabian Nights' adventure ! We had our choice between crossing the river on one of the old wooden bridges turned by one or two men pushing on a long lever, or going through the brand-new tunnels; and never was a decision harder to make. To go across the bridge meant to see the busy river, jammed with screaming tugs and tows great schooners piled high with lumber most likely ; and we could stand and watch them go one by one through the draw. And after a while, when the bell rang for another opening, we could scurry across with the hurrying teams and step off with brave and jaunty air, just as the bridge began to move; or we could boldly remain upon it, regardless of the bell and The Law, and be swung out into midstream, where we could look down on the 128 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO deck of the passing schooner and call out to the idle crew. Then, as the turning bridge fol- lowed the vessel, we found ourselves in delightful bewilderment on the opposite side of the river, and stepped dizzily off. Wonderful experience, perennially new! But then, on the other hand, the tunnels! They were so mysterious and so fascinating! There was even the alluring possibility of Robbers ! The carriages then all went through the tunnels, as yet unprofaned by street cars. There was a separate road for foot passengers, reached from the street by a crooked winding stair that seemed to lead down to the very depths of the earth. But we knew! The last turn brought us into the cold gray passage-way and then we ran down with all our might, our screams rever- berating from the imprisoning walls in terrifying roars, and the speed we gained was enough to carry us panting half way up the opposite incline. In the bottom, the white- washed walls were al- ways wet and it was dank and shivery, and through, the open archways we caught glimpses of the more brightly lighted carriage way and heard the deafen- ing hoof-beats as of a hundred king's horses. How deliciously fearful we were, and how brave ! And when we emerged how stifling the warmth SEEING CHICAGO 129 of the upper world and how pale and unreal the white daylight after the red glare of the noisy gas jets that flared and smoked in the fierce draughts that always swept through! And to go to the water works and back we had to cross the river four times ! Sometimes we meant to go to Lincoln Park, but we seldom got farther than the water works. We climbed the dizzy winding iron stair to the top, and looked down over the city. A four-story building was very high; a six-story was the limit of human imagination. But here we were, higher yet, grandly higher! High heaven itself does not seem so lofty now. Then, having descended, we stood enthralled by the great, polished, throbbing engines, ate our luncheon in the little park about the place or down on the shore, and then, turning homeward, twice more crossed the river. When we did go on as far as the park to see the bears that then constituted the zoological garden, it was through the old burying ground. Today, as we ride over the spot in our automobile, there is just one tomb left, and about it in the sunshine there is life and stir and holiday gaiety. The drives of the park are crowded on a pleas- ant afternoon, and not the least gay of the drivers 130 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO are the occupants of the pony carts laboriously urging on the long-suffering calico ponies that are kept for hire. Up the west side of the park you go and down the breezy boulevard into the Lake Shore drive. If our megaphone man of the south parks were here, he would not need to tell lies, so thickly studded is it with the homes of wealthy and not- able citizens. Full of memories, you are sped over Rush street bridge, past the Fort Dearborn tablet, and through River street back to the shopping dis- trict. As you step out of the automobile you look at your watch. You have been gone only an hour ! But to the Chicago-born that hour can be a life's reminiscence. LOTS WE are a public spirited family. The o. m. in particular looms large in discussions of municipal art and municipal ownership, high license and high bill-boards, and with much sense of civic righteousness, cheerfully pays her personal property tax, which is more than her rich neighbors do. But when we are asked to subscribe to the local improvement association, we balk and consider long. To be sure they have sent out their white- wings who have cleared away carloads of scattering paper and tin cans and various unsightly rubbish, and their watering carts have much mitigated the stifling summer dust, for which blessings we try to be thankful; but at the same time they have done us deep and permanent injury, for they have exterminated the brave field flowers, weeds, they call them and they have driven away the boys, equally obnoxious to their well ordered minds, from playing ball on the vacant lots. 134 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO It seems as if more and more in the cities, the weeds and the boys were coming to be classed together as troublesome and superfluous things. How I hate the smug and pompous personage who is the leading light of one particular asso- ciation, as he briskly makes his rounds, planning new devastations, and causing the children to flee at his coming ; for has he not decreed that the precious vacant lots are not to be degraded into playgrounds, but shall stand, mowed and trimmed and untrampled, sleek monuments to the glory of his association? Down with improvement associations, say I, and our big boy and all the other boys shout assent. It is but a few summers since I looked forward eagerly to the coming of July, for then my thistle field bloomed in beauty and honey-sweet fra- grance. A path led down from the sidewalk diagonally across the low-lying field, and here I walked daily, my eyes just at the level of the thistle tops, whose irregular heads made a purple mist for me to look through. In the morning coolness they were so fresh and sweet and in the afternoon sunshine so heavy with perfume, and always so brave and sturdy and flourishing! LOTS 135 Somehow they seemed so distinctly mine! And when their red purple had faded to blue purple and then to white, feathery seed-tops, they had fulfilled their season's mission, and earned repose until July should come again. Now they are ruthlessly cut down. No one is the better or happier and I am much the sadder. I may still enjoy the vacant lots by extending my walks beyond the precincts of the improve- ment associations, but there are no more thistle fields! The tall, rank, green- white sweet clover is another of my joys, and it still holds its own. It is so free and fresh and breezy. If you pick the blossoms and dry them, they make the most delightful sachets for your linen chest, sweeter even than lavender. For fifteen years I have known this as I walked among the clover, and for fifteen years I have not made sachets. But this summer I am again resolved to do it ! Down near the lake the open lots are tangles of sweet clover leaning far over the unused walks, brushing you saucily as you pass along completely hidden by its tall tops; and under the native oaks that still remain here and there, the dear old bouncing-Betty has run loose and wild and sticks out at you temptingly through the wire 136 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO fences that some one, for some unknown reason, has put around the lots. I can never see bouncing- Betty without visions and odors of warm brown acres, with a quiet white farmhouse and its ram- bling garden in their midst. There are other surprises down by the lake. Back from the road that fronts the most fash- ionable of hotels, is a waste of forbidding sand, and no one ventures there. But beyond and through it, is a bit of curving beach, hard and pebbly, with one or two stranded drift logs to lean against. If you listened you could hear the voices of the promenaders at the hotel and the tooting automobiles on their way to the park. But your back is to all such, and your eyes face the swinging curve of the wave-lapped bay and LOTS 137 the changing tints of the water and the clouds. The sky looks very near and immense, while far to the north looms the gray, smoke-dimmed city, unreal and apart. In the very middle of a low weed-grown vacant block, all about which flat buildings are springing up, still unknown and unsuspected to the multi- plying race of those whose only habitat is the pavements, grow sunny armloads of golden -rod and bright yellow sunflowers, and as we emerge with our burden, people wonder where we have been journeying surely somewhere far out of town. There are some beauties that even an improve- ment association cannot destroy, and the close- guarded lots near us still are lovely until mowing time. In the early spring the dandelions make field of cloth of gold, to turn in a week or two into silvery expanses of feathery what-o'clocks. Later the June grass and the red-top are all in bloom on the low ridges, and the squirrel grass its plumes were "pussy-tails" in our childhood flourishes along the walks. The vacant lots between houses, too small to merit the attention of our enemy, still attract our explorations, and their green tangles yield rich and surprising results. A blue closed gentian 138 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO lately rewarded us. But usually it is some com- mon plant grown to unusual luxuriance great heads of reddest clover, or extra big black-eyed Susans, or a giant jimson weed, covered with a delicate web of wild morning-glory. It is the lots in the most aristocratic neighbor- hoods that yield the richest harvests. There are few children there, and those there are are hope- lessly well cared for. That they should spoil their clothes and scratch their skins rummaging in weeds is too dreadful to contemplate. The homes are splendid, the grounds spacious and faultlessly kept and pleasing to the eye of the wayfarer, but in midsummer the owners are else- where, and while children are dying of dirt and heat and smells in the Yards two miles back, and in the slums three miles cityward, the gates of these paradises are closed and the lawns untrod save by the foot of the gardener. In a morning walk along the shaded avenues you see no soul save a man or two moving the hose on the lawn, a letter carrier on his early rounds, a grocer's clerk calling for his order, or a maid engaged in some kitchen activity at the back door. The walk is solitary and beautiful and refresh- ing unless you allow your mind to go deeper, LOTS 139 and see the tragedy and injustice underneath it all. But, cui bono? Today let us enjoy alike the royal clematis and the stately cannas, the modest morning-glory and the plebeian jimson weed, the graces of the rich and the patience of the poor. To the man in the moon there is probably small difference in us mortals after all. " The deep, cool ravine" RAVINIA WE have two kinds of trips to the North Shore civilized and uncivilized. The first can be taken even by a perfect lady, so thoroughly proper and conventional are all the proceedings. Moreover, she can look pretty while she is at it; that is, if nature has been somewhat kind to her. She can wear her white dress and her lace hat with the pink rose garden, and come back unwearied and undamaged. Take a morning train to Highland Park. It is a restful pleasure to wander about the town. It has homey houses with rose hedges and vine- laced porches, and air fresh and sweet with indefinable woodsey fragrance. If you are going just once, find Vine street, and go eastward to the lake. You will come out through patches of delicious white clover, and tangled wood lots where 143 144 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO gray squirrels scamper in mock alarm as you approach, to the top of the high bluff, on one side of the road wild and weedy, on the other mown and even. There you may look down upon a stretch of sand beach punctuated with piers, where children are sporting gleefully on the sand or in the water, and if it is a calm day their voices are just audible above the washing of the waves. On the glorious blue expanse a sail drifts by. But for these sights you need not have come just here; the lake is the same for many long miles. You came to see the garden. So you must go back to the first road and turn south- ward. Soon you will find it, on the right, hemmed in by hedges of roses and marvelous shrubbery; known far and wide as the fairest of small gardens, so perfect is its succession of color, delicate and tender in the spring, gay and flaunting in mid- summer, rich and gorgeous in the autumn, and so artfully arranged are its vistas across unbroken lawns to the ravine and the road that form its limits. We entered the grounds, Mother and I, for the owner invites garden lovers to come and see. Down past the rockery we all at once found our- selves startling a whisking squirrel in a rustic RA VINA lookout point among the tree tops, overhanging the deep, cool ravine. Here we sat as though the place were our own and is it not if we may enjoy it? From the lookout a rustic bridge leads over a tiny tributary gully where all is un- touched wilderness. We should love to sit here a few moments sometimes when the world has been too much with us ; out of sight of everything human and artificial and toilsome. 146 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO The road makes a rather abrupt turn toward "the lake and down the ravine. It would bring us out on the sand with the children. But we can- not go down. Clothes forbid. In one's best clothes it is not possible to get below the surface, either of nature or human nature. Fine togs repel all confidences. If one wears them, she must suffer the consequences and be content to stay at the top of things. When you can bring yourself to leave the gar- den, you will need bodily refreshment, and in Highland Park it may be found to suit any taste or purse. And now, after luncheon, I will disclose the reason why you made this a civilized trip, when the wild scramble down the ravine bot- tom and out on the beach is so much more fun. It was because you were going to the concert in the woods; for not far away, in a pavilion built among the trees, a treat is in store. We have chosen the afternoon of children's day. The children, big an^ little, come in droves from their summer homes in the towns about, for there is nothing to pay ; with their mothers or with- out, with hats or without, with stockings or with- out, plainly dressed or elegantly dressed, under- RA VINA 147 dressed or overdressed, but all so happy and so at ease that to us at least, the children make half the pleasure of the concert ; especially quaint, fat, pic- ture-book Betty, aged three, who sat next us, and whom we love, though we never saw her before or since. The children delight the leader too. He keeps one eye on the orchestra, and the other eye and a continuous smile on the little ones bunched in the front seats. The orchestra plays to them and for them and their presence keeps the music from being too heavy for the non-elect like me. There is an indescribable charm in these con- certs in the woods, this blending of art and nature, and when the orchestra plays Mendelssohn's Spring Song, one's nerves fairly tingle with joy as he hears the bursting of buds and opening of leaves and the low sound of the roots struggling underground. Birds perch on the branches and trill and twitter. Far away, a coachman is driving slowly up and down among the carriages and automobiles. A white-robed mother is leading her restless little one by the hand, off among the trees. A pair of strolling lovers disappear down the green arched roadway singing their own Spring Song. And these gentle movements only add to the feeling of quiet and repose. 148 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO The music stops. The musicians put away their instruments. The audience rises and moves away in various directions. There is no hurry, no crowding, nothing to break the music's spell as you linger about; and by and by, when most have gone, you take your homeward way, fresh as the morning, peaceful as the evening, thor- oughly content with a lovely day even a day in the Forest of Arden. I . . . DUNE PARK WE are hungry for sand and we are watching the weather. When the rain storm has passed and the north winds are blowing at its back, there will come our glorious blue days, and then we are going to Dune Park. We must wear our shortest skirts and our highest boots, and take a trav- eler's lunch, light, but satisfying and plentiful, for we start at six and return at eight. And we must have the company of good friends, for it is to be a day in a complete wilderness. At Dune Park the train sets us down among box cars, loaded from the dunes themselves, for even they are marketable. The station keeper's gaze follows us wonderingly as we move off through the woods toward the steep lee slopes of sun-burned sand. Chicago's youthful spirit of hurry is with us yet, and we pant upward. But on reaching the top 152 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO all out of breath, we pause to reflect that there is nothing to do and the livelong day to do it in, and so we sit down to rest in the sweep of the wind, while the children, wild with delight, run screaming down with giant strides, and then struggle up the slipping sand again. Over the crest of the dune we are lost in a waste of sunlit yellow billows and shadowy green troughs, sombered here and there by what was DUNE PARK 153 once a pine forest, standing stark and bare as it emerges from its long burial in the devouring sand, the polished trunks still erect and unyield- ing ; ghostly skeletons of proud forest kings. I push eagerly on, for at the top oi an especially high wave I shall find what I came for, the won- derful clear color panorama of the blue water of the lake, the tawny hills of sand, and the blue sky over all. There may be white caps on the lake and white clouds in the sky. Other color there is none. The blue is so intense and vivid that by its very purity it grasps you and lifts you up, out of yourself. I have taken artist friends to see, but in vain. They do not paint it; they do not seem to see it. They want "atmosphere" where there is nothing but pure clear air, and they give me curious gray-green things when I want tawny yellow and brilliant blue. Vereshchagin has painted such things right. I do not know who else has. My artist friends have not. I am resolved to do it myself some day, though I know not brush or colors. It will be poster style, just blue and yellow splashes, but it will be truer than theirs. I always stop here and let the picture sink through my eyes into my brain. Some tired day next winter when the child-garden seems chiefly 154 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO weeds and nettles, this pure, cool, lovely land- scape will come to me, and the fresh clean wind will blow courage into my soul. The beach invites our thirsty company. A little well is dug just at the water's edge and each dry throat is satisfied. Then the big boy and his chums suddenly disappear behind a distant dune to do the thing that any proper man would rather do than eat take a swim. Instantly we are barefooted and running in the other direction along the hard smooth beach just on the wet side of the wave marks. Far we go, scaring a leggy little sandpiper nearly to death, and then we throw ourselves down in the shadow of a hill to burrow in the warm sand and watch the queer little sand-spiders burrowing too. When the boys appear around the curve we decorously return. Quickly the lunch is out and con- sumed, except what is prudently withheld for supper-time. In the autumn, the tangles of wild grape-vines among the dunes will be heavy with spicy flavor. You will eat the grapes to your heart's content, and you will carry back your pails and baskets full, for all the aroma of this beautiful day will be in each glass of the jelly that Mother will make. DUNE PARK 157 In the hollow behind the highest dune the bitter-sweet grows. The place is hard to reach, but the big boy and the o. m. can get to it and it is worth the effort, for we could never start in on a winter without bitter-sweet. Its berries will open in the cozy warmth of the autumn fires and disclose the precious coral ball in its golden saucer. 158 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO Back where the sand does not obey the wind so well, there are rush-bordered sloughs between the dunes that invite one at any season. In July the water in the middle is starred with pond- lilies, and in grape time you can gather exquisite blue fringed gentians around the edges. I worked very hard in a child-garden in a thickly crowded part of the city one warm summer. Perhaps the only thing I did worth while was to take flowers and give them to the children pan- sies and sweet-peas and field lilies and daisies. I shall never forget the look of hushed awe and reverence when I distributed water-lilies and the tenderness with which the children carried them away. Sedor begged for two he told me why. He was never bad after that. It seemed a garden in the mire. But the lilies gave me hope. ''Beautiful lives have sprung up in the darkest places, as pure white lilies full of fragrance have blossomed on stagnant waters." Ah! I know whereof I speak. Out of what seemed hopelessly dark, noisome pools, have grown some of the whitest, purest lilies of my child-garden. Some day I will tell you about Emma. Still farther back from the lake are undrained swamps on whose edges you may find fairy DUNE PARK 159 lady-slippers, and in the clear black water, un- canny sun-dews and fat pitcher-plants digesting their insect dinners. One spring day when we ranged the dunes with our botanist friend, we found almost under the clumps of blue-berried juniper, the trailing arbutus, and in one little spot he reverently showed us linnaea, the low fragrant arctic flower which the great Swedish botanist chose to bear his name. We must turn our faces back toward the rail- road early, for once out of sight of the lake it is easy to lose one's way and we may have a long walk to the station. To miss the train would mean to spend the night in Dune Park goodness knows how. We are going to camp for a week in the dunes, but until then we do not wish night to overtake us there. Laden with whatever harmless booty the sea- son yields, sunburned and weary of foot, we take the train for our long ride home. As we walk through the streets to our trolley car, we see many a dull eye brighten, and many a hard face soften into a smile at the sight of our load. We are better in body and in soul, as we come trailing some little clouds of glory back to our i6o ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO home in the breeze-swept city by the lake. We sleep long and well, and for days we are cheered by visions of yellow and blue as we shake lurking sand grains from our shoes and our clothes ; clean, clear sand that every human being loves. SOUTH SHORE WHAT shall we do now that South Shore is gone, gone the way of all our lake shore, gone to destruction say we, to improve- ment say the property owners? What shall we do the long seasons to come without this place to which we can hie in a few minutes for a few minutes and back before any one misses us? And when the barbarian gets strong within us, where are we to go for beach fires and com roasts? Peace to the ashes of many such, and a requiem to our beloved South Shore, the last bit of natural beach in all our miles of south side water front. For years now there has been no other spot where one might dip into the water except in the presence of coarse and curious crowds. Once there was a bathhouse at South Shore, little patronized by the general, but well known 163 164 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO to the few; and here we came in jovial companies when the east wind blew, to jump the waves in the surf and to run on the long hard beach. The bathhouse went long ago, and we raged. But the memories of the cool water still refresh us. SOUTH SHORE 165 After that, the boys found a refuge in the bushes, and on warm days appeared in the water as by magic. A low gravel ridge, undercut by the storm waves, rose from the narrow beach. It was covered with scraggy oaks overgrown with entangling vines, and here, cold from our bath- ing, we used to pile up drift-wood and brush, and in the grateful blaze of our crackling fire come back to summer. Then we boiled our coffee and roasted our corn, gotten, for a price, fresh off the stalk from the green garden acres to the west. We burned it of course, but it tasted the better. We burned our faces too, but never did we mind ! On gala occasions, such as the big boy's birth- day, which we always celebrated here, marsh- mallows were added to the menu, to be roasted on sharpened sticks to a fine brown, and taken off in one melting ambrosial mouthful. The need of water for our coffee or to quench our marsh -mallow thirst would give us our old glad excuse for going to hear the parrot talk German, to our never-failing merriment. It is really nothing surprising that a German's parrot should talk German but to hear it affected us almost to tears. So we filed in procession, pails in hand, through the back gate of the tall blank i66 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO board fence, for it is guiltless of opening at the front, to the neatly kept house inside. Then the kindly German woman who presides over all, having proudly shown us the fussy little garden with its rustic bridge and its grape arbor, and having sat the big little girl in the big swing, escorted us to the well. And we listened to the parrot talking German! We were so glad this house was here, and we were so glad there were no more! Our familiar unspoiled spot at South Shore seemed better than any other to us, for we knew it best, in all its changing phases, and here alone have the children followed the march of the seasons through. In earliest spring, when the first warm sun came, even while the wind was still keen from the cold blue lake, the brave pussy willows showed their snowy cotton tufts, and the fur- coated mullen leaves stuck their tips through the ground, while flocks of gray j uncos spread their white tail feathers as they skimmed over last No- vember's leaves, and blue birds, like animated bits detached from the sky, flitted and sang among the leafless branches of the oaks amid a chorus of other birds that we know not, while in the low places the awakening frogs lent their vocal aid. SOUTH SHORE 167 When w went a little later, we climbed the fence and crossed the field between the railroad and the beach, to find the blue fallen to the ground in the shape of myriads of violets, and still later to find it caught in the border of stately iris that grew among the ferns around the wet spot just back of the low ridge. South Shore had its seasons of pink as well as blue. In May, the low- growing crab- apple trees on the ridge were mounds of beauty. A little later, we deserted the field for the path along the road, bordered thick with wild roses. In mid-summer the aris- 1 68 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO tocratic pink deepened into the red of 'the buxom phlox and milkweed, and as the autumn came, the golden-rod brought its wealth to pay for the season's beauty. Now, we took to the field again, scaring up flocks of meadow-larks as we went. Their notes came out clearer and sweeter now that the fall was at hand, and their "Spring-o'-the-year" ranked them with the prophets. Then the rabbits showed their cotton tails oftener as we crossed our field, the leaves grew russet and brown, and we went no more to South Shore. At last, one winter's night the snow covered it all, and for us, for alway; and only the sturdy blue jay now keeps watch until until the hated clubhouse opens in the spring ! "Through the splendor of autumn woods" PALOS PARK AND last of all, in October, with the red sun shining and the cool wind blow- ing, go again to Palos Park. Gather up a neighborhood party, old and young, good and bad. Long will the memory of such a party be in my heart. A farmer's man was to meet us with a hayrack, and drive us about. What did meet us was a god, a red and bronze son of Italy, tall, erect, perfect featured, a very god of the harvest. And he came in a chariot, decked with green and scarlet and gold of leaves and berries and vines. Seats were in the chariot fit for kings' thrones, so gloriously were they bedecked. Like a gracious, smiling god did he help us in and bear us away through the splendor of autumn woods, to the spring whose waters we quaffed, to hilltops whence we looked westward over valleys that were seas of gorgeous color, and through cool roads along the winding creek. 171 172 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO Our bags were filled with nuts from the tall hickory and walnut trees, and as the great sun began to decline we found a grassy opening among the trees by a quiet road. Baskets were opened, a fire was lighted, and in the gathering twilight, with the cold evening wind rising, we ate, half-hungrily, half-worshipfully. The chil- dren frisked about the fire, roasting red-hots, (save the mark !) and all supremely happy. Then in the dusk we gathered the fragments, offered them up in one blaze of red and yellow flame, and sought again our god of the autumn. In the west the evening star glowed alone. In the east the harvest moon rose full and yellow. And between them we were driven back the long PA LOS PARK 173 road to the station, making the sweet night air merry with songs. All the children were good. How could it be otherwise? Our god deposited us at the station, filling our arms with the chariot's adornings. In my little best room I have them yet, ex quisitely tinted old-rose oak leaves, and as I look at them I whisper to myself, "Et ego in Arcadia." I, too, have been in Arcadia. THE SEASON OF FLOWERS THIS summer you have been our guest; we have taken you with us and shown you the way you should go. But you must know your lesson well, for next season you are to go forth alone, to preach the saving gospel of out-of-doors to your family and your friends and your friends' friends to the third generation. For Mother and I have missionary zeal. Now, the only thing the o. m. claims to know even a little, is how to cultivate a child-garden, and her main implement is repetition, strategic repetition. A theme with variations is her way; for children as well as men "must be taught as though you taught them not." 177 178 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO This particular variation she calls The Season of Flowers. If there are those in your family who lack strength of spirit or of body to go to the wild flowers, do you bring the flowers to them and keep the house sweet and beautiful from early April to late October. A few hours on Saturday afternoon or, better yet, early Sunday morning will bring joy to dozens who see your trophies, and much greater joy to you who gather them; for of flowers more than of any other thing in the world is it true that it is better to give than to receive. But there are flowers to be picked, and flowers not to be picked, and before you can go with us you must be carefully instructed in this matter, else our present wrath will fall upon your head, and your own future conscience will smite you for your thoughtlessness, even as the o. m.'s sometimes smites her now. Moreover, there are flowers of which one may pick armfuls, and others of which a handful is better, and still others of which a single blossom is the limit of propriety ; and there are flowers to be picked in full bloom, and flowers to be picked in the bud, and flowers to be taken roots and all. And there is art in knowing the best length of stem, and the right THE SEASON OF FLOWERS 179 amount of foliage; and there is the important first lesson of picking one kind at a time. Oh, the hopeless flower mixtures that one sees ! And always know that the best of your trip is what you can bring back only in your memory ; the picture of the flowers where God meant them to be, in their settings of meadow or prairie or woodland. We have little patience with our friends whose first instinct is for possession, and who instantly fall to picking and digging, as soon as their feet strike soft earth. If picking flowers is a great art, arranging them is a greater. Ask the Japanese. But there is safety in the rule keep to one kind at a time. When you come with us you are not to violate it. Thus instructed, we will take you first for the hepaticas that early April finds peeping out on the northward slopes of the ravines on the north shore. Lakeside or Winnetka or Glencoe will be the place. You may bring a shoe box or a tin cracker box, for you are to take some home, a blue and a white and a pink-tinted one per- haps, and these with their roots and much ad- hering leaf mold. You must never pick the blos- soms. They will only droop and wither miser- ably and to no purpose. When you have your plants home, put them i8o ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO in low pots with their own woods earth, and cover the pots with crape paper of the same shade as the blossoms, and you will have prepared your sweetest Easter gifts. Choose the recipients with care, and admonish them to plant the hepaticas, when they have done blooming, in a sheltered corner of the lawn near the front fence; and next spring, and many succeeding springs, every passer-by who has known the country life, but especially the old people, will cry out at sight of them, and lean over the fence to gaze at their soft-tinted, waving petals, first harbingers of spring, and talk to the children about them, and go away smiling and reminiscent. In the ravines with the hepaticas, but on the warmer south slopes you will find dancing anemones, sweet, fragile and unpickable. Let them alone. By the time the hepaticas are gone to sleep the violets will be up in the woods along the Desplaines and at Beverly Hills, and a little later in the ravines to the north, and later still the Flossmoor woods and Stewart Ridge will be blue with them. Take a few of the roots and do as you did with the hepaticas, and also pick many bunches of blossoms, mixed plentifully with their own green THE SEASON OF FLOWERS 183 leaves. You need not fear that you will exter- minate them. Next spring there will be just as many, and plenty for all who come. And take all the children you know with you, lest one of them should ever send a pang to your heart by saying, as a sweet city child of fourteen once said to me very wistfully, "But, Miss Emily, I never saw violets growing." The most beautiful of the flowers in the ra- 184 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO vines is the great white trillium, tall and spot- less in a circle of its own green leaves; but of these you must never take but a handful, and a very small handful at that, for they are sadly diminishing year by year, as the city reaches farther and farther out. Best of all, take just one apiece to those at home, and put each in a tall clear glass vase ; and for yourself, enjoy them THE SEASON OF FLOWERS 185 where they stand fluttering beside the waxy May-apples, in the misty green of the maiden-hair and meadow rue on the cool shadowy slopes. As I read my new seed catalogue lately, I was delighted to find that the white trillium is being domesticated, and that the plants can be bought. I wonder if, treated as a garden pet, it can ever be quite its own wild shy self. While the trillium is being threatened with extinction on the north shore, the blushing arbutus and the rare sweet linnaea on the dunes are safe, because it takes long and patient search to find them, and he who will take that trouble, loves them too well to harm them. In mid-May, the wild crab-apple blossoms be- gin to open, and it is best to gather the branches that are in bud, and let them spread their petals in water, for the flowers are too frail to transport. You can find them in many places: at Sag back of the churchyard, along Western avenue between Tracy and Morgan Park, at Glencoe and Ravinia, at River Forest, and best of all at Palos Park, where on every hand great pink thickets brighten the fresh young green of the landscape. Indeed, if you have not seen Palos Park in crab- apple week you have missed the loveliest sight that Nature spreads for you the whole round year. 1 86 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO And, moreover, you have no excuse, for a few hours are enough, and you could find the time somewhere in that beautiful week. June will bring the climax of the early and delicate blossoms in the shape of the roses that bloom all about on the railroad embankments everywhere. They too must be picked in the bud, with plenty of leaves, and put, just a few together, in finger bowls, so that the leaves and stems may show through the clear glass. Their delicate color and matchless perfume will make the whole house glad. THE SEASON OF FLOWERS 187 After the roses comes the mid-summer carnival of less exquisite but stronger, more decorative and more abundant flowers; but there are many that make the fields and roadsides showy, and yet are useless for bouquets, such as the red phlox, the puccoons and the lupines, for when picked they shed their corollas in deep dejection. The shooting-stars and gaudy painted-cups that are so effective in masses in the fields, are not strong enough in texture or color to be useful. Even the blue iris, the haughty fleur-de-lis, be- comes a mass of corruption when cut and in water. I used to class the blue vervain of the vacant lots with the unpickables, but I know better now. If you put the stems immediately into water, it will hold its erect freshness and make a charming table decoration. Our favorite flowers for decorating house or church or child-garden are the large white golden- eyed daisies. You can take them by the arm load and wagon load and no one misses them, and next year you can take just as many more. They grow at Tracy, Homewood, Willow Springs and out the "Archey Road"; but this last place I will not locate, for they are on the land of an irate foreigner who is likely to shoot you for trespassing. The daisies are killing out his 1 88 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO timothy, and the people who come for the daisies are spoiling what is left. So, though they are a little later at Tracy, you must wait. They always come before the child-garden is scattered for the summer, and the garden is always taken out to them and they are always brought in to the garden. As you get off the train at Tracy, look back along the track. A florist has his farm here, and at the beginning of daisy time his acres of rose-scented peonies are in full bloom, a gorgeous sight to see. Then go westward past the florist's house garden, where you may look over the fence at rare iris and pansies and what-not, and to the THE SEASON OF FLOWERS 189 top of the "hill," the long ridge that extends from Beverly Hills to Blue Island, and which yields the same harvest at many points. A sunny Sunday morning in the daisy-patch is not to be forgotten. You must take shears or a strong knife, for the stems are tough, and you want so many; and you will need strings to tie the daisies in tight bunches, so that you may carry the more. And for a while you stoop to cut them, and then you just sit down where they are thickest and pick around you. It is beautiful to see the big little girl sitting so, almost buried in the tall daisies, the white ribbon on her top-knot making her look like a larger blossom as she bends over her lapful to tie them up. The west wind sways the flowers and the ribbon. The great feather-bed clouds sail past, miles above you in the clear blue sky. Only the distant sounds^ from the early golfers break the Sabbath stillness. As you go back you will find a few wild straw- berries under the edge of the sidewalk, just enough to remind you what nectar is. You have had such a season of refreshment that you find yourself pitying the church-goers whom you fall in with on your way home. When you have eaten the dinner that has been 1 90 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO preparing itself while you have been gone, if you have learned the gentle art of fireless cooking, you will fit your pieces of wire screening into your bowls and pitchers to make each daisy stand up free and independent, just as it grew. You can put some in everything you have that will hold water, but always very loosely dis- posed, and have plenty left to give to your neigh- bors, and for a week or two your house will be a bower of beauty. And if you like, and we al- ways do like, by going several times you can have a continuous "daisy-fest" of a month at least. With the daisies comes vacation, and then we can range farther and oftener. Now and then toward the end of daisy time we happen upon a lily near the daisy haunts, but to find them 1 in abundance we must go across the ridge and into the low fields on the western side. . And how abundant they are! Dozens and scores of them ! They are the gorgeous, red, spotted lilies, like the tiger lilies of the garden, but brighter; those that I always see when I hear "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow." Pick them with long stems and be careful not to stain your garments with the deep brown pollen that the swaying stamens will dust over you May-apples in the misty green of meadow-rue THE SEASON OP FLOWERS 193 as impartially as over the bills of the iridescent mites of humming birds that sometimes hover over them, almost while you pick, to take their last sip of sweetness from the lily's deep narrow throat. The pavement dwellers that meet you return- ing will never suspect or believe that you are carrying wild flowers. The lilies grow also in the moist places along the railroad between Glencoe and Ravinia, in the open fields at Clyde and Berwyn, and prob- ably at many points between the western edge of the city and the Desplaines river. The field lilies yield the palm but to the most magnificent of all America's native flowers, the pink lady-slipper, and her attractive but shyer cousins in yellow. The pink slippers are full two inches long and marvelously beautiful in form and tints. Years ago they grew thickest where East Chicago now is, and once I stood on a low sand ridge and counted more than two hundred bordering a swampy spot. They tossed, proud and free in the full sunshine, at the top of their tall, straight stalks, yet I picked them down to the ground, all I could carry, and they made my neighbors and my child-garden glad. Now I would not harm one on any account. I am J94 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO more civilized than I was, but that does not bring back the vanished orchids. I will only whisper to you, very privately, when and where they bloom, for now one is rarely seen, save in the clutch of some ruthless picnicker who has found and beheaded one of them, and in whose careless hand it hangs limp and pathetic. After the lilies are faded comes a long glory of yellow ! Plebeian sunflowers from the fields that any trolley line reaches, and more plebeian and plentiful black-eyed-Susans, coarse and common, but yielding place to none in decorative beauty. And then, in August, come the royal golden-rod, and the royal asters of all shades from white through lavender to deepest purple. You can go in any direction for them, but they seem purest in their coloring and most free from dust in the uplands between the ravines to the north. And for once you may mix your flowers- at random, for the golden-rod and the asters never quarrel with one another, no matter what tints you find. Arm loads are in order ! Pick the stems very long. Choose particularly the more plume-like golden- rods and the lighter shades of asters, and put the bunches just as you gathered them into tall, wide-mouthed jars and pitchers. As you garner your gold and purple, the sumach THE SEASON OF FLOWERS 195 thickets turning crimson in the first frosts will warn you that you must be thinking of your winter stores. Bitter-sweet you must have, and red rose hips, and the sand hills of Dune Park "will yield both, and at the same time perhaps, on the edge of some slough, belated fringed gentians and one or two lonely cardinal flowers. So late, you will get only a handful of the pure deep-blue gentians. The cardinals you will take with their roots, for in your garden they will thrive and bloom and multiply, and their intense glowing color will be many seasons' delight. You will make one more trip to the north shore for late golden-rod and the red berries of the Solomon's seal, and one trip to Pullman for some of the cat-tails that are filling Calumet Lake. Our brown grasses for the brown vase that would be nothing without them, we have collected early and quite incidentally at Morgan Park. Thither we go sometimes for an hour or two, just as we used to go to South Shore, for Mother discovered long ago a charming walk that takes us all in a minute out of the suburban atmosphere into the real country air. At the end of the Mor- gan Park trolley line a path leads northward along the cemetery into a veritable country road, 1 96 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO with a farm and an apple orchard on one side and tangled natural woods on the other. Sitting by the farm fence in the shade of the apple trees we eat our luncheon and are indescrib- ably refreshed. A busy red-headed wood-pecker is spiraling around the trunk of a gnarled oak tree in the woods across the road. Two squawking blue jays are quarrelling in another tree close by; and the farmer's dog is sniffing uneasily through the fence. We walk on to the north and east through woods and fields and out on the main trolley line, and we make us a brown bouquet as we go, with rose-brown docks and yellow- brown grasses. For the red-bronze oak branches that we shall hang in the dining room, and arrange in our copper bowls for Thanksgiving time, we pay a last visit to Palos Park on a mellow hazy after- noon, bringing back arm loads of branches and heart loads of thanksgiving that it has been given to us to know and love God's country, and that we have the health and strength to gain more health and strength as each summer season adds to our soul's stature. 'On a mellow, hazy afternoon" GENTLE reader, the summer is ended, and the autumn far advanced. And as the season has ripened, so in varying degree have we. The big little girl has stretched beyond the boundaries of her summer frocks, and clamors to have her hair tied up and hid with monster ribbon bows. The big boy has symptoms of the trying time when he will roll his trousers toward his knees, be melancholy and "sporty" by turns, and refer to himself and the like as men. But Mother has nursed him through chicken-pox and measles, and will bring him safely even out of this. Dear Mother, who used to play with her crow- ing babies on the floor, is still as old as they. Swiftly and unconsciously she adjusts herself to them. Her joys and her duties change and bring her growth. Only the o. m. seems stationary, her children always young, her round of life unchanging. She knows that she is slowly crystallizing, and only prays that the crystal may be clear and many- faceted, with all its angles true. Father has come back and says that there is 199 200 ROUND ABOUT CHICAGO nothing on earth so happy as an old maid when she "gives up/' I, the o. m., long since gave up, and I am happy. Very happy through the long sweet summer and the lingering golden autumn. But now the silver moon rides high, and the red sun seeks its sol- stice; and with the longer shadows comes a faint, questioning dread of the lonely winter even the winter of life. " The lonely winter even the winter of life."