the convent, but it was re-constructed, and inhabited by the Dames de St. Pierre till the Revolution, when it became national property, and has since been devoted to its present

uses.

The Library, one of the finest in France, the mint, arsenal, barracks, and numerous other buildings common to all great cities, call for no special notice. There are several hospitals, some of which are of considerable interest. The grand Hôtel-Dieu is probably the oldest in France; it was founded by Queen Ultrogotha, the wife of Childebert, thirteen centuries ago. The present erection dates from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the garden is the tombstone of Young's step-daughter, whom he has immortalised in the "Night Thoughts" under the name of Narcissa. The Hospice de la Charité was founded after a famine in 1531; the Hospice de l'Antiquaille, from the numerous Roman antiquities found on the site. Here once stood the palace inhabited by Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Domitian, Severus, Caracalla, and Germanicus, and in which the Emperor Claudius was born.

Lyons takes a high rank amongst the industrial cities of the world. Its workshops for the construction of machinery, its manufactories of chemical products and coloured papers, are justly celebrated; but it is from the production of its silk fabrics that Lyons derives its chief fame. This industry, in which Lyons has no rival, was first brought from Italy. Florentines, Genoese, and others, driven away by revolutions, did for France what in after-times expatriated Frenchmen did for other countries to which they were compelled to flee by reason of tyranny at home. By decree of Louis XI., experienced workmen settling at Lyons were exempt from taxes levied on other inhabitants. Twelve thousand silk-weavers were busy at work in Lyons by the middle of the sixteenth century. At the Revocation of the Ediet of Nantes, it seemed as if the silk industry was about to be annihilated. More than three-fourths of the looms were silenced; but in the course of a couple of generations the industry resumed its former proportions, and steadily increased, till Lyons became par excellence the city of beautiful silks. Inventions and improvements of various kinds have been introduced into the process of manufacture, and Jacquard, a native of Lyons, by the invention of the loom that bears his name, revolutionised the silkweaving industry.

The Lyonnese silk-weavers mostly work in their own dwellings. A man with his family will keep from two to six or eight looms going, often employing journeymen. The silk merchants of Lyons, about 600 in number, supply the patterns and the silk; there are about 40,000 looms at work in the city and in the vicinity. Formerly, the weavers were nearly all grouped together in the northern part of the city; but the employers, in order to lessen the influence of the close trade organisations, have succeeded in distributing the industry throughout the neighbouring villages, though La Croix-Rousse still holds the lion's share

The commerce of Lyons is very considerable. It is the central station for disseminating through France the Oriental and other products imported at Marseilles. It expends 200,000,000 franes yearly in silk, produced in France, Italy, Japan, India, and China. It exports its silk fabrics chiefly to America, England, and Russia, to the value of about 450,000,000 francs annually.

CHICAGO.

The Red Men of the Prairies-The Pioneers of France-The Fur Traders-The Massacre of the Garrison-The AngloSaxon Advance-A Mournful Exodus-The Rising Tide of Population-The Great Fire of 1871-The March of the Flames-Anarchy and Panic-Driven into Lake Michigan-The Loss-The Civic Phoenix-Commerce-The River and its Fleet-The Main Streets-Public Buildings-Lake Park-The Refinements of Civilisation-NewspapersThe Churches-The Residence Quarters-The Schools-Douglas-The Urban Parks-The Granaries-A City of Cattle -The Trade in Timber-The Water-works-Problems in Drainage-The Great Western Railway System-The Parks and Boulevards-Suburban Towns-The Prairie.

BOUT one-third of the way across the American continent (from east to west), midway between Hudson's Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, and between Manitoba and New York, stands the modern city of Chicago, near the head of Lake Michigan, a vast fresh-water sea, 350 miles long, and united with the distant ocean by other great lakes and navigable channels. The rapid rise of this city, from the humble position of an Indian trading post to metropolitan wealth and splendour; the unparalleled and still-expanding volume of its commerce; the magnitude of the disaster which, but a few years ago, destroyed it; and the foremost place which it now occupies among the granaries of the world: all these bear witness to the intense energies which have been concentrated here, and have made the civic name famous throughout a large part of Christendom. If there is romance in the history of commerce (and the records of the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company show that there is), surely the annals which describe the development of the Indian camp and the log-fort into the fourth American city must be full of the deepest interest.

The great State of Illinois, of which Chicago is the metropolis, was originally the domain of a nation of Indians who called themselves the Illini, or the "manly men." The first European explorers in this unknown region were Marquette and Joliet, two Frenchmen, who travelled hitherward from Canada in 1673; and, adding a French termination to the tribal name, described it as the land of the Illinois. Missionaries and soldiers of France, from Canada and Louisiana, afterwards established stations and settlements here and there upon the prairies, in execution of the plans of the Bourbon kings, which contemplated the erection of a vast Latin empire, reaching from the Mexican Gulf to the hyperborean regions. When Wolfe defeated the Marquis de Montcalm, before Quebec, Canada and the more distant and little-known prairies were annexed to the possessions of Great Britain, and her garrisons occupied the chief points in Illinois. But in 1778 Colonel George Rogers Clarke led a small army of several hundred frontiersmen across the Alleghanies from Virginia, and took possession of this vast

western domain, overcoming the weak and detached royalist posts, and formally annexing the country to Virginia. Sixteen years later, Virginia ceded it to the United States; and in 1809 the territory of Illinois was formed. In 1818 it passed from the subordinate and dependent condition of a territory to that of a sovereign State. The population then was 30,000. At that time, within the memory of citizens now living, the area of 2,000 miles from Ohio to the Pacific Ocean was a wilderness, inhabited only by bands of savages, with military posts and the log-forts of traders scattered at wide intervals, and a few feeble French hamlets along the Mississippi River. From the rude stations of the American Fur Company, a thriving commerce was carried on with the disdainful aborigines; and occasional detachments of soldiers marched cautiously (and not without disastrous fighting) over long solitary regions, now as densely peopled as Devon or Warwickshire. Less than fifty years ago, the population of Chicago consisted of a dozen families, exclusive of two companies of United States infantry in garrison at the fort.

The first Europeans who saw the Chicago River were the French explorers, Joliet and Père Marquette, who descended its course in 1673, returning northward from the Mississippi Valley; and Marquette wintered there the following year. The aboriginal name of the locality was derived from the chikagon, or wild onion, which grew abundantly on the banks of the river, and perfumed the air for a great distance. The primary meaning of the word was "strong; and its secondary application, referring to the quality of the onion's flavour, is easily comprehensible. There are old hunters who confidently assert that the name chicago is applied by the Indians to that very uncomfortable little beast, the Mephitis americana; but the local archæologists and philologists hotly dispute that statement.

About thirty years after the dreary winter encampment of Père Marquette had broken up, the French maps marked this site with the words Fort Checagon, as if to indicate its destination as a station in the great trans-continental line of Bourbon fortresses.

It was not until the year 1796, however, that the first settler, Jean Baptiste Pointe au Sable, a San Domingo negro, built a hut by the lonely stream. But he soon moved on, touched with the Western nomadism; and an adventurous Frenchman, Le Mai, succeeded to his improvements. The unrest which abides in the air of this locality seized him also, and he made haste to sell out his place to the first substantial Saxon settler, John Kinzie, an agent of the American Fur Company, who came hither to trade with the Indians, and thus became the founder of the city. The local historians have likened this honest trader, ambitious only for the acquisition of beaver-skins, to Romulus. But his foundation is not to be compared with Rome, fortunately, for her fortresses are the lofty granaries-her gladiators are the butchers who kill cattle at the Stock-yards for the English markets-and in place of the old Latin legions, marching out to devastate the nations, Chicago continually sends abroad from her gates bread for millions upon millions of far-away peoples. So Kinzie's work was, on the whole, better than that of Romulus.

The first commerce of Chicago consisted in the exchange of European wares and trinkets for the furs and peltries which the Indians brought in their canoes along the Mississippi and up the Illinois. From the upper navigable waters of the latter stream, the canoes and their cargoes were carried over a short portage, and then dropped down the Chicago River. In 1794 the Indians had ceded to the United States (among other tracts) "a piece of land six

miles square, at the mouth of the Chickago River;" and in the year 1804 the Government established a fortified post on this remote verge of its dominions. The vast territory of Louisiana, extending up the Mississippi Valley almost to this parallel of latitude, had been purchased from Napoleon the year before, for fifteen million dollars; and the stations of the

army were advanced farther into the unknown West. About the Chicago River were the wigwams and hunting-grounds of the valiant Pottawatomie Indians, with whom the little garrison-a company of infantry-dwelt on terms of amity and fraternity. The fort was only a frontier block-house or palisade, without artillery, and there were five houses outside it. A subterranean way ran from the stockade to the river, which could be used to procure water for

the garrison, or as a sally-port in case of siege. The entire commerce of the place was done by a small schooner, sent out by the United States once a year from Buffalo, to carry supplies to the garrison. Occasionally a few Canadian bateaux, filled with merry voyageurs and halfbreeds, descended from the north, from the distant fortress-rock of Mackinaw, or the remoter towns toward the outflow of the St. Lawrence. More often the birch-bark canoes of the Indians lightly skimmed the surface of Lake Michigan, silent, bird-like, fleet, bearing the proud chiefs of the forest-clans to hunting, or festival, or battle. Powerful as the tribes were, and weak as the attacking van-guard of civilisation appeared, the red hunters kept peace with their invaders, as if remembering the prophecy of Hiawatha.

When war broke out between Great Britain and the United States in 1812, as a result of the arbitrary conduct of the former Power in impressing British seamen found on American ships, the contest, begun on the high seas, spread to the innermost recesses of the continent, and along the course of the Great Lakes. The chiefs of the Indian tribes, who had suffered in various ways at the hands of the Americans, and had been kindly treated and plied with presents by the British officers, in many cases declared in favour of the latter, and ranged their red warriors under the royal standard. Among these were the traculent Pottawatomies, one of the most valiant and pitiless of the prairie clans. The hostility of the Indians, and the danger that the wretched stockade of Fort Dearborn might be attacked by British armed vessels on the lake, caused the commander of the army to send orders that Chicago should be evacuated. The supplies were to be distributed as a peace-offering to the Indians, and the troops received orders to retreat eastward to Fort Wayne. Captain Heald, the commander of the post, was urged by his officers, who dreaded the treachery of the natives, to hold the works until reinforcements came up, or at least until the hostile British fleet arrived, when they might surrender to Christians and gentlemen. On the other hand, Winnimeg, a friendly Indian, advised him to march out as soon as possible, and reach a secure distance while the warlike tribe should be plundering the fort. But the captain-a little sentimental, withal, and sadly irresolute-finally decided to trust the good faith and mercy of the savages, and held a solemn council with them, agreeing to surrender the ammunition and supplies in Fort Dearborn if they would escort his company in safety to Fort Wayne. After this bargain was concluded, the captain destroyed all the gunpowder and spirits in his charge, and, by thus breaking faith with the enemy, invited their vengeance. The retreating garrison marched along the shore of Lake Michigan, with twelve friendly Miami warriors in advance, the soldiers in the centre, and the wagon-train, containing the baggage, the sick, and the women and children, in the rear. As they emerged from the works, the garrison band played the Dead March in "Saul." When the doomed procession had reached a point a mile and a half from the fort, the Miami scouts discovered an ambush, and were put to flight by sudden volleys of musketry. The soldiers were formed into line, and charged over the sand-hills into the midst of ten times their number of Pottawatomies, where they fought with desperate valour until two-thirds of them were slain. The wife of Lientenant Helm was the heroine of the scene, urging on the soldiers and moving about in the thickest of the battle. While vigorously wrestling with one of the savages, and trying to get his scalping-knife, another Indian seized her and bore her into the lake, where