an Academy of Art; and several scientific societies, of various sorts, unite the devotees of the crucible and microscope.

The study of music has received much attention; and four large conservatories are maintained by the students who flock hither from the North-Western region. Another group of educational institutions is devoted to the study of medicine, to which four colleges are dedicated. The hospitals of Chicago are numerous and extensive, the chief of them being the vast Mercy Hospital, which is under the care of the devoted and beloved Sisters of Mercy. Another group of institutions, semi-charitable and semieducational, is found in the convents and monasteries, of which there are twelve, mostly of the modern orders of nuns.

The public schools are large, costly, and efficient, giving free instruction to scores of thousands of pupils, and strongly aiding in the desirable amalgamation of this Anglo-Dane-Scandinavian-Teutonic-Celtic community into a homogeneous (as well as harmonious) unity. The cramming process, which is so universal in the Northern States schools, is in full flower here, and if the children can effectively learn half of what they say by rote, their intellectual life is well-founded. But one lesson is fairly and surely taught, and that is equality. The child of the navvy is seated alongside the heir of the grain-king, and has the same privileges and opportunities, so far as the schools are concerned.

No small share of the marvellous success and influence of Chicago is due to the conspicuous ability of its newspapers, which are circulated throughout all the North-West, and sound the glories of the Garden City over the remotest prairies of Dakota and Nebraska. The Tribune and the Times are the largest of these, and sometimes contain in a single number twenty pages of the size of the London Times, closely printed, and treating a great number of topics,

usually with marked ability and enterprise. They give not only the chronicles of these fresh-water States, but also the latest news from the British Isles and Europe, the daily whims of the Sublime Porte, the battle-records of South Africa and Central Asia, and the politics of Australia and Japan, all of these topics being handled with noteworthy breadth of treatment and clear comprehension of the subjects. Madrid, Constantinople, and Calcutta are practically nearer to these editors than they are to those of Berlin and Paris. The Inter-Ocean, another daily newspaper, has a telegraph-line of its own running to Washington, 800 miles distant, which is the longest wire in the world under journalistic control.

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and near the southerly extension of the avenue. These beautiful suburban reads, with their lines of trees and shrubbery, have given rise to the title of "The Garden City," which Chicago greatly prizes.

Not far from the beginning of the boulevard leading to the South Park, in a small square on the shore of Lake Michigan, is the mausoleum of Stephen A. Douglas, over which rises a tall and graceful pillar, surmounted by a bronze statue of the famous Western orator. This man was a fair type of many of the leaders of the new States, and received the heartiest homage of the people, who delighted to call him "The Little Giant." Born and educated in New England, he emigrated to the West at an early age, and rose from the humble duties of an auctioneer's clerk to the highest positions in the gift of the State. For fourteen years Douglas was a Senator of the United States, and just before the breaking out of the Civil War, he became a candidate for the Presidency. Abraham Lincoln, another lawyer and politician of the same State, whom he had defeated in the contest for the Senatorship, easily beat him in the race for the greater prize, and became Chief Magistrate of the Union. Soon afterwards, when the deadly flames of sectional battle were beginning to crackle all over the country, the Little Giant died, and was honoured with a royal sepulture among the people whom he had so long represented.

Near the Douglas Monument are the handsome and commodious stone buildings of the Chicago University, occupying a domain which was given for the purpose by the Senator himself. The various departments of this institution contain several hundred students, many of whom are women; and the academic faculty is affiliated with other groups of professorships, forming schools of law and medicine. The observatory has one of the largest equatorial telescopes in the world; and doubtless the genius loci will not be entirely content until it is quite the largest, and has a lens of unapproachable dimensions. The University was founded in 1858, and has already attained a position of great influence. The buildings are of the beautiful Athens marble, which is quarried not far away, and has been extensively used in the rebuilding of Chicago; and their spires and towers rise high over the surrounding groves of oaks. The proximity of Lake Michigan, with its sea-like expanse of blue water, and of charming semi-rural residence-streets, affluent in trees and lawns, makes the locality very pleasant and attractive, and in high favour as a place for homes.

In this district is the beautiful little enclosure of Aldine Park, surrounded by handsome houses, and adorned with abundant trees and shrubbery. Union Park, Jefferson Park, and other urban enclosures of the West Division, are similarly surrounded and ornamented, and form very pleasant features among the long and densely-peopled streets. The first-named, Union Park, contains 23 acres, and the expenditure of £20,000 has made a pretty landscape garden out of this bit of dull prairie, including some creditable hillocks and a gracefully winding pond. The pleasant residence-quarter of the West Division surrounds the park on all sides.

It was once said by an eminent orator in Boston (and it is as true in Great Britain and Western Europe as in America), "There is not a man here the beef upon whose table yesterday was not the cheaper to him because these people laid out their world-renowned and wonderful system of stock-yards. There is not a man here the bread upon whose table

is not cheaper because these people, in the very beginning of their national existence, invented and created that marvellous system for the delivery of grain which is the model and pattern of all the world."

Chicago indeed stands paramount in respect to its grain-elevators, of which it has twenty, with a storage capacity of more than 16,000,000 bushels, and handling 160,000,000 bushels a year. One granary alone stores 1,300,000 bushels, and its yard holds 400 of the long and large American railway cars, which are unloaded by lifts, or elevators, running to the top of the building, 130 feet above the ground, where the grain is weighed, and then sent down in spouts, or chutes, to its appropriate bin. Forty ears, containing 140,000 bushels, are unloaded in an hour, and the grain stored. The process of shipment is even more rapid, since 180,000 bushels can be sent out in ten hours. The grain is taken by elevators from its bins to the top of the building, where the weighing is done, and then long spouts lead it into the cars, or the holds of the vessels lying alongside. The elevators are exceedingly ugly buildings, sombre and gloomy, with vast blank walls extending to a cathedral's height, looking very dry and dusty, and covered with dejected and melancholy roofs. Withal, it is impossible to avoid them, so hugely do they tower over the tributary city, of which they are the raison-d'étre. It would be æsthetic death for Mr. Ruskin to see one of these vast and ungainly utilitarian temples of Ceres; but many a Lancashire operative and London tradesman gets his flour several shillings a barrel cheaper, and can thereby have more and better bread, because they exist and are ceaselessly busy. The works of elevating and shipping are not the most important among those pertaining to the elevators, which are storehouses, first and foremost, where the grain-product is held for a demand, or during the fluctuations of the market. Primarily, therefore, they are granaries, the chief magazines of the nation, the reservoirs which compel Dantzic and Odessa to be reasonable.

In the year 1879, nearly 800,000 tons of grain, valued at £9,000,000, were despatched from Chicago to Europe under through bills of lading; and vast quantities were sent eastward by the five trunk-lines of railway, to be shipped from Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The time is close at hand when British steamships of 2,000 tons shall lie at the docks of Chicago, to which navigation will be easy and direct when the magnificent system of Canadian inland canals shall have been finished. Then Birmingham and Leeds and Sheffield can outbid New England and Pennsylvania, landing their goods in the very centre of the American continent, amid a teeming and generous population.

The city of quadrupeds known as the Union Stock-Yards covers more than half a square mile, in the South-Western Prairie suburb, and is by a long way the greatest market for livestock in the world. More than 8,000,000 head of stock (1,200,000 cattle, 6,500,000 hogs, 300,000 sheep) are brought here every year; and the careful attention which they receive is shown by the accommodations made ready for them, which include eight miles of streets, four miles of watering-troughs, ten miles of feeding-troughs, more than thirty miles of drainage, and huge tanks of water, supplied from artesian wells. All the great railways which converge at Chicago have spur-tracks here, with a thousand feet of platform to each, and an ingenious system of gates and shoots, by whose aid 500 cattle-vans can be loaded or unloaded at once, and within less than half an hour. The trains are drawn up before a

street of pens-the sides of the vans are removed-the cattle step gladly down the inclined plane into their pens, where the watering-trough lines one side, and the manger is on the other. Their owners pass out to the handsome stone building of the Cattle Exchange, where they meet and bargain with the large buyers, who are taken out to inspect the animals. The trade being concluded, the cattle are driven into a great weighing-pen, from which they are transferred to another railway-train, and sent eastward, rested and refreshed. Cash down is always paid to the drovers, who then retire to the great hotel adjoining, to enjoy their ease with dignity. A telegraph-office in the Yards continually reports the ruling prices of beef, pork, and mutton in Europe and America, and sends out the latest local quotations. So large is the volume of business here, that a flourishing National Bank has been established, and an exchange, with an

impregnable safe-deposit vault. There is also a huge yellow-stone hotel, where one may see the picturesque drovers and "cow-boys" from the remote West, the solid farmers of Illinois and Indiana, and the wealthy speculators from the long-settled East. Formerly most of the Texas cattle were brought to this point, and droves came in even from the Mexican frontiers, under the charge of those interesting desperadoes, the cow-boys of the Southern Plains. But much of this business is now done in Kansas, a State far to the westward, the vast herds being driven up through the Indian Territory at regular seasons each year.

In the vicinity of the Stock-Yards

are the great establishments used for the packing of pork and beef, where the processes which change the plump and portly animals into the linings of provision-barrels, or the dressed meats of the markets, are carried on with marvellous rapidity and precision. In the year 1880, 5,375,000 hogs were slaughtered here, making more than 1,000,000,000 pounds of pork, which was valued at £12,500,000. This enormous business began in 1853, and has attained its present development since that time. In 1880, also, half a million cattle were killed at these Yards. Not many years ago, the city of Cincinnati was the chief pork-market of the Republic, and proudly assumed the sobriquet of Porkopolis; but now its sister city of the West has far surpassed it in this respect, and turns out five times as much dressed pork each year.

It was long since discovered that the most surprising results of economy in freight were obtainable by feeding the bulky corn to the prairie hogs. As a local orator once remarked, amid applause greater than Demosthenes ever received at Athens: "The hog eats the corn, and Europe eats the hog. Corn thus becomes incarnate: for what is a hog but fifteen or