When the train drew into Chicago we were met by a tally-ho, which the obliging Mr. Dean had been kind enough to announce to each and every one of us as the train stopped. The idea of riding to the World’s Fair in such a thing and with this somewhat conspicuous party of school-teachers went very much against the grain. Being very conscious of my personal dignity in the presence of others and knowing the American and middle-West attitude toward all these new and persistently derided toys and pleasures of the effete East and England, I was inclined to look upon this one as out of place in Chicago. Besides, a canvas strip on the coach advertising the nature of this expedition infuriated me and seemed spiritually involved with the character of Mr. Dean. That bounder had done this, I was sure. I wondered whether the sophisticated and well-groomed superintendent of schools would lend himself to any such thing when plainly it was to be written up in the _Republic_, but since he did not seem to mind it I was mollified; in fact, he took it all with a charming gayety and grace which eventually succeeded in putting my own silly provincialism and pride to rout. He sat up in front with me and the driver discussing philosophy, education, the Fair, a dozen things, during which I made a great pretense at wise deductions and a wider reading than I had ever had. Once clear of the depot and turning into Adams Street, we were off behind six good horses through as interesting a business section as one might wish to see, its high buildings (the earliest and most numerous in America) and its mass of congested traffic making a brisk summer morning scene. I was reëngaged by Michigan Avenue, that splendid boulevard with its brief vista of the lake, which was whipped to cotton-tops this bright morning by a fresh wind, and then the long residence-lined avenue to the south with its wealth of new and pretentious homes, its smart paving and lighting, its crush of pleasure traffic hurrying townward or to the Fair. Within an hour we were assigned rooms in a comfortable hotel near the Fair grounds, one of those hastily and yet fairly well constructed buildings which later were changed into flats or apartments. One wall of this hotel, as I now discovered, the side on which my room was, faced a portion of the Fair grounds, and from my windows I could see some of its classic façades, porticoes, roofs, domes, lagoons. All at once and out of nothing in this dingy city of six or seven hundred thousand which but a few years before had been a wilderness of wet grass and mud flats, and by this lake which but a hundred years before was a lone silent waste, had now been reared this vast and harmonious collection of perfectly constructed and snowy buildings, containing in their delightful interiors the artistic, mechanical and scientific achievements of the world. Greece, Italy, India, Egypt, Japan, Germany, South America, the West and East Indies, the Arctics—all represented! I