Now, although I saw many houses, large and small, possessing real beauty--most of them along the boulevards, in the Wade Park Allotment or on Euclid Heights, where modern taste has had its opportunity--it is nevertheless true that, for some curious reason connected with the workings of the mind, those streets which I remember best, after some months of absence, are not the streets possessed of the most charm. I remember vividly, for instance, my disappointment on viewing the decay of Euclid Avenue, which I had heard compared with Delaware, in Buffalo, and which, in reality, does not compare with it at all, being rather run down, and lined with those architectural monstrosities of the 70's which, instead of mellowing into respectable antiquity, have the unhappy faculty of becoming more horrible with time, like old painted harridans. Another vivid recollection is of a sad monotony of streets, differing only in name, containing blocks and blocks and miles and miles of humble wooden homes, all very much alike in their uninteresting duplication. These memories would make my mental Cleveland picture somewhat sad, were it not for another recollection which dominates the picture and glorifies the city. This recollection, too, has to do with squalid thoroughfares, but in a different way. Down near the railroad station, where the "red-light district" used to be, there has long stood a tract of several blocks of little buildings, dismal and dilapidated. They are coming down. Some of them have come down. And there, in that place which was the home of ugliness and vice, there now shows the beginning of the city's Municipal Group Plan. This plan is one of the finest things which any city in the land has contemplated for its own beautification. In this country it was, at the time it originated, unique; and though other cities (such as Denver and San Francisco) are now at work on similar improvements, the Cleveland plan remains, I believe, the most imposing and the most complete of its kind. When an American city has needed some new public building it has been the custom, in the past, for the politicians to settle on a site, and cause plans to be drawn (by their cousins), and cause those plans to be executed (by their brothers-in-law). This may have been "practical politics," but it has hardly resulted in practical city improvement. No one will dispute the convenience of having public buildings "handy" to one another, but there may still be found, even in Cleveland, men whose feeling for beauty is not so highly developed as their feeling for finance; men who shake their heads at the mention of a group plan; who don't like to "see all that money wasted." I met one or two such. But I will venture the prophecy that, when the Cleveland plan is a little farther advanced, so that the eye can realize the amazing splendor of the thing, as it will ultimately be, there will be no one left in Cleveland to convert.