One knows in advance what a visitor from Europe will say about New York, just as one knows what an American humorist will say about Europe. But one never knows what any visitor will say about Chicago. I have heard people damn Chicago--"up hill and down" I was about to say, but I withdraw that, for the highest hill I remember in Chicago is that ungainly little bump, on the lake front, which is surmounted by Saint Gaudens' statue of General Logan. As I was saying, I have heard people rave against Chicago and about it. Being itself a city of extremes, it seems to draw extremes of feeling and expression from outsiders. For instance, Canon Hannay, who writes novels and plays under the name of George A. Birmingham, was quoted, at the time of his recent visit to this country, as saying: "In a little while Chicago will be a world center of literature, music, and art. British writers will be more anxious for her verdict than for that of London. The music of the future will be hammered out on the shores of Lake Michigan. The Paris Salon will be a second-rate affair." Remembering that the Canon is an Irishman and a humorist--which is tautology--we may perhaps discount his statement a little bit for blarney and a little more for fun. His "prophecy" about the Salon seems to stamp the interview with waggery, for certainly it is not hard to prophesy what is already true--and, as everybody ought to know by now, the Salon has for years been second-rate. The Chicago Art Institute has by all odds the most important art collection I visited upon my travels. The pictures are varied and interesting, and American painters are well represented. The presence in the institute of a good deal of that rather "tight" and "sugary" painting which came to Chicago at the time of the World's Fair, is to be regretted--a fact which is, I have no doubt, quite as well known to those in charge of the museum as to anybody else. But as I remarked in a previous chapter, most museums are hampered, in their early days, by the gifts of their rich friends. It takes a strong museum indeed to risk offending a rich man by kicking out bad paintings which he offers. Even the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has not always been so brave as to do that. "Who's Who" (which, by the way, is published in Chicago) mentions perhaps a score of Chicago painters and sculptors, among the former Lawton S. Parker and Oliver Dennett Grover, and among the latter Lorado Taft.