Another thing which interested me in Field's was the appearance of the saleswomen. They do not look like New York saleswomen. In the aggregate they look happier, simpler, and more natural. I saw no women behind the counters there who had the haughty, indifferent bearing, the nose-in-the-air, to which the New York shopper is accustomed. Among these women, no less than among the rich, the Chicago spirit seemed to show itself. It is everywhere, that spirit. I admit that, perhaps, it does not go with omnipresent taxicabs. I admit that there are more effête cities than Chicago. The East is full of them. But that any city in the country has more sterling simplicity, greater freedom from sham and affectation among all classes, more vigorous cultivation, or more well-bred wealth, I respectfully beg to doubt. No, I have _not_ forgotten Boston and Philadelphia. * * * * * In an earlier chapter I told of a man I met upon a train who, though he lived in Buffalo, had never seen Niagara Falls. In Chicago it occurred to me that, though I had worked on a newspaper, I had never stood as an observer and watched a newspaper "go through." So, one Saturday night after sitting around the city room of the Chicago "Tribune"--which is one of the world's great newspapers--and talking with a group of men as interesting as any men I ever found together, I was placed in charge of James Durkin, the world's most eminent office boy, who forthwith took me to the nether regions of the "Tribune" Building. With its floor of big steel plates, its towering presses, vast and incomprehensible, and its grimy men in overalls, the pressroom struck me as resembling nothing so much as the engine room of an ocean liner. The color presses were already roaring, shedding streams of printed paper like swift waterfalls, down which shot an endless chain of Mona Lisas--for the Mona Lisa took the whole front page of the "Tribune" colored supplement that week. At the bottom, where the "folder" put the central creases in them, the paper torrents narrowed to a disappearing point, giving the illusion of a subterranean river, vanishing beneath the floor. But the river didn't vanish. It was caught, and measured, and folded, and cut, and counted by machinery, as swift, as eye-defying, as a moving picture; machinery which miraculously converted a cataract into prim piles of Sunday newspapers, which were, in turn, gathered up and rushed away to the mailing room--whither, presently, we followed.