In character and impressiveness these by no means disappoint the stranger’s expectations, but in number and extent they do, rather. For what one expects of Chicago, before anything else, is modernness. In most things one’s expectations are fully realized. It is the most contemporaneous of capitals, and in the appearance of its people and their talk in the streets and in the clubs and in the newspapers it fairly palpitates with “actuality.” Nevertheless, the general aspect of the business quarter is distinctly old-fashioned, and this even to the effete Oriental from New York or Boston. The elevator is nearly a quarter of a century old, and the first specimens of “elevator architecture,” the Western Union and the “Tribune” buildings in New York, are very nearly coeval with the great fire in Chicago. One would have supposed that the rebuilders of Chicago would have seized upon this hint with avidity, and that its compressed commercial quarter would have made up in altitude what it lacked in area. In fact, not only are the great modern office buildings still exceptional in the most costly and most crowded district, but it is astonishing to hear that the oldest of them is scarcely more than seven years of age. “Men’s deeds are after as they have been accustomed”--and the first impulse of the burnt-out merchants of Chicago was not to seize the opportunity the clean sweep of the fire had given them to improve their warehouses and office buildings, but to provide themselves straightway with places in which they could find shelter and do business. The consequence was that the new buildings of the burnt district were planned and designed, as well as built, with the utmost possible speed, and the rebuilding was for the most part done by the same architects who had built the old Chicago, and who took even less thought the second time than they had taken the first, by reason of the greater pressure upon them. The American commercial Renaissance, commonly expressed in cast-iron, was in its full efflorescence just before the fire. The material was discredited by that calamity, but unhappily not the forms it had taken, and in Chicago we may see, what is scarcely to be seen anywhere else in the world, fronts in cast-iron, themselves imitated from lithic architecture, again imitated in masonry, with the modifications reproduced that had been made necessary by the use of the less trustworthy material. This ignoble process is facilitated by the material at hand, a limestone of which slabs can be had in sizes that simulate exactly the castings from which the treatment of them is derived. After the exposure of a few months to the bituminous fumes it is really impossible to tell one of these reproductions from the original, which very likely adjoins it. Masonry and metal alike appear to have come from a foundry, rather than from a quarry, and to have been moulded according to the stock patterns of some architectural iron-works.