the north side, is the only one of the parks of Chicago that as yet deserves this description, and the north side is much to be congratulated upon possessing such a resort. It has the great advantage of an unobstructed frontage upon the lake, and it is kept with the same skill and propriety with which it was planned. It will be evident from all this that in the three residential quarters of Chicago there is plenty of room, and it is this spaciousness that gives a pervading characteristic to its domestic architecture. The most fashionable avenues are not filled with the serried ranks of houses one expects to see in a city of a million people. On the contrary, in Michigan Avenue and Prairie Avenue, on the south side, and in the corresponding streets in the other quarters, there is commonly a considerable strip of sward in front of the house, and often at the sides as well. The houses are often completely or partly detached, and they are frequently of a generous breadth, and always of a moderate height. Three stories is the limit, which is rarely exceeded even in the costliest dwellings. Conditions so different prevail in all the Eastern cities, even in Philadelphia, the roominess of which is one of its sources of local pride, that to the inhabitant of any one of them the domestic building of Chicago indicates a much less populous city than Chicago is, and its character seems rather suburban than urban. In the main, this character of suburbanity is heightened by the architectural treatment of the dwellings. There are exceptions, and some of them are conspicuous and painful exceptions; but the rule is that the architect attempts to make the house even of a rich man look like a home rather than like a palace, and that there is very little of the mere ostentation of riches. Even upon the speculative builder this feeling seems to have imposed itself; and however crude and violent his work may be in other ways, it does not very often offend in this particular direction. The commercial palace against which we have been inveighing is by no means so offensive as the domestic sham palace, and from this latter offence Chicago is much freer than most older American cities. The grateful result is that the houses in the best quarters are apt to look eminently “livable;” and though inequalities of fortune are visible enough, there is not so visible as to be conspicuous any attempt of the more fortunate to force them on the notice of the less fortunate. In other words, Chicago is, in its outward aspect at least, the most democratic of great American cities, and its aspect increases one’s wonder that anarchism should have sprung up in this rich and level soil--to which, of course, the answer is that it didn’t, being distinctly an exotic.