I do not mean to celebrate again the growth of St. Paul and Minneapolis from these small beginnings, which is the marvel of even the marvellous West. But for our immediate purpose it is necessary to bear in mind not only the rapidity of the growth of the two cities, but the intensity of the rivalry between them--a rivalry which the stranger hardly comprehends, however much he may have heard of it, until he has seen the workings of it on the spot. Indeed, it is scarcely accurate to describe the genesis of Minneapolis, in particular, as a growth at all. St. Paul has been developed from the frontier trading-post of the earlier days by an evolution, the successive stages of which have left their several records; but Minneapolis has risen like an exhalation, or, to adopt even a mustier comparison, has sprung from the heads of its projectors full-panoplied in brick and mortar. “The twin cities on either bank,” remarks the historiographer of the Minneapolis Exposition of 1886, “amid many ups and downs--the ups always predominating--pegged along steadily towards greatness.” The phrase is rather picturesque than graphic, for nothing could be less descriptive of the mode of locomotion of Minneapolis than a steady pegging along. It has been an affair of leaps and bounds. There are traces of the village that Trollope saw, and there are the towering structures of a modern city, and there is nothing between. In this electric air, where there is so little “precipitation” in the atmosphere and so much in everything else; where “the flux of mortal things” is not a generalization of the mind, but a palpable fact of daily experience; where antiquity means the day before yesterday, and posterity the day after to-morrow, the present is the most contemptible of tenses, and men inevitably come to think and live and build in the future-perfect. A ten-story building in a ten-acre lot requires explanation, and this seems to be the explanation--this and the adjacency of the hated rival. In St. Paul the elevator came as a needed factor in commercial architecture, since the strip of shore to which the town was confined in Trollope’s time still limits and cramps the business-quarter, and leaves only the vertical dimension available for expansion. Towering buildings are the normal outcome of such a situation. Minneapolis, on the other hand, occupies a table-land above the river, which at present is practically unlimited. Although, of course, every growing or grown town must have a most frequented part--a centre where land is costlier than elsewhere, and buildings rise higher--the altitude of the newest and tallest structures of Minneapolis could scarcely be explained without reference to the nearness of St. Paul, and the intensity of the local pride born of that nearness. If the physical necessities of the case prescribed ten-story buildings in St. Paul, the moral necessity of not being outdone would prescribe twelve-story buildings for Minneapolis.