On any Christmas Eve in those days–and some are still alive who remember it–the smooth motor-filled boulevard which magnificently borders the city was a country road, frozen in deep ruts, or, if the weather had been mild, a sandy morass, thick and impassable. And the streets just west of it, the streets which are filled with Christmas shoppers, with ballyhooers for jumping bunnies and sparklers and little rubber men who stick out their tongues and great tin lobsters which waddle around on the sidewalk, the streets which are thick with human beings and every known mechanical device to lure them and give them comfort and excitement–these same streets were frozen bogs of pathways barely worth the name of road, often with an abandoned cart mutely crying their impassability. Signs proclaiming ‘No bottom here’ told the tale which the rivers of mud only hinted at. The very street, where an elevated whangs by overhead, a street car clangs its warning to the holiday crowds, and ceaselessly honking motors make a bedlam of the air, is the scene of the classic story of the man who, in the early days, was up to his ears in mud. From a spot identical with one which is being stepped over by thousands, so the story goes, a pedestrian offered to throw out a lifeline to the mud-imprisoned neighbor. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he is said to have answered, ‘I’m on a good horse.’ That story delighted our grandfathers. [Illustration: Street scene] The sidewalks, lined with gaudy windows wheedling dollars from the passers-by and noisy with street hawkers, passionately supply last-minute gew-gaws for the tired men and women who have had to shop late because they had no money to shop early–sidewalks smooth and wide and sturdy to the tramp of millions of feet–not over a lifetime ago were narrow strips of wood, raised on stilts, with enough room underneath for children to play and for rats to hold continuous convention. Within the memory of its oldest inhabitants those same planks which served as walks were the scene of many a fiasco when an arrogant Indian would calmly push a child off into mud which almost smothered it–an indignity which had to be borne by the members of the community who still remembered the horrors of the Fort Dearborn massacre. Those same lordly concrete ways were the scene in the early days of many a romantic moment when carriages and carts were drawn up to the very doors of the houses and shops and whatever strong male arms that happened to be present were offered to lift the ‘wimminfolks’ safely from one dry spot to another. High hip boots, they all wore, those early Chicago cavaliers, and of necessity.