In the old days, a pair of shoes, woolen underwear, warm mittens, or a highly extravagant ‘fascinator’ knitted by skillful fingers were the gifts which elicited shrieks of joy from the recipients. An orange was the height of luxury for a child; and he had one orange, not a basket full of them. One wealthy old settler tells with heart-breaking candor of his envy at the sight of a playmate who owned and devoured one large orange before his yearning eyes, and how the memory lasted for years. The highly humanized modern doll, that does everything but think, now walks under the adoring eyes of its ‘mama’ and says ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’ with equal tenderness to-day. In the early days a little girl was being pampered by her mother when she found among her useful Christmas gifts a creature made of rags and which had to have all of its talking and walking done for it. Parties all over the city as big as a country are gay with boys and girls home from preparatory schools and colleges and fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, all apparently the same age, all living lives made easy by modernity. In the great hotels that face the tree, there are numberless Christmas celebrations, where the guests are all handsomely dinner-jacketed and gowned, all very sophisticated, all having eaten just a little too much and perhaps tippled less wisely than well, dancing something that in the early days of Chicago would have shocked the city fathers. And there is much conversation about the small high-powered roadster that this one found in his Christmas stocking, and the jaunt to Palm Beach as soon as the Christmas gayeties are past, and the new bridge rules, and there is more rich food and bubbly drink. Cosmopolitan, typically modern American they all are, with yearly trips to Europe to furbish up a wardrobe or to buy knick-knacks for the new house. There is as much wealth in the persons of the guests as in the old days the whole territory west of the Hudson would have boasted.