The Christmas feast was not planned the day before Christmas, either. Days of hunting the fowl which were its backbone preceded the work of the housewife. The father and the boys did the shopping for her with guns. There were no great slaughterhouses to supply her with dressed fowl. The packing industry wasn’t even heard of. For many years now Chicago has been known as the ‘pork-packing town.’ Every visitor who comes from overseas insists upon being shown through the ‘Yards.’ English poets have celebrated Chicago for its stockyards odor, and missed the fresh spiritual fragrance of youth and a zest for life that simply exudes from the city through its smoke and its dirt and its city smells. But in the early days pigs were just pigs, and not a world advertisement. They were a nuisance, not even a luxury. The village had to pass an ordinance that ‘any pig or hog running at large without a ring in its nose shall be fined $2.00 collected on conviction of such offense before a justice of peace.’ Pigs running around loose in the suavities of Michigan Avenue–isn’t that enough to give the giant tree an extra glimmer of mirth and of pride at what the years have done? In the darkness of the nights between Christmas and New Year’s–nights which are now hectic with sirens of motors and the scrape of shifting gears and the continual swish of human voices and the blare of lights–within the memory of men and women living, the quietness of a town safely shut in by its own fireside was in the air, with the occasional call of the town crier–‘Lost! Lost! Lost! Little girl seven years old!’ Chicago has left those days behind it, but memories of them make sweeter the complete security and comfort of the city in these days. And the dazzling pyramid of jeweled green, a giant’s dream of a Christmas tree, is a symbol of the child’s fairy-tale come true. It is a Christmas _boutonnière_ tucked into the proud buttonhole of Chicago.