The first city that appreciated the usefulness of this new, unlovely building was Chicago. It became not only the home of the Reaper, but also the main storehouse of the wheat. It erected one after another of these mastodonic buildings until to-day thirty-six of them stand along the water-front, roomy enough to hold the entire crop of Holland, Sweden, Greece, Egypt, Mexico, and New Zealand. What these immense grain-bins have done for the prosperity of Chicago would require many books to tell completely. It was largely because of them that Chicago outgrew Berlin and became the central metropolis of North America, with twenty-six railways emptying their freight at her doors and seven thousand vessels a year arriving at her harbor. At present Chicago has swung from wheat to corn and oats, and enabled Minneapolis to become the greatest actual wheat-storage city of the world. In Minneapolis the owning of elevators has become a profession. There are not only forty-four elevators in the city itself, but also forty elevator companies that have built more than two thousand elevators in the wheat States of the Northwest. The Jumbo of all elevators is here--a stupendous granary that holds 6,000,000 bushels, as much as may be reaped by two thousand self-binders from seven hundred square miles of land. Of all American cities, there are only five others that can put roofs over 10,000,000 bushels of grain. Duluth-Superior stands at the head of these, with twice the storage capacity of New York. This double city, with the picturesque location, Duluth on her Minnesota hillside and Superior on her Wisconsin plain, has in recent years overtaken all competitors and is now the leading wheat-shipping port in the world. Buffalo comes next as an elevator city, having twenty-eight towering buildings of steel operated by the energy of Niagara Falls. Even this famous cataract helps a little in the making of cheap bread. New York follows closely after Buffalo; with Kansas City and St. Louis running neck and neck at quite a distance behind. It is an odd fact that there is not one elevator on the Pacific coast. Because of the rainless weather, the wheat is put into bags and piled outdoors until the day of shipment. This is an expensive method of handling, as the bags cost four cents apiece and no machine has as yet been invented that will pick up and handle a sack of grain. The American elevator has now been very generally adopted as the ideal wheat-bin. Two Roumanian cities, Braila and Galatz, have suggested an improvement by using concrete instead of steel. And one Russian city, Novorossisk, on the Black Sea, has introduced a most original feature in the building of elevators by erecting a very large one a quarter of a mile back from the dock, because of the better view that this site affords of the harbor.