We had a very pleasant dinner, at which General Sheridan, General M'Dowell, and General Forsyth assisted. It was a relief to get away for a little from grain averages and railway statistics, but these are rare escapades from the study of material interests. The subsidence of the mass of combatants which the Civil War summoned to the field north and south from civil life into the ordinary pursuits of citizens was one of the most wonderful phenomena of the contest. I find my old friends have beaten their swords into all kinds of peaceful implements. One day General McClellan writes to me from a railway office in New Jersey to say he is on the eve of a voyage to Europe. Now I get a letter from "Bangs and Kirkland, attorneys-at-law, 142, La Salle St., Chicago," dated May 9th, which puzzled me a little till I read the text and the well-known signature of "Joseph Kirkland," recalling the old days of the army and head-quarters of the Potomac in 1861, and remembered the martial major who was my frequent companion in excursions about the camps around Washington. _May 23rd._--The Duke and most of the party started at 8.30 to inspect the Pullman car factory. The town is called Hyde Park, South Chicago, Calumet, Grand Crossing, and Kensington--and lies upon the outside of the great city, nine miles distant. Nine months ago, according to a Chicago paper, there was not a single trace of an industrial habitation upon the spot, and for five months of the subsequent time there was one of the most severe winters on record; but in April the largest engine in the world, as we were told, was started as the central motive power of one of the most extensive manufacturing schemes of the world. The Corliss Centennial Exhibition engine, which was built at a cost of 25,000_l._, was set to work with its 24,000 horse-power, to give life to the machinery which had been erected by the enterprise of Colonel Pullman; and since that time a city of freight shops, hammer shops, equipment buildings, lumber store-houses, foundries, brickworks, with railway tracks to connect them, gas-houses, artesian wells, and wide and long ranges of streets round the central depôt, have sprung up in Pullman; and locomotive works are also busy in connection with the rolling-mills and iron-dale mills which are connected with the town of Pullman by water, rail, and waggon roads. The sentiment of wonder is taxed when one visits this great American enterprise. It is said that before the year is over ten thousand people will be comfortably housed and living in this city, the work of a few weeks. No wonder that the Chicago people are enthusiastic about their city, though they are apt to be somewhat tiresome in the details which they give of its greatness. "I have sometimes tried," said one of them, "when I was travelling about, to invent some fabulous story to relate about Chicago; but when I woke up in the morning I always found that the progress made had exceeded the