Something had come into the air of the place where we sat, a kind of weariness. At times all Chicagoans grow weary of the almost universal ugliness of Chicago and everyone sags. One feels it in the streets, in the stores, in the homes. The bodies of the people sag and a cry seems to go up out of a million throats,—“we are set down here in this continual noise, dirt and ugliness. Why did you put us down here? There is no rest. We are always being hurried about from place to place, to no end. Millions of us live on the vast Chicago West Side, where all streets are equally ugly and where the streets go on and on forever, out of nowhere into nothing. We are tired, tired! What is it all about? Why did you put us down here, mother of men?” All the moving bodies of the people in the streets seem to be saying something like the words set down above and some day, perhaps, that Chicago poet, Carl Sandburg, will sing a song about it. Oh, he will make you feel then the tired voices coming out of tired people. Then, it may be, we will all begin singing it and realizing something long forgotten among us. But I grow too eloquent. I will return to Tom and the restaurant in Wells Street. Carl Sandburg works on a newspaper and sits at a desk writing about the movies in Wells Street, Chicago. In the restaurant two men stood at the bar talking to the bartender. They were trying to hold a friendly conversation, but there was something in the air that made friendly conversations impossible. The bartender looked like pictures one sees of famous generals—he was the type—a red-faced, well-fed looking man, with a grey moustache. The two men facing him and with their feet resting on the bar rail had got into a meaningless wrangle concerning the relationship of President McKinley and his friend Mark Hanna. Did Mark Hanna control McKinley or was McKinley only using Mark Hanna to his own ends. The discussion was of no special interest to the men engaged in it—they did not care. At that time the newspapers and political magazines of the country were always wrangling over the same subject. It filled space that had to be filled, I should say. At any rate the two men had taken it up and were using it as a vehicle for their weariness and disgust with life. They spoke of McKinley and Hanna as Bill and Mark. “Bill is a smooth one, I tell you what. He has Mark eating out of his hand.” “Eating out of his hand, hell! Mark whistles and Bill comes running, like that, like a little dog.” Meaningless vicious sentences, opinions thrown out by tired brains. One of the men grew sullenly angry. “Don’t look at me like that, I tell you. I’ll stand a good deal from a friend but not any such looks. I’m a fellow who loses his temper. Sometimes I bust someone on the jaw.”