In Chicago as everywhere else the friend who owned an automobile was at my command, and on a glorious May day when wind and sun had cleared the air, and a night's rain had washed the streets, we were taken from South Shore to North Shore and away out where the American city is at her best, and Chicago is striving to excel them all in her wonderful suburbs. The Herr Director had seen Chicago over thirty-three years ago--a young, thriving, daring, ambitious city in the making; he found her still young, thriving, daring, and in the making. Unchastened by her great disasters, undismayed by her vexing problems, defying the lake, she reaches out into it and into neighboring states, leading and controlling the whole Middle West. Babylon, Capernaum, Rome, her older sisters, her ideal, and perchance her destiny. She is _par excellence_ the merchant city, and the merchant princes rule her, although that rule is not unchallenged. While the Herr Director saw the city changed in many respects, larger, and in places beautiful, her dirt not so apparent, her wickedness subdued, and her rough corners rubbed off, she is still Chicago, a synonym for boastful bigness and ostentatious wealth. If it had not been for the Frau Directorin, I would not have taken them where every man, woman and child is taken who visits Chicago, into the largest department store in the world. She entered with the joyful anticipation of engaging in that most exciting occupation--shopping--aided and abetted by my wife. The Herr Director followed with the martyr's air common to husbands who go along to pay the bill. That type of store is no longer a novelty to city dwellers anywhere, but this one because of its size, the variety and quality of goods displayed, the courtesy to customers and, above all, the provisions for their comfort and convenience, were remarkable enough to call forth even the Herr Director's commendation. The Frau Directorin was in the seventeenth Heaven, the Biblical seventh not being an elevation high enough to be used as a simile when she was shopping in a Chicago department store. Obliging clerks showed her plates which cost three hundred dollars apiece, cut and etched glass at more fabulous prices; she walked through miles of costly gowns, coats and millinery, and having made a few purchases to her entire satisfaction--we were about to leave the store with flying colors, figuratively speaking, when pride had a fall. Unluckily remembering that a certain small boy needed summer underwear, my wife led our party to the basement. When we left the elevator a polite floor man directed us to aisle 16, Wabash Building. As we were on the State Street side the cavalcade moved past what seemed like miles of commonplace merchandise and commonplace buyers to aisle 16, Wabash Building. At last we had reached our "Mecca." "I should like to see boys' union suits," my wife said. "Certainly. How old?" "Twelve years."