To the amazement of his public, Mr. Fuller's next book--published as a serial in Harper's Weekly, during the summer of the World's Fair, and called 'The Cliff-Dwellers'--pictured Chicago in its most sordid and utilitarian aspect. King Money sat on the throne, and the whole community paid tribute. The intensity of the struggle for existence, the push of competition, the relentlessness of the realism of the book, left the reader almost breathless at the end, uncertain whether to admire the force of the story-teller or to lament his mercilessness. In 1895 appeared 'With the Procession,' another picture of Chicago social life, but painted with a more kindly touch. The artist still delineates what he sees, but he sees more truly, because more sympathetically. The theme of the story is admirable, and it is carried out with a half humorous and wholly serious thoroughness. This theme is the total reconstruction of the social concepts of an old-fashioned, rich, stolid, commercial Chicago family, in obedience to the decree of the modernized younger son and daughters. The process is more or less tragic, though it is set forth with an artistic lightness of touch. 'With the Procession' is such a story as might happen round the corner in any year. Herr Sienkiewicz's Polanyetskis are not more genuinely "children of the soil" than Mr. Fuller's Marshalls and Bateses. In these later stories he seems to be asking himself, in most serious words, what is to be the social outcome of the great industrial civilization of the time, and to demand of his readers that they too shall fall to thinking. AT THE HEAD OF THE MARCH From 'With the Procession.' Copyright 1894 by Henry B. Fuller, and reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers, publishers, New York "Well, here goes!" said Jane half aloud, with her foot on the lowest of the glistening granite steps. The steps led up to the ponderous pillared arches of a grandiose and massive porch; above the porch a sturdy and rugged balustrade half intercepted the rough-faced glitter of a vast and variegated facade; and higher still, the morning sun shattered its beams over a tumult of angular roofs and towering chimneys. "It _is_ swell, I declare!" said Jane, with her eye on the wrought-iron work of the outer doors, and the jewels and bevels of the inner ones. "Where is the thingamajig, anyway?" she inquired of herself. She was searching for the door-bell, and she fell back on her own rustic lingo in order to ward off the incipient panic caused by this overwhelming splendor. "Oh, here it is! There!" She gave a push. "And now I'm in for it." She had decided to take the richest and best known and most fashionable woman on her list to start with; the worst over at the beginning, she thought, the rest would follow easily enough. "I suppose the 'maid' will wear a cap and a silver tray," she observed further. "Or will it be a gold one, with diamonds around the edge?"