Then again, look at this Chicago which allows its business thoroughfares to be so sumptuously neglected--some of them are almost as disreputable-looking as Broadway--and goes and lays out imperial "boulevards" to connect its "system of parks." These boulevards, simply if left alone for the trees to grow up and the turf to grow thick, will before long be the finest in all the world. The streets in the city, however, if left alone much longer, would be a disgrace to--well, say Port Said. The local administration, they say, is "corrupt." But that is the standing American explanation for everything with which a stranger finds fault. I was always told the same in New York--and would you seriously tell me that the municipal administration of New York is corrupt?--to account for congestion of traffic, fat policemen, bad lamps, sidewalks blocked with packing-cases, &c., &c. And in Chicago it accounts for the streets being more like rolling prairie than streets, for cigar stores being houses of assignation, for there being so much orange peel and banana skin on the sidewalks, &c., &c. But I am not at all sure that "municipal corruption" is not a scapegoat for want of public spirit. But let the public spirit be as it may, there can be no doubt as to the private enterprise in Chicago. Take the iron industry alone--what prodigious proportions it is assuming, and how vastly it will be increased when that circum-urban "belt line" of railways is completed! Take, again, the Pullman factories. They by themselves form an industry which might satisfy any town of moderate appetite. But Chicago is a veritable glutton for speculative trade. The streets at all times abound with incident. Here at one corner was a Hansom cab, surely the very latest development of European science, with two small black children, looking like imps in a Drury Lane pantomime, trying to pin "April Fool" on to the cabman's dependent tails. Could anything be more incongruous? In the first place, what have negro children to do with April fooling? and in the next, imagine these small scraps in ebony taking liberties with a Hansom! A group of cowboy-and-miner looking men were grouped in ludicrous attitudes of sentimentality before a concertina-player, who was wheezing out his own version of "old country" airs. On the arm of one of the group languished a lady with a very dark skin, dressed in a rich black silk dress, with a black satin mantle trimmed with sumptuous fur, and half an ostrich on her head by way of bonnet and feathers. The men there, as in most of America, strike me as being very judicious in the arrangement of their personal appearance, especially in the trimming of their hair and moustachios; but many of the women--I speak now of Chicago--sacrificed everything to that awful American institution, the "bang."