I know of no female head-dress in Asia, Africa, or Europe so absurd in itself or so lunatic in the wearer as some of the Chicago bangs. Ugliness of face is intensified a thousandfold by "the ring-worm style" of head-dress with which they cover their foreheads and half their cheeks. Prettiness of face can, of course, never be hidden; but I honestly think that neither a black skin, nor lip-rings and nose-rings, nor red teeth, nor any other fantastic female fashion that I have ever seen in other parts of the world, goes so far towards concealing beauty of features as that curly plastering which, from ignorance of its real name, I have called "the ring worm style of bang." Here, too, in Chicago I found a man selling "gophers." Now, I do not know the American name for this vanish-into-nothing sort of pastry, but I do know that there is one man in London who declares that he, and he alone in all the world, is aware of the secret of the gopher. And all London believes him. His is supposed to be a lost art--but for him--and I should not be surprised if some lover of the antique were to bribe him to bequeath the precious secret to an heir before he dies. But in Chicago peripatetic vendors of this cate are an every-day occurrence, and even the juvenile Ethiop sometimes compasses the gopher. What its American name is I cannot say; but it is a very delicate kind of pastry punched into small square depressions, and every mouthful you eat is so inappreciable in point of matter that you look down on your waistcoat to see if you have not dropped it, and when the whole is done you feel that you have consumed about as much solid nutriment as a fish does after a nibble at an artificial bait. Have you ever given a dog a piece of warm fat off your plate and seen him after he had swallowed it look on the carpet for it? So rapid is the transit of the delicious thing that the deluded animal fancies that he has as yet enjoyed only the foretaste of a pleasure still to be, the shadow only of the coming event, the promise of something good. It is just the same with yourself after eating a gopher. Of course I went to see the stock-yards, and my visit, as it happened, had something of a special character, for I saw a pig put through its performances in thirty-five seconds. A lively piebald porker was one of a number grunting and quarrelling in a pen, and I was asked to keep my eye on him. And what happened to that porker was this. [1] He was suddenly seized by a hind leg, and jerked up on to a small crane. This swung him swiftly to the fatal door through which no pig ever returns. On the other side stood a man-- That two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more,