I looked everywhere for "Chicago Mountain"--a New England joke against the Phoenix City--and at last found it behind a house at the corner of Pine and Colorado streets. They say (in Boston) that Chicago, being chaffed about having no high land near it, set to work to build itself a mountain, but that when it had reached its present moderate elevation of a few feet, the city abandoned the project. But I am inclined to think that this fiction is due to the spite of the New Englanders, who, it is notorious, have to sharpen the noses of their sheep to enable them to reach the grass that grows between the stones; for on looking at the mountain in question I perceived it to be merely a natural sand-dune which it has not been thought worth while to clear away. Further to acquaint myself with the city, I went into sundry "penny gaffs," or cafés chantants, and found them to my surprise patronized by groups of men sad almost to melancholy. It was the music, I think, that made them feel so. Its effect on me I know was very chastening. I felt inclined to lift up my voice and howl. But the intense gravity of the company restrained me, and I left. Yet I am told that inside these very places men stab each other with Bowie knives and shoot each other with revolvers, and are even sometimes quite disagreeable in their manners. But so far as my own experience goes I seldom saw a gathering so unanimously solemn. I might even say so tearful. It is possible, of course, that the music eventually maddens them, that it works them up about midnight into a homicidal melancholy. But there was no profligacy of blood-shedding while I was there. They did not even offer to murder a musician. Footnotes: 1. Need I say that I do not refer to the small field-rat of that name? CHAPTER II. FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER. Fathers of Waters--"Rich Lands lie Flat"--The Misery River--Council Bluffs--A "Live" town, sir--Two murders: a contrast--Omaha--The immorality of "writing up"--On the prairies--The modesty of "Wish-ton-Wish"--The antelope's tower of refuge--Out of Nebraska into Colorado--Man-eating Tiger. FROM Chicago to Omaha by the Chicago and "Northwestern" route is not an exhilarating journey. When Nature begins to make anything out here in America she never seems to know when to stop. She can never make a few of anything. For instance, it might have been thought that one or two hundred miles of perfectly flat land was enough at a time. But Nature, having once commenced flattening out the land, cannot leave off. So all the way from Chicago to Omaha there is the one same pattern of country, a wilderness of maize-stubble and virgin land, broken only for the first half of the way by occasional patches of water-oak, and for the second half of willows.