splendor of moving equipages. And here is no cramped mile or two for parade, like most of the fashionable drives of the world, but space inviting healthful exercise as well as display. These broad avenues and park outlooks, with ample ground-room, stimulate architectural rivalry, and this opportunity for driving and riding and being on view cannot but affect very strongly the social tone. The foresight of the busy men who planned this park system is already vindicated. The public appreciate their privileges. On fair days the driving avenues are thronged. One Sunday afternoon in January, when the sleighing was good, some one estimated that there were as many as ten thousand teams flying up and down Michigan avenue and the Grand Boulevard. This was, of course, an over-estimate, but the throng made a ten-thousand impression on the mind. Perhaps it was a note of Western independence that a woman was here and there seen “speeding” a fast horse, in a cutter, alone. I suppose that most of these people had been to church in the morning, for Chicago, which does everything it puts its hand to with tremendous energy, is a church-going city, and I believe presents some contrast to Cincinnati in this respect. Religious, mission, and Sunday-school work is very active, churches are many, whatever the liberality of the creeds of a majority of them, and there are several congregations of over two thousand people. One vast music-hall and one theatre are thronged Sunday after Sunday with organized, vigorous, worshipful congregations. Besides these are the Sunday meetings for ethical culture and Christian science. It is true that many of the theatres are open as on week-days, and there is a vast foreign population that takes its day of rest in idleness or base-ball and garden amusements, but the prevailing aspect of the city is that of Sunday observance. There is a good deal of wholesome New England in its tone. And it welcomes any form of activity—orthodoxy, liberalism, revivals, ethical culture. A special interest in Chicago at the moment is because it is forming—full of contrasts and of promise, palaces and shanties side by side. Its forces are gathered and accumulating, but not assimilated. What a mass of crude, undigested material it has! In one region on the west side are twenty thousand Bohemians and Poles; the street signs are all foreign and of unpronounceable names—a physically strong, but mentally and morally brutal, people for the most part; the adults generally do not speak English, and claning as they do, they probably never will. There is no hope that this generation will be intelligent American citizens, or be otherwise than the political prey of demagogues. But their children are in the excellent public schools, and will take in American ideas and take on American ways. Still, the mill has about as much grist as it can grind at present.