Perhaps those eyebrows indicated in Charlotte Thrift something of the iron that had sustained her father, Isaac Thrift, the young Easterner, throughout his first years of Middle-Western hardship. Chicago to-day is full of resentful grandsons and -daughters who will tell you that if their grandsire had bought the southwest corner of State and Madison Streets for $2,050 in cash, as he could have, they would be worth their millions to-day. And they are right. Still, if all those who tell you this were granted their wish Chicago now would be populated almost wholly by millionaire real estate holders; and the southwest corner of State and Madison would have had to be as the loaves and the fishes. Isaac Thrift had been one of these inconsiderate forebears. He had bought real estate, it is true, but in the mistaken belief that the city's growth and future lay along the south shore instead of the north. Chicago's South Side in that day was a prairie waste where wolves howled on winter nights and where, in the summer, flowers grew so riotously as to make a trackless sea of bloom. Isaac Thrift had thought himself very canny and far-sighted to vision that which his contemporaries could not see. They had bought North Side property. They had built their houses there. Isaac Thrift built his on Wabash, near Madison, and announced daringly that some day he would have a real country place, far south, near Eighteenth Street. For that matter, he said, the time would come when they would hear of houses thick in a street that would be known as Thirtieth, or even Fortieth. How they laughed at that! Besides, it was pretty well acknowledged by the wiseacres that St. Charles, a far older town, would soon surpass Chicago and become the metropolis of the West. In books on early Chicago and its settlers you can see Isaac Thrift pictured as one of the stern and flinty city fathers, all boots and stock and massive watch-chain and side-whiskers. It was neither a time nor a place for weaklings. The young man who had come hopefully out of New York state to find his fortune in the welter of mud, swamp, Indians, frame shanties and two-wheeled carts that constituted Chicago, had needed all his indomitability.