cents a pound, such as sausages, venison, beef, pork--everything except fowls. Of fruit there is little. I saw some grapes yesterday in the market, all powdered over with sawdust. They had come from Spain. They made my mouth water.... Every day great prairie schooners, as they call them, go by the house. They have come all the way from the East.... I am terrified of the Indians though I have said little to Isaac. They are very dirty and not at all noble as our history and geography books state...." She bore Isaac Thrift two children, accomplishing the feat as circumspectly and with as much reticence as is possible in the achievement of so physical a rite. Girls, both. I think she would have considered a man-child indelicate. Charlotte had been the first of these girls. Carrie, the second, came a tardy ten years later. It was a time and a city of strange contradictions and fluctuations. Fortunes were made in the boom of 1835 and lost in the panic of '37. Chicago was a broken-down speculative shanty village one day and an embryo metropolis the next. The Firemen's Ball was the event of the social season, with Engine No. 3, glittering gift of "Long John" Wentworth, set in the upper end of the dance-hall and festooned with flowers and ribbons. All the worth-while beaux of the town belonged to the volunteer fire brigade. The names of Chicago's firemen of 1838 or '40, if read aloud to-day, would sound like the annual list of box-holders at the opera. The streets of the town were frequently impassable; servants almost unknown; quiltings and church sociables noteworthy events. The open prairie, just beyond town, teemed with partridges, quail, prairie chicken. Fort Dearborn, deserted, was a playground for little children. Indians, dirty, blanketed, saturnine, slouched along the streets. "Long John" Wentworth was kinging it in Congress. Young ladies went to balls primly gowned in dark-colored merinos, long-sleeved, high-necked. Little girls went to school in bodices low-cut and nearly sleeveless; toe-slippers; and manifold skirts starched to stand out like a ballerina's.