The traveler coming to the city from the east and by night finds it indeed a mighty affair. For an hour and a half before his train arrives at the terminal station, he is making his way through Chicago environs--coming from dull flat monotonies of sand and brush and pine into Gary--with its newness and its bigness proclaimed upon its very face so that even he who flits through at fifty miles an hour may read both--jolting over main line railroads that cross and recross at every conceivable angle, snapping up through Hammond and Kensington and Grand Crossing--to the right and to the left long vistas with the ungainly, picturesque outlines of steel mills with upturned rows of smoking stacks, of gas-holders and of packing-houses, the vistas suddenly closed off by long trails of travel-worn freight-cars, through which the traveler's train finds its way with a mighty clattering and reverberating of noisy echoes. This is Chicago--Chicago spreading itself over miles of absolutely flat shore-land at almost the extreme southern tip of Lake Michigan--Chicago proudly proclaiming herself as the business and the transportation metropolis of the land, disdaining such mere seaport places as New York or Boston or Baltimore or San Francisco--Chicago with the most wretched approaches on her main lines of travel of any great city of the world. If you come to her on at least one of the great railroads that link her with the Atlantic seaboard, you will get a glimpse of her one redeeming natural feature, for five or six miles before your train comes to a final grinding stop at the main terminal--the blue waters of the lake. This railroad spun its way many years ago on the very edge of the lake--much to the present-day grief of the town. It gives no grief to the incoming traveler--to turn from the sordid streets, the quick glimpses of rows of pretentious but fearfully dirty and uninteresting houses--to the great open space to the east of Chicago--nature's assurance of fresh air and light and health to one of the really vast cluster-holds of mankind. To him the lake is in relief--even in splendid contrast to the noise, the dirt, the streets darkened and narrowed by the over-shouldering constructions of man. From the intricate and the confusing, to the simplicity of open water--no wonder then that Chicago has finally come to appreciate her lake, that she seizes upon her remaining free waterfront like a hungry and ill-fed child, that she builds great hotels and office-buildings where their windows may look--not upon the town, stretching itself to the horizon on the prairie, but upon the lake, with its tranquillity and its beauty, the infinite majesty of a great, silent open place. * * * * *