And yet with all of that metropolitanism--there is a spirit in Chicago that distinctly breathes the smaller town, a spirit that might seem foreign to the most important city that we have between the two oceans. It is the spirit of Madison, or Ottumwa, or Jackson, perhaps a little flavor still surviving of the not long-distant days when Chicago was merely a town. You may or you may not know that in the days before her terrific fire she was called "the Garden City." The catalpa trees that shaded her chief business streets had a wide fame, and older prints show the Cook County Court House standing in lawn-plats. In those days Chicago folk knew one another and, to a decent extent, one another's business. In these days, much of that town feeling remains. You sit in the great tomb-like halls of the Union League, or in the more modern University Club, perhaps up in that wonderful bungalow which the Cliff-dwellers have erected upon the roof of Orchestra Hall, and you hear all of the small talk of the town. Smith has finally got that franchise, although he will pay mighty well for it; Jones is going to put another fourteen-story addition on his store. Wilkins has bought a yacht that is going to clean up everything on the lake, and then head straight for laurels on the Atlantic seaboard. You would have the same thing in a smaller western town, expressed in proportionate dimensions. After all, the circle of men who accomplish the real things in the real Chicago is wonderfully small. But the things that they accomplish are very large, indeed. They will take you out to see some of these big things--that department store, without an equal outside of New York or Philadelphia at least, and where Chicago dearly loves to lunch; a mail-order house which actually boasts that six acres of forest timber are cleared each day to furnish the paper for its catalogue, of which a mere six million copies are issued annually; they will point out in the distance the stacks and smoke clouds of South Chicago and will tell you in tens of thousands of dollars, the details of the steel industry; take you, of course, to the stock-yards and there tell you of the horrible slaughter that goes forward there at all hours of the day and far into the night. Perhaps they will show you some of the Chicago things that are great in another sense--Hull House and the McCormick Open Air School, for instance. And they will be sure to show you the park system.