There was dirt in the street everywhere; there were hideous buildings and disgusting vulgarities on every side, and crime in view on nearly every corner; but still one had to feel that this was the vital spot, this the great blood centre of a nation, young, but boiling with energy, boundless in promise--a city with a vital fire in its heart that would one day burn the filth and dross away and show the world the dream of the noblest dreamers all come true--established, gigantic, magnificent. There is thrill and inspiration--simple, natural, and earthy--in the Canyon where the Cheyenne cut the hills; but this was a different thrill that slowly grew to a rumble in Jim's heart as he felt the current floods of mind, of life, of sin, of hope that flowed from a million springs in that deep Wabash Canyon that carved in twain the coming city of ten million hopes that are sprung from the drifted ashes of a hundred million black and burnt despairs. Hartigan had ever been a man of the saddle and the open field; but gazing from the top of that tall tower above the station, sensing the teeming life, the sullen roar, far below, he glimpsed another world--a better thing, for it was bigger--which, in its folded mantle, held the unborn parent, the gentler-born parent, of the mighty change--the blessed cleanup that every wise man prays for and works to bring about. What place were they to occupy in this maelstrom? Two ways were open--one, to dwell in the dungeons and the horrors as poor among the poor; the other, to come as different beings--as frequent visitors--from another world. Jim, with his whole-souled abandon, was for the former; but Belle thought that all he would gain in that way would be more than offset by loss of touch with the other world. At that time those two worlds were at war and she contended that his place was to stand between the world of power and the world of need. Their compromise was a little flat on the second floor of a house in Englewood, near enough to the rolling Lake to afford a glimpse of it and convenient to the open stretch that is now the famous Jackson Park. Here, with pretty rugs and curtains and pictures of horses and hills, they lined the home nest and gathered the best thoughts of the lives they had lived. Here at all times they could come assured of peace and rest.