At Chicago the visitor stopped to wonder, as men have stopped to wonder ever since. The splendid location of the town as a commercial thoroughfare between the lakes and the Mississippi had made it an easy victim to the land-boom of 1834 and 1835, and Mr. Buckingham, visiting there in 1840, was told by persons who had been present at the time that building lots on streets only marked out on paper had been sold over and over again in a day, with an advance of price each time until the evening purchaser was likely, at the very least, to pay ten times as much as the morning buyer of the same lot. Chicago had, however, been able to survive the succeeding panic in 1837, which swamped for the time being several smaller towns. It was now a prosperous trading centre of six thousand people. The town was planned with the symmetry of all these newly built cities, and the streets were of good width with rows of trees separating the plank sidewalks from the main road. None of the streets were as yet paved; and indeed many of them had still the green turf of the prairie grass in the centre. So scarce was stone and so high was labor that a small piece of flagstone pavement around the Lake House Hotel had cost nine hundred dollars,--an extravagance which no one else had yet committed. On the south side of the river were the stores, many of them built of brick, and the main street was a busy trading mart. There were in the city six churches, four hotels, banks, and insurance offices, and along the water front stretched a growing line of warehouses. The fashionable residential district was on the north side of the river, where were avenues of large villas surrounded by gardens. Between the two parts ran a ferry-boat, drawn across the river by a rope, and passing and repassing every five minutes. This was maintained by subscription among the inhabitants, and no fee was therefore charged for crossing. [Illustration: Chicago in 1831. Chicago as seen from the water.]