The traveller’s curiosity is teased constantly, as he cruises through the towns and cities of the Middle West, by the numbers of homes that cannot imaginably be maintained on less than five thousand dollars a year. The economic basis of these establishments invites speculation; in my own city I am ignorant of the means by which hundreds of such homes are conducted--homes that testify to the West’s growing good taste in domestic architecture and shelter people whose ambitions are worthy of highest praise. There was a time not so remote when I could identify at sight every pleasure vehicle in town. A man who kept a horse and buggy was thought to be “putting on” a little; if he set up a carriage and two horses he was, unless he enjoyed public confidence in the highest degree, viewed with distrust and suspicion. When in the eighties an Indianapolis bank failed, a cynical old citizen remarked of its president that “no wonder Blank busted, swelling ’round in a carriage with a nigger in uniform”! Nowadays thousands of citizens blithely disport themselves in automobiles that cost several times the value of that banker’s equipage. I have confided my bewilderment to friends in other cities and find the same ignorance of the economic foundation of this prosperity. The existence, in cities of one, two, and three hundred thousand people of so many whom we may call non-producers--professional men, managers, agents--offers a stimulating topic for a doctoral thesis. I am not complaining of this phenomenon--I merely wonder about it. The West’s great natural wealth and extraordinary development is nowhere more strikingly denoted than in the thousands of comfortable homes, in hundreds of places, set on forty or eighty foot lots that were tilled land or forest fifty or twenty years ago. Cruising through the West, one enters every city through new additions, frequently sliced out of old forests, with the maples, elms, or beeches carefully retained. Bungalows are inadvertently jotted down as though enthusiastic young architects were using the landscape for sketch-paper. I have inspected large settlements in which no two of these habitations are alike, though the difference may be only a matter of pulling the roof a little lower over the eyes of the veranda or some idiosyncrasy in the matter of the chimney. The trolley and the low-priced automobile are continually widening the urban arc, so that the acre lot or even a larger estate is within the reach of city-dwellers who have a weakness for country air and home-grown vegetables. A hedge, a second barricade of hollyhocks, a flower-box on the veranda rail, and a splash of color when the crimson ramblers are in bloom--here the hunter of types keeps his note-book in hand and wishes that Henry Cuyler Bunner were alive to bring his fine perceptions and sympathies to bear upon these homes and their attractive inmates.