dashed down the avenue and swirled the accumulated refuse into the car, choking the passengers, and covering every object with a cloud of filth. Once and again the car jolted across intersecting boulevards that presented some relief in the way of green grass and large, heavy-fronted houses. Except for these strips of parklike avenues, where the rich lived,--pieced into the cheaper stuff of the city, as it were,--all was alike, flat-building and house and store and wooden shanty,--a city of booths, of extemporized shifts. Sommers picked up a newspaper that some passenger had thrown aside and endeavored to distract his mind from the forlorn sight. The sheets were gritty to the touch, and left a smutch upon the fingers. His clothes were sifted over with dust and fine particles of manure. The seat grated beneath his legs. The great headlines in the newspaper announced that the troops were arriving. Columns of childish, reportorial prattle followed, describing the martial bearing of the officers, the fierceness of the "bronzed Indian fighters." The city was under martial law. He read also the bickering telegrams exchanged between the state authorities and the federal government, and interviews with leading citizens, praising the much-vilified President for his firm act in upholding law and order. The general managers were clever fellows! Sommers threw the grimy sheet aside. It was right, this firm assertion of the law; but in what a cause, for what people! He turned to the street once more. This block, through which the car was grinding its way, had a freakish individuality in sidewalks. Each builder had had his own idea of what the proper street level should be, and had laid his sidewalk accordingly. There were at least six different levels in this one block. The same blunt expression of wilful individuality was evident in every line of every building. It was the apotheosis of democratic independence. This was not a squalid district, nor a tough one. Goose Island, the stock yards, the Bohemian district, the lumber yards, the factories,--all the aspects of the city monstrous by right, were miles away. But Halsted Street, with its picturesque mutations of poverty and its foreign air, was infinitely worthier than this. Sommers shuddered to think how many miles of Cottage Grove Avenue and its like Chicago contained,--not vicious, not squalid, merely desolate and unforgivably vulgar. If it were properly paved and cleaned, it would be bearable. But the selfish rich and the ignorant poor make bad housekeepers.