I found, one early morning, among a lot of “fake” advertisements, which I had come to recognize with ease, one notice of “a man wanted” which rang with genuineness. Applicants were told to report at a certain shop just without the Stock-yards at twelve o’clock that day. In ample time I crossed over to Halsted Street and walked in a leisurely way down that marvellous thoroughfare. It was not new to me, and I was missing Clark sorely and was experiencing a new phase of the loneliness of being “left behind.” And yet I could but mark again with fresh interest the wonders of this great artery of the West Side in the five miles of its length through which I walked to the appointed number. It is essentially a cheap street: cheap buildings line it, in which tenants rent cheap lodgings and shop-keepers employ cheap labor and sell cheap wares of every kind to those of the poor “whose destruction is their poverty.” Every sort of structural flimsiness looks down upon you as you pass: ghastly imitations in stone of real, substantial buildings; the unblinking fronts of glaring red-brick shells, whose shoddiness is the more apparent in gaudy shops and in “all the modern improvements” and in the heavy cotton-lace at the upper windows. And there are wooden shanties with “false fronts,” after the manner of frontier “cities,” and wooden hovels with sloping roofs which are far along in process of decay, and here and there a substantial house which was built upon the open prairie, and which looks with amazement upon the fungus growth about it, while struggling pitifully to maintain its dignity in the uncongenial company which it is forced to keep. Down miles of such a street I went on sidewalks which were chiefly rotting planks, with black mire, as of a pig-sty, straining through the cracks under the pressure of passing feet. The street itself is paved with cylindrical blocks of wood, ill laid at the beginning, and having now closely pounded filth between them, while the whole surface presents an infinite variety of concavities, in which, especially along the gutters, lay garbage in frozen, shallow cesspools. A saloon stood on almost every corner, and sometimes I counted seven pawnbrokers’ signs within the limits of a square. It was interesting to watch the run of “loan agencies,” and “collateral banks,” and other euphemisms under which the business was disguised.