For two hours or more I go from one contractor to another, among the new buildings, asking work. The interviews are short and decisive. The typical boss is he who is moving anxious-eyed among his men with attention fixed upon some detail. He hears without heeding my request, and he shouts an order before he turns to me with an imperative “No, I don’t want you!” and sometimes an added curse. “I guess you are the fiftieth man that has asked me for a job to-day,” said one boss, more communicative than the others. “I’m sorry for you poor devils,” he added, with a searching look into my face, “but there’s too many of you.” My walk has carried me now through the coming Midway Plaisance and past the grounds of the new Chicago University to the outskirts of a park. I enter there with a feeling of relief, for I am soon out of the atmosphere of infinite employment where there is no work for me. Here there are open lawns, with snow crystals clinging to the tender turf, and trees of bewildering variety whose boughs are outstretched in graceful benediction over winding walks and drives and the curving, mossy banks of lakes. When I emerge from this touch of nature and high art it is upon a stately boulevard of double drives and quadruple rows of sturdy elms which line the bridle-paths and wide pavements. Mile after mile I walk, tired and hungry and wet, and quite lost in wonder. Is there in the wide world a city street to match with this? Rising in a paradise of landscape gardening it stretches its majestic length like the broad sweep of another _Champs Elysees_, flanked by palaces of uncounted cost and unimagined horror of architecture, opening here to a stretch of wide prairie, and closing there to the front of a “block” of houses of uncompromising Philistinism and decorations of “unchastened splendor,” and reaching, at times, its native dignity in a setting of buildings which tell the final truth of the elegance of simplicity. It has grown dark when I enter Michigan Avenue, and again my way stretches far before me, this time under converging lines of lights that seem to meet at an almost infinite distance. The sense of infinity is heightened by the floating mist, in which the nearer lights play with an effect of orange halo about them, and the farther lamps shine in an ever vaguer distance behind their clinging veils of fog.