He had not long been in Chicago before he caught the spirit of its vigor and they both marched rapidly toward wealth and power. He soon founded a tobacco warehouse and salesroom on Lake Street, and his business steadily increased with the growth of the city until he gained that imposing title of dignity, influence, selfishness and narrowness, “a business man.” As he left the busy years behind, his warehouse grew greater, and he moved from place to place until he occupied a whole building on Lake Street which he had bought and paid for from the incense that a generous people was everlastingly sending up, if not to his glory, still to his profit. William Henry had come from the farm, and with all his city life and training he kept the inborn love for the soil, for the blue sky, the open air and a piece of land big enough for a cottage, a garden, a barn and a chicken house—such necessities as he had known in his younger days. These simple surroundings of a rural life which seem hard and bare while they are living things, because of the toil and pains that all the necessities of life impose—these simple companions of our youth seem, somehow, to grow into the fiber of our being, and when we look back upon them from our artificial surroundings and our worn out feelings, the mist of the gathering years covers them with a glamor that makes us think that our childhood was lived in a fairyland. So when business grew prosperous, Henry looked for a piece of land. He did not want a twenty-five foot lot or even an acre, but he wanted a fine, big “patch” on which he “could turn around.” He always kept a horse and buggy, and every Sunday after his week’s work was done, he would drive out into the country to find a “patch.” He drove out beyond the brick stores; out beyond the houses and frame cottages; out beyond the utmost limit of the place; out on the open prairie, covered with water in the spring and rank with high weeds and waving grass in the summer months, and out there in the country he found a “patch” of fifty acres of raw prairie, which, like a herd of wild horses on the plains, had never been subdued by man. His friends and neighbors laughed when he told them of his “farm” clear out beyond the confines of civilization, almost to the red man’s reservation, but he told them to wait and see. In his prophetic brain there rose the scene of a great city, stretching out along the lake, reaching far to the north and south and west—a wondrous conglomeration of all the people of the earth drawn together by the magic name “Chicago.”