Everywhere, as I journeyed about the city how many memories assailed me. When I lived in Chicago the Masonic Temple was the great show building of the town: the highest building in the world, it was, then. The Art Institute was in the brown stone pile now occupied by the Chicago Club. The turreted stone house of Potter Palmer, on the Lake Shore Drive was the city's most admired residence--a would-be baronial structure which, standing there to-day, is a humorous thing: a grandiose attempt, falling far short of being a good castle, and going far beyond the architectural bounds of a good house. Then there was the old Palmer House hotel, with its great billiard and poolroom, and its once-famous barbershop, with a silver dollar set at the corner of each marble tile in its floor, to amaze the rural visitor. The Palmer House is still there, looking no older than it used to look. And most familiar of all, the toy suburban trains of the Illinois Central Railroad continue to puff, importantly, along the lake front, their locomotives issuing great clouds of steam and smoke, which are snatched by the lake wind, and hurled like giant snowballs--dirty snowballs, full of cinders--at the imperturbable stone front of Michigan Avenue.
[Illustration: As I stood there, studying the temperament of pigs, I saw the butcher looking up at me.... I have never seen such eyes]
Chicago has talked, for years, of causing the Illinois Central Railroad to run its trains by electricity. No doubt they should be run in that way. No doubt the decline of the South Side and the ascendancy of the North Side has been caused largely by the fact that the South Side lakefront is taken up with tracks and trains, while the North Side lakefront is taken up with parks and boulevards. Still, I love the Chicago smoke. In some other city I should not love it, but in Chicago it is part of the old picture, and for sentimental reasons, I had rather pay the larger laundry bills, than see it go.
One day I went down to the station at Van Buren Street, and took the funny little train to Oakland, where I used to live. One after the other, I passed the old, dilapidated stations, looking more run down than ever. Even the Oakland Station was unchanged, and its surroundings were as I remembered them, except for signs of a sad, indefinite decay.