fortunes and affairs had reached a disastrous climax elsewhere.  It was a city of over 500,000, with the ambition, the daring, the activity of a metropolis of a million.  Its streets and houses were miles.  Its population was not so much thriving upon pared prepared for the arrival of others.  The sound of the ham everywhere heard.  Great industries were moving in.  The huge railroad corporations which had long before recognized the prospects of the place had seized upon vast tracts of land for transfer and shipping purposes.  Street-car lines had been extended far out into the open country in anticipation of rapid growth.  The city had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions where, perhaps, one solitary house stood out alone a pioneer of the populous ways to be.  There were regions open to the sweeping winds and rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long, blinking lines of gas-lamps, fluttering in the wind.  Narrow board walks extended out, passing here a house, and there a store at far intervals, portion was the vast wholesales and shopping district, to which the uninformed seeker for work usually drifted.  It was a characteristics of Chicago then and one not generally shared by other cities, that individual firms of any pretension occupied individual buildings.

The presence of ample ground made this possible.  It gave an imposing appearance to most of the wholesales plain view of the street.  The large plates of window glass now so common, were them rapidly coming into use, and gave to the ground floor offices a distinguished and prosperous look.  The casual wanderer could see as he passed a polished array of office fixtures, much frosted glass clerks hard at work, and genteel business men in “nobby” suits and clean linen lounging about or sitting in groups.  Polished brass or nickel signs at the square stone entrances announced the firm and the nature of the business in rather neat and reserved terms.  The entire metropolitan center possessed a high and mighty air calculated to overawe and abash the common applicant, and to make the gulf between poverty and success seem both wide and deep.

Into this important commercial region the timid Carrie went.  She walked east along Van Buren Street through a region of lessening importance, until it deteriorated into a mass of shanties and coal-yards, and finally verged upon the river.  She walked bravely forward, led by an honest desire to find employment and delayed at every step by the interest of the unfolding scene, and a sense of helplessness amid so much evidence of power and force which she did not understand.  These vast buildings, what were what purposes were they there?  She could have understood the meaning of a little stone-cutter’s yard at Columbia city, carving little pieces of marble for individual use, but when the yards of some huge stone corporation came into view, filled with spur tracks and flat cars, transpierced by docks from the river and traversed overhead by immense trundling cranes of wood and steel, it lost all significance in her little world.