Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/227

Rh consist of shops. One sees scarcely any pretty country houses with their gardens either within or without the city—which is so generally the case in American towns—and in the streets the houses are principally of wood, the streets formed with wood, or if without, broad and sandy. And it seems as if, on all hands, people came here merely to trade, to make money and not to live. Nevertheless I have here in Chicago, become acquainted with some of the most agreeable and delightful people, that I ever met with anywhere; good people, handsome and intellectual; people to live with, people to talk with, people to like and to grow fond of, both men and women; people who do not ask the stranger a hundred questions, but who give him an opportunity of seeing and learning in the most agreeable manner which he can desire; rare people! And besides that, people who are not horribly pleased with themselves and their world, and their city, and their country, as is so often the case in small towns, but who see deficiencies and can speak of them properly, and can bear to hear others speak of them also.

To-day and last evening also, a hot wind has been blowing here, which I imagine must be like the Italian sirocco. One becomes quite enervated by it; and the air of Chicago is a cloud of dust.

September 23rd.—But in the evening when the sun descends and the wind subsides, I go to some higher part of the city, to see the sun set over the prairie land, for it is very beautiful. And beholding this magnificent spectacle melancholy thoughts arise. I see in this sun-bright western land thousands of shops, and thousands of traders, but no temple of the sun, and only few worshippers of the sun and of eternal beauty. Were the Peruvians of a nobler intellectual culture than this people? Had they a loftier turn of mind? Were they the children of the light in a higher degree than the present race who colonise the western land of the New World?