Kansas City. He had with him a stock of green adhesive labels, enjoining the public to "Use Legacy's Tobacco." Observing a horse hitched to one of the rings which stud the pavements in Western cities, he stuck one of the labels on its haunch, carefully selecting the off side. Presently the owner, a portly, well-to-do citizen, came out of the store where he had been transacting business, and mounting his cob rode off, gratuitously and unconsciously advertising a tobacco brand.

Unless people have a fancy for seeing pigs killed, there is nothing in Chicago to keep a traveller familiar with Liverpool or Manchester. It is curious, when we come to think of it, that no one regards a visit to Chicago as completed till he has seen a pig killed and cut up. In itself the process is not attractive. It could be seen any day in London, if not in the scientific and wholesale manner practised in Chicago, at least complete enough for the pig. Yet I never heard of any one having an hour or two to spare in London who went to see a pig killed. Fortified by these reflections, I did not go; but Lord Coleridge, making his famous semi-official tour through the States, did, and so do nine out of any ten visitors who pass through Chicago. It would be idle to attempt to disguise the growth of a

slight coolness between the Lord Chief Justice and his hospitable and enthusiastic hosts because, having seen a pig killed and dismembered, he would not "go the whole hog" and be present at the process of sausage-making.

Apart from its pig-sticking and packing regarded as a fine art, to be visited by the stranger as rare pictures and stately cathedrals are elsewhere sought out, Chicago is a place of which America may well be proud. It is a monument raised by human energy, skill, and pluck. Burned down to the ground in 1871, in 1873 it was rebuilt-a city ten times handsomer and more substantial than that out of whose ashes it was raised. At the time the building was going forward it was stated in a local journal that "beginning on April 15, 1872, and ending December 1, 1872, excluding Sundays, counting two hundred working days, and each day of eight hours, there will be completed one brick, stone, or iron building, twenty-five feet front and from four to six stories high, for each hour of that time."

The energy and dauntless enterprise which thus grappled with the great calamity of 1871 throbs through the city to-day in pursuit of the ordinary avocations of business. Chicago is one of the liveliest towns I have seen. In whatever part of the city one walks, he is

sure to be jostled by a crowd moving at high pressure. The city covers a wide area, but its business capacities are nearly doubled by the heights of its buildings. Nothing under six stories is to be seen even in what may be called its back streets, whilst seven or eight is the average in the main thoroughfare.

Chicago is the model to which all Western cities turn, with natural expectation of some time equalling or even rivalling its splendid growth.

"We reckon here that Kansas City will some day show Chicago the way," a citizen of that thriving place said to me, as he sat on the pavement in his shirt sleeves and a chair, with his legs a considerable distance up the lamp-post.

Certainly the growth of Kansas City within the last few years makes this expectation a little less wild than it will appear in Chicago. It is estimated that during the last four years Kansas City has nearly doubled itself, and is still rapidly growing. St. Louis looks on with something of jealousy at the strides taken by its lusty younger brother, and some spiteful talking goes on between the newspapers of the rival towns. Just now St. Louis is sneering at the theatrical and dramatic taste of Kansas City, and recommends an opera com

pany playing there to meet the tastes of the community by interspersing a breakdown by Buffalo Bill between the acts of "Maritana." Whereto Kansas journals vigorously respond by quoting well-authenticated instances where St. Louis having declared in favour of an operatic or dramatic company, the company has hopelessly failed elsewhere; or where St. Louis having damned with faint praise, public opinion in more advanced cities has enthusiastically approved the efforts of players or singers.

Unlike Chicago, neither St. Louis nor Kansas City shows outward signs of the press of business. The gentlemen of Kansas City are much addicted to sitting in their shirtsleeves on the shady side of the pavement, with a cigar in their mouths and their heels in the air. There is great competition for lampposts, eased off a little since the introduction of telegraphs, which are carried by posts along the footways of the main streets. But appetite grows with what it feeds upon, and the passion of Kansas men for getting their feet above the level of their heads is not slaked even by combination of telegraph-posts and lamp-posts. When not thus carrying on business on the pavement, the male inhabitants of Kansas City play billiards, or sustain their drooping energies by imbibing a whisky cocktail, or, to

use latest imagery, born with the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad, "driving a golden spike." Work must be done here, or Kansas City, instead of forging ahead, would fall out of the race. Only it seems to be done by stealth, and with an ostentatious appearance of leading a lazy life.

The only earnest workers visible from a street survey are the newsboys, who rush about from morn till eve with ever fresh editions of the daily papers. Whilst New York journalism is suffering the shock of reduction in price, and from £250 a day downwards is being sacrificed by enterprising proprietors anxious, as the Tribune puts it, that their readers shall share in their prosperity, Kansas City goes on its way demanding and receiving twopence halfpenny for its morning sheets. Here, as throughout the States, there is notable the distinction, as against English custom, that every one buys his own paper. There is neither borrowing nor lending, and an hotel would as soon think of providing its customers with the free use of the latest three-volume novels as of furnishing a gratuitous supply of the morning papers for common reading.

To such extent is this care of the interests of newspaper proprietors carried, that in the