Miss Pyne sat by the window watching, in her best dress, looking stately and calm; she seldom went out now, and it was almost time for the carriage. Martha was just coming in from the garden with the strawberries, and with more flowers in her apron. It was a bright cool evening in June, the golden robins sang in the elms, and the sun was going down behind the apple-trees at the foot of the garden. The beautiful old house stood wide open to the long expected guest.

"I think that I shall go down to the gate," said Miss Pyne, looking at Martha for approval, and Martha nodded and they went together slowly down the broad front walk.

There was a sound of horses and wheels on the roadside turf: Martha could not see at first; she stood back inside the gate behind the white lilacs as the carriage came. Miss Pyne was there; she was holding out both arms and taking a tired, bent little figure in black to her

66

heart. Oh, my Miss Helena is an old woman like me! and Martha gave a pitiful sob; she had never dreamed it would be like this; this was the one thing she could not bear.

"Where are you, Martha?" called Miss Pyne. "Martha will bring these in; you have not forgotten my good Martha, Helena?" Then Helena looked up and smiled just as she used to smile in the old days. The young eyes were there still in the changed face, and Miss Helena had come.

That night Martha waited in her lady's room just as she used, humble and silent, and went through with the old unforgotten loving services. The long years seemed like days. At last she lingered a moment trying to think of something else that might be done, then she was going silently away, but Helena called her back.

"You have always remembered, have n't you, Martha dear?" she said. "Won't you please kiss me good-night?" Sarah Orne Jewett.

THE opportunity to attempt a marshaling and a review of some of the elements prominent in the composition of a large, new, and conspicuous community is not one to be accepted in a spirit of easy self-confidence ; and when these elements are at once comprehensive in range, discordant in character, and so overcharged with peculiarities as to be rendered susceptible to a rather wide variety of interpretation, then the commentator can only approach them in a certain spirit of self-distrust.

The civic shortcomings of Chicago are so widely notorious abroad and so deeply deplored at home that there is little need to linger upon them, even for the purpose of throwing into relief the worthier and more attractive features of the local life. The date of the Fair was the period at once of the city's greatest glory and of her deepest abasement. But at the very moment when the somewhat naïf and officious strictures of foreign visitors seemed to present Chicago as the Cloaca Maxima of modern civilization, the best people of the town found themselves, for the first time, associated in a worthy effort under the unifying and vivifying impetus of a noble ideal. The Fair was a kind of post-graduate course for the men at the head of Chicago's commercial and mercantile interests; it was the city's intellectual and social annexation to the world at large. The sense of shame and of peril aroused by the comments of outside helped to lead at once to a practical associated effort for betterment, and scarcely had the Columbian Exposition drawn to a close when many of the names that had figured so long and familiarly in its directorate began to appear with equal prominence in the councils of the Civic Federation.

censors

largely, too markedly—a struggle for the bare decencies. Justly speaking, such may be, perhaps must be, the case with every young city; but never, surely, has the struggle been conducted upon so large and striking a scale, for never before have youth and increase gone so notably together. We are obliged to fight determinedly, unremittinglyfor those desirable, those indispensable things that older, more fortunate, more practiced communities possess and enjoy as a matter of course. As a community, we are at school; we are trying to solve for ourselves the problem of living together. All the best and most strenuous endeavors of Chicago, whether practical or æsthetic, whether directed toward individual improvement or toward an increase in the associated well-being, may be broadly bracketed as educational. Everything to be said about the higher and more hopeful life of the place must be said with the learner's bench distinctly in view. The two gratifying phases of the situation are to be found in an increased capacity for effective organization, and in an intense desire for knowledge, for personal improvement, for the mastery of that which elsewhere has already been mastered and passed by. This rush of momentum to make up lost time and to get over hitherto untraversed ground justifies the surmise that the goal may be not only reached, but overreached, and that there may be a propulsion of the new and vigorous Western type past the plane of mere acquired culture, on toward the farther and higher plane of actual creative achieve

ment.

It would be unadvisable to enter upon an extended presentation of Chicago's efforts toward the amenities and adornments of life without first having safe

tion stands the Chicago Woman's Club. This notable force in the better life of the city was organized in 1876 with a view to "mutual sympathy and counsel, and united effort toward the higher civilization of humanity." For several years the club was content to occupy itself with domestic matters, and with the literary and artistic interests common to women's clubs all over the country. Later on it determined to make itself felt in practical work, and its most valuable services have been effected through its recently organized committees on philanthropy and reform. Among its other activities, this club has secured women physicians for the Cook County Insane Asylum and for the State Hospital at Kankakee; has established a free kindergarten, a women's physiological institute, and a protective agency for women and children; and on one occasion it sent a delegation to Washington to urge upon the President the reinstatement of women employees in the internal revenue offices. Upon occasion the club has entertained the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and its organization has served as a model. for numerous other clubs throughout the West and Northwest.

As already stated, almost everything to be said about the upward movement in Chicago may be directly arrayed under the one general head of "education." There is to be shown first, then, what Chicago is doing for her own children and for those who come to her from outside; and afterward there is to be indicated the active propaganda which she is conducting with a gallant spirit through out her tributary territory.

It is difficult, I admit, to put forward as an educational centre a city which habitually sends the best of its youth, boys and girls alike, far away from home for instruction; it is here, indeed, that the colleges and seminaries of Massachusetts and Connecticut become absolutely obtrusive. Nothing better can

be done, in such a case, than to fall back upon the mass and weight of mere numbers a few figures will serve to show the support accorded to half a dozen of Chicago's own representative educational institutions. The Chicago Conservatory (musical and dramatic) has some six hundred pupils; the Lewis Institute (technological) has instructed during its first year, just ended, close upon seven hundred; the Armour Institute (also technological) had last year about twelve hundred; the Chicago Athenæum (day and night school) instructs about fourteen hundred; the Art Institute, seventeen hundred; the University of Chicago had last year a total enrollment in excess of twenty-four hundred; while that of the Northwestern University, in a northern suburb, with important departments in the city itself, rose as high as twenty-eight hundred. Never has a young city shown itself more liberal in founding and developing public institutions for instruction; this is one of the most favorable turns taken by the new democracy of the West.

Such figures as those cited imply scale; such scale implies the high exercise of practical ability; and practical ability, in the West, implies successand appreciation. In this New World, the respect gained by the educator, the clergyman, the professional man in general, comes almost completely, not from his mere education, his mere book knowledge, his mere practice of an acquired art, but from his virtù (as the Italians of the Renaissance expressed it), from his masterful dealing with things, circumstances, and his fellow men. The hearty and ungrudging respect of the community goes to the college president

mere formal professional fee; and at the epoch of the Fair it seemed pleasantly possible for the mere artist (or at least the architect) to gain the good-natured tolerance of a practical communityprovided he operated upon a sufficiently extensive scale, and showed a large and manlike adequacy in dealing with practical affairs.

It will be impossible to give due recognition to the merits of each of the half dozen institutions lately cited, but the brilliant and felicitous career of the new University of Chicago demands a few lines. No institution of learning in the country has been more signally favored by donations, endowments, and bequests. The extent of the endowments, original and supplementary, made by Mr. John D. Rockefeller, is widely known; and the recent magnificent gift of an entire group of buildings, by the Hull estate, for biological purposes, but follows (though on a larger scale) the example already set by many wealthy and well-disposed citizens. The university seems an immense magnet, which draws to itself not only money and lands, but subordinate educational institutions as well: again and again we hear that this school, that academy, or such a seminary, in the city itself, or in the suburbs, or outside of city and county altogether, has yielded to the process of absorption or affiliation, so many indications that the name of the university for an assured permanence and a businesslike practicality is spreading every day.

The university is in session all the year round. The faculty number close upon one hundred and seventy-five. One third of the students come from Chicago and vicinity; another third, from the Middle West; and the remaining third includes a significant proportion from the East and even from Europe. The last summer quarter attracted thirteen hundred students, of whom one third were women. Nearly six hundred wo

men, furthermore, attended the 1897 sessions of the Chicago Normal Summer School; they came from all parts of the country, from Canada, and from Mexico.

A notable feature of the work of the university is to be found in its extension division. This department, active last year through a range of eight States, carries on its work by three methods of study, — by lecture, by class, and by correspondence. The class study section, operative in the university itself or anywhere in the city and suburbs upon the request of six persons, had last year an attendance of eighteen hundred students. The extension division cooperates with the Chicago Board of Education, gives evening instruction at several convenient points in the down-town business district, and arranges for lectures at a number of churches, high schools, and libraries.

The lecture idea, indeed, is as firmly rooted in the Chicago of to-day as it was in the Boston of a generation ago. Free courses of lectures are given annually in the Field Columbian Museum (the former Art Building at Jackson Park); at the Academy of Sciences (the Laflin Memorial), in Lincoln Park; in the assembly hall of the Art Institute, on the Lake Front; and a fourth series has lately been inaugurated in connection with the new Haskell Oriental Museum of the University of Chicago. Lectures are also given at the Kindergarten College, which for nine or ten years past has been accustomed to hold an annual "literary school." The name of the organization affords little clue to the class of subjects to which the school gives its attention. These subjects are, in fact, such standard ones as Homer, Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare; and the school is considered by visiting lecturers to be almost unique in its alert sympathy and in its fidelity to the highest standards of culture. The same organization also arranges for