of this double driveway. Through the centre was a wide strip of green sward, interspersed with shrubs, and flowerbeds of beautiful design and richest color. Many of the finest mansions and villas of Chicago are to be seen on each side of this avenue.

In the afternoon the family rode on the north side along Lake Shore Drive toward Lincoln Park. This drive at one part is carried through the edge of the lake, affording a fine view of the water on both sides, with the park and some part of the city not far away. This park is more fully advanced than the other parks. Mr. Cartmell drove leisurely about, stopping to see the attractions whenever the children asked him. The Lincoln, Grant, and Indian monuments were carefully viewed. The palm-house, sixty feet high, was greatly admired by the ladies, and the lily ponds delighted every one. Miss Gray, however, became unusually enthusiastic over the great victoria, whose leaves are over three feet in diameter and whose blossom is nearly a foot across.

At another time Mr. Cartmell took the children out on the North Western Line across the northern part of Illinois, directly west from Chicago, in order to see some of the grain-producing operations of the West. After riding some twenty miles from the city, they began to see fields of waving wheat and bright green corn.

"How pretty it is!" exclaimed Florence.

"So beautiful," replied her father, "that it has been used by artists and architects in their designs, and so precious that the wheat fields of our country are worth more than its gold mines."

"Worth more than gold!" repeated Nellie. "Why, I. thought that was the most valuable thing there was!

"No, the mines are very rich; but California, which has the richest, is better known as an agricultural than as a mining State, and annually produces and sends away great quantities of flour. If the six great products of the United States are arranged according to their value, we have three pairs, the first of which, flour and meat, gives us food; the second, lumber and iron, furnishes buildings; and the last, cotton and woollen cloth, provides our clothing."

"Don't they need a perfect army of men to care for such great farms?" inquired Florence.

"No," replied Mr. Cartmell, "new machines have been invented and old ones improved, so that now the work is done by horse or steam power, and one man in charge of a machine can do the work that used to require half a dozen or more. Take for example the harvesting: a -machine reaps the wheat and binds it into sheaves; it is carried to the steam thresher, which has been brought to

the field, and there threshed and freed from the chaff. In some places, instead of reaping, a "header" is used which cuts the grain, drops it into a great box on the machine, and leaves the straw standing."

While this conversation was going on, the children were looking out of the window, and soon discovered that the great reapers were actually at work in many of the wheat fields. They are drawn by four to six horses or mules, and they cut the wheat and bind it up. Other men follow the machine and stack the wheat that it may ripen and dry. A few weeks later it is threshed in the fields by powerful steam threshing-machines.

"In what States is wheat now principally raised?”

"Wheat is raised in nearly all the States, and there are grist mills in all; but the business is becoming more and more a western one."

"I was surprised," remarked Miss Gray, "to learn how rapidly it is becoming so. In the year 1850 half of the wheat crop was raised on the Atlantic Slope; thirty-five years later, half the crop was grown beyond the Mississippi, and only one twentieth in the Atlantic States, although the quantity raised there had increased somewhat."

GRAIN ELEVATOR.

"The great wheat growing States," said Mr. Cartmell, "are the Dakotas, Minnesota, California, Kansas, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri. The four great centres for the distribution of this wheat are Chicago,

Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. The last two have great mills for making flour from the wheat. One of the largest mills in the latter city turns out seventy-two hundred barrels of flour in a day, and the whole city forty thousand barrels."

On this trip they noticed how level the land was, and that fields of corn seemed to alternate with those of wheat. The corn was about two feet high, and in many cases the farmers were running a cultivator between the rows to stir up the ground and kill the weeds.

"The great corn States," said Mr. Cartmell, are Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Ohio, and Indiana.”

On their way back to Chicago in the afternoon, Mr. Cartmell amused the children by explaining with words and drawings how grain is handled in large quantities in the great elevators.

First Mr. Cartmell drew a sketch of the inside of a great elevator as seen in Boston, New York, Buffalo, or Chicago. "The grain is shovelled out of the car into the bin far below called a sink, whence it is taken up by the elevator buckets into the garner in the top story. These elevator belts travel at a speed of four hundred and fifty feet per minute, carrying up about one hundred bushels in that time. A railway car holds about four hundred bushels, and it can be emptied in a few minutes. From the garner bin, the grain passes into the scale-hopper, where it is weighed, and then is conducted into any one of the twelve or more bins in the building, from which it flows into cars or ships that carry it away."

LESSON XIV.

DOMESTIC COMMERCE.1

"WHEN we were in New York," Mr. Cartmell remarked one evening after the trips about Chicago, recorded in the last lessons, we had a long talk about foreign commerce. (See Lesson XIX., in Part I.) We ought to consider domestic commerce now, as we are in this great inland commercial centre."

The children were eager to learn about this subject, and so expressed themselves. Their father, therefore, continued:

Great and important as our foreign commerce is, our domestic commerce is much vaster. No other country can equal us in this respect. Let us discuss first the means of carrying it on. How are things carried, Nellie?" "By the railroads."

"Yes. In what other way, Fred?"

"By steamers and ships along the coast, and through the rivers."

"By boats through canals," said George.

"Please look at this railroad map, George, and name some of the trunk lines in the eastern part of the United States."

1 The places mentioned in this chapter should be looked up by the chil dren on the different maps.