NE day last August I saw a picture at the gates of Jackson Park that is like to vex my memory for a long while. A young man and a young woman, husband and wife, were stepping into their phaeton. The dainty little vehicle sparkled with a kind of beamy splendor, all white and silver. The groom at the horses' bits, restraining their impatience while they tossed their heads and their chains jingled, was in white and silver also. The young man wore the picturesque and comfortable summer bravery of a fashionable young man, including a dazzling straw hat with a wide brim and a blue ribbon. The young woman's sweet face dimpled and smiled under a foreign masterpiece of lace and flowers. An adorably simple gown of a shining fabric-whether silk or linen or lace it was not for the mind of man, not in the haberdashery line, to decide-seemed to have been built upon her pretty figure, for there was no apparent way for her to get into it. She carried a glittering parasol wherein were blended all the hues in her hat and gown. As she settled herself on the cushions she said something at which the young man laughed, and they were whirled away.

All the while on the curbstone stood a little child, close to another child, holding its smaller hand tightly in hers. A ragged old shawl did duty both for covering and head-gear. Her feet were bare, her face was thin and dirty, but she was smiling in the purest delight. She did not envy the lovely lady in the lovely carriage, she only admired her; and bending over the mite beside her she pointed out the spectacle. She was not a pretty child; but her wide, blue eyes and her freckles were illumined by that radiant gaze. How easy to soothe one's uneasy sympathies with a careless

gift and a careless kind word; not so easy to do anything that will count for the child herself, or for the real solving of the baffling and disheartening problem that her presence suggests.

I know the young people. They and the child live in the same great city, a fact that led me insensibly into a number of idle musings of no especial value to the social student, since they were of a sort common to most thinking Americans.

The great cities represent our failures and our achievements. For once I had a view of the two extremes of the working of civilization. The young people in the carriage were born to whatever of happiness love and money could procure for them. Archie, the young man, is a good fellow in every detail of the phrase. He has abundant sense, a sweet temper, an honest, unpliable Anglo-Saxon will, and a simple conception of his duties in life. He is not likely to be tangled up in a mesh of enthusiasms; and he will never expect to reform the whole structure of society off-hand; he will be content to do his best to help those nearest to him, and to put his shoulder to his own wheels. There will be enough for him to do, for his father has a great army of working - men. To meet the young fellow at a dinner party you would see nothing but a rather unusual modesty to distinguish him from & hundred other young fellows with an English accent and an admirable tailor. shambles into the room quite as they do, and fills the interstices of conversation with a faint smile and inarticulate ejaculations in the most approved manner. He has not a great deal to say. He neither tells stories nor makes epigrams. But you might notice that he takes very little wine with his dinner, and that after dinner he has gone to the side of an elderly woman who was his mother's friend, or to the shy girl to whom this is a first dinner-party, or to the hostess's

He

kinswoman from the country, who is tormented by secret qualms about her best black silk gown, fondly deemed for years to be a garment fit for any state. You might be amused at his serious and reticent attention to them all, but you would notice that it somehow puts them all at their ease. Did you watch him further, standing on the edge of a financial and political conversation among the elder men, you would hear them address him occasionally, and his modest answers might explain to you the light in his father's eye whenever it falls on him.

Neither Archie nor his wife are likely to figure gloriously in the fashion columns of the newspapers. They are very fond of their home and their baby. They are not at all fond of society. Being conscientious youngsters, they will attend a certain number of grand functions and repay them in kind; nevertheless they have a far better time with a few old friends and the baby brought in after dinner. Archie has not much to say about the baby; he beams and blushes in silence while Mrs. Archie, half-humorously, half-shyly, and altogether charmingly, exhibits the idol.

"If there were many such rich people," a shrewd and candid labor agitator said, referring to a man of Archie's stamp, "we shouldn't be needed!"

A man like Archie is another citizen of the same town; but he is of a more inquisitive moral turn. Whether his eager sympathy will work as much advantage to its objects as Archie's unhasting, unresting sense of duty, I should not like to decide; it is safe to say that both temperaments are needed in the world. Young Sidney is hardly so rich as Archie will be, though he has a pretty reason for dreading the income-tax. He is of a more plastic, receptive, fervid nature. Most of his acquaintances do not suspect his deep interest in social reforms, or, to be accurate, social experiments-since which of us dare label rashly the feelers which legislators and philanthropists, and economical inventors are adventuring in every direction? A brilliant Frenchwoman who met him described to me her surprise at dis

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covering that the charming young man of fashion, whose wit she had admired in half a dozen drawing-rooms, used to spend his Sundays regularly at Hull House, studying the needs and habits of the poor. "He spoke of his 'friends' there so simply," said she, "and with such interest, such affection. It was really almost apostolic!"

But if an enthusiast, Sidney keeps his eyes about him and his head cool. He is reported to have said once, "The longer a fellow works among the poorest poor, the weaker his faith gets in any short cut to the millennium by legislation or anything else. They will have to be saved just exactly as the rest of us are, one at a time!"

Sidney was often at the Fair, and generally with a new face at his elbow. A thin, sharp-featured, un - American face it was most times, gazing at everything with the soul in its flashing eyes. The chances are that it belonged to one of the races that take to revolution and carnage as naturally as a tiger takes to a meat diet. One young fellow with him looked to be of his own age. He would have been a handsome boy could he have done something (I am not quite sure what) to the outline of his nose. He had superb dark eyes and a vivid, un-American smile. In talking he made swift gestures, his face kindling and changing. One could see that he had abandoned himself utterly to the moment. He was in the Liberal Arts Building when I saw him, bending over the wonderful bronzes of the Russian exhibit, and as he spoke he would wave his long brown hand (which held a red silk handkerchief a little ragged at the edges), clenching the lean fingers and striking out with the fist. There was a hint of savagery in that clenched hand with the red silk dripping out of it. He did not look prosperous, poor fellow, nor even what the doctors call well nourished. I fear he worked too hard and lived too intensely, and did not eat enough meat. He was shabby, but it was a jaunty and picturesque shabbiness, worn with a wild sort of grace impossible to an Anglo-Saxon. He was clean, too-which was rather surprising, as men of his type generally love soap as little as the police. But

I read in the tidy, threadbare coat, and the shining face, his affection to Sidney. Sidney is saving one at a time, and the handsome young anarchist is being saved. I picture to myself the squalid Old-World poverty out of which he sprang; I seem to listen to the fairy tales of a new world where there are fabulous wages and no prying officials, and fortunes are accumulated in the twinkling of an eye; I can see the ardent young fellow fired by the coarse inventions of the steerage and immigration agents; it is easy to imagine the impossible paradise of the poor that he expects, for which he starves and freezes himself-and it is easy, alas! to imagine his cruel disappointment when he reaches us. He has fallen an easy prey to the first ferocious dreamer that he has met, who can rave against the social order in his own tongue. To-day, probably (unless Sidney has interfered to hold his hand), he is pinching himself for the benefit of crazy secret plotters. He wouldn't in the least mind killing a hundred innocent women and children to advance the good cause of universal upheaval; yet he may be the very man that Sidney was describing the other day, and after his ten hours of hard work may have sat up all night with a sick child and waited on a bed-ridden old woman. his strength and his weakness, his pathetic virtues, and the strain of brutal barbarism that runs through his nature, he is the fit representative of a class in every great city. Well for us if there were more Sidneys to guide him, for it is a class easier to guide than to restrain.

In

I wonder what my young anarchist would think of a third rich young man of my knowledge (not my acquaintance) whom I saw this same day at the Fair. Blank van Blank lives in a great city on the seaboard, and he belongs to the class at which the social critics roar without ceasing. He is the possessor of a large share of that mysterious and fiercely berated kind of wealth termed "the unearned increment." His father left him a fortune, and the fortune has swollen without further aid from him than keeping his money safe - which, nevertheless, is no mean proof of a

good business mind. Blank van Blank's apparent object in life is to amuse himself. At one time his name and his wife's were in all the columns devoted to the parade of wealth. Mrs. Van Blank's toilets are still described with reverential incorrectness; but it is Mr. Van Blank's yacht, and Mr. Van Blank's horses, that receive the greater attention. Mrs. Van Blank hates the sea, so she is never on his yacht; she is bored by the country, so she lends her graceful presence (being thin and not strikingly pretty, Mrs. Van Blank is usually described as "graceful;" were she stout she would be "stately ") for a very brief period to the estate in the interior which he poetically terms his "farm;" then she betakes herself to gayer scenes. She is much admired, is Mrs. Van Blank; she is witty after a fashion, generous with her money and her kind speeches, capable of extravagant though fleeting attachments to things as well as to people; in fine, possessed of all the hysterical virtues and many of the faults. Her children adore her. She never refuses them anything, from a new toy to a chance to catch cold by throwing off irritating wraps when they are too warm. Their aunt, Van Blank's unmarried sister, has nursed them all through diphtheria or smallpox, or some such unpleasant and contagious disease, and loves them devotedly; but she makes them obey her and be quiet in company, and they are not fascinated by her. Mamma, with her exquisite and bewildering toilets, her indulgence, and her frequent absences, is adorable.

Perhaps she is not so adorable to Van Blank. When I saw him at the Fair he was seated at a table in Old Vienna. For a wonder, he was quite alone. It may have been my fancy that, as he sat before the sloppy boards, idly knocking his cigar-ash against the thick rim of his beer-glass, he looked profoundly melancholy. He is not a handsome fellow like Archie, nor interesting and attractive like Sidney; he is short, rather stout in figure; and his dark, unsmiling face wears a suspicious scowl So many times has poor Van Blank been deceived that he has put out his suspicions as a porcupine its quills. Yet

he is, at bottom, a simple-minded, easily influenced fellow, and the most loyal friend and follower in the world. A man who is so thorough a sportsman as Van Blank must needs have some fine qualities; and the people who know him best like him most. He drinks more than is good for him, and, what is even more deadly, he eats what he should not, and very much, too much of it; and at thirty he is old and tired. Had he been born on a farm, or with the need to become a sailor, or soldier, or mechanic, or indeed any kind of worker who must use his muscles as well as his brains, Van Blank might have been a very worthy man; it was his misfortune that the city captured his youth!

Reflecting on the protean influence of the city, how it debases one soul and exalts another, I encountered my plutocrat. I really do not know that he is a plutocrat, I know nothing about him except that I met him a number of times in the New York Building, and once I heard him give some orders to a Columbian guard. He had the tone of command. I feign him, to myself, to belong to the type of business man in a great city, that prods the innermost recesses of Mr. Howells's soul. He is a man who has built a vast fortune up from nothing, by sheer force of intellect and industry and pluck; and he intends to run his business with his own brains and to keep the profits.

He is a beetle-browed, chin-bearded, smooth-lipped man, whose iron-gray hair has worn away at the temples, revealing a magnificent dome. He has a pleasant eye, and there are lines of humor about his firm mouth. I have fixed his residence in New York City. I think he is a patron of art, and has daughters who admire Monet. He himself hankers after the English school, and likes stories in his pictures; and I fancy that the elegant young woman who was laughing and shaking her little finger imperiously at him, while he stood wistfully gazing at Hovenden's country lad leaving home, was restraining his desire to buy that picture. Twice, after that, I saw him standing, his hands clasped behind his back, studying the same homely scene and the mother's face.

He encourages literature and religion,

not that he is interested in either personally, but he thinks them useful agents in moving the world, and wishes them well. He reads the newspapers diligently and a few articles in the magazines. When he was a boy in a country town he read Abbott's "Napoleon" and Macaulay's "History of England." So persistent are the impressions of youth that he, a singularly shrewd and hardheaded critic of human nature, believes the First Napoleon one of the noblest as well as greatest of men; and unconsciously whittles his views of English politics into the Macaulay Whig pattern of a former day.

But his personal American politics are more elastic; they have well-considered practical reasons for existence; and they side with the party that in his opinion will make the country most prosperous. Five years ago he was a moderate protectionist, to-day he is a very moderate free-trader. He is not above other means than those of moral suasion to advance his views; yet it would be one of those grave mistakes that theorists in ethics are always making with regard to men of the world, forced continually to weigh the greater against the lesser evil, and travelling tortuous paths on the border line of right and wrong, to infer that he has no robust principles of his own. The standard of honor and honesty of American men of business is far higher than the critic not acquainted with business men and business methods can easily imagine. My imaginary business man is a crafty and relentless competitor; but he keeps his word faithfully, and does not enter into agreements which his subordinates will be expected to break.

Because he resembles a man who is the most determined enemy of organized labor-I believe that is the phrase that the organizers prefer-I figure him as regarding his men simply as units, not as men. He will get the most work for the cheapest wages that the unions will allow. It is an unremitting, although not always open, warfare that goes on between the two powers; and I fear to both the men are but pawns in the game. But he is a splendid fighter if he is like the man whom he resembles; and I can see him throw

ing a "personal" letter to his secretary with a grim smile.

"That," says he, " isn't from a friend, you needn't bother to hand me those things; read them and send them to the police if you think they need attention. How many s's are there in assassination, by the way?'

Yet it would be another mistake to suppose that our business prince is without kindly feelings, even without his tinge of romantic sentiment. The American business man generally has a bridle-path of sentiment running under the shade, through his nature. One of the keenest, apparently driest, business men that I ever knew risked hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a friend, nor would he listen to a word of reproach of the man when he lost it all. Another stayed last summer in town through weather that was like a deathwarrant to him, simply to help some of his friends threatened by the panic.

So, when I see my imaginary business potentate's features light up as he advances to greet an elderly woman, plain both in face and garb, and I hear his genial greeting, "Well, and how are all the good people in the good old town?" I suspect that he was born in a village and keeps a warm corner in his heart for his old home. Many a kind deed has he done, too, for the young men who have tempted fate in a great city, because they were born in that same "good old town."

But the city has kept him and will keep him to the end of his days, let him fancy as he will that he means to buy the old farm and build an old colonial modern mansion and pass the evening of his days among the hills and the fields that his boyhood loved.

Different and less tender than the countryman's love for his unencumbered fields, but no less tenacious, is the citizen's drawing to his familiar streets. And it is interesting to notice how soon the whirlpool fascination of a vast town acts on its recent population. I hardly recognized the gentleman who used to be the "nicest young man" in a certain Iowa village, when he dawned upon my admiration in the Polish section of the Art Building, in fine clothes made especially for him, praising the ghast

liest "impressions" of the room to two charming girls.

Who could imagine that only a brief ten years before, as chief clerk of the chief village store, he had won the hearts of the matrons by his politeness and the hearts of the maids by his gayety. Then, he waited on customers in his shirt-sleeves, and his Sunday suit was ordered from Chicago, and he was saving half the year to get the ten or fifteen dollars that he paid for it! His wedding-gift to each bride in the village was two neatly fringed towels of the best huckaback in the store. Thus his popularity was never endangered by envy or any bad feelings among the recipients. And in every list of bridal generosity, among the "solid silver" butter - knives, the spoons and forks that modestly shrank from naming their metal (because, perhaps, it was mixed), the "tidies" from Cousin Tilly and Aunt Martha, a hat, a hen, and ten chickens from Uncle Bartholomew," "honey in a glass dish from the bride's mother," and the other friendly and useful offerings, always appeared "two towels from Mr. Dick Vernon."

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Mr. Dick Vernon left his village ten years ago, to " travel" for a dry-goods house in a larger town; from this employment he finally went to New York. He is floor-walker in an immense drygoods shop; and it is wafted to his proud kindred at home that his success with the country trade is astonishing. They say that the transformation in him is only external, and that he is the same kind and gay fellow. But he has become infatuated with the town. He tells every old friend that he should come to New York, it is the only place in the world for a business man or anybody else. "You're simply not in it, anywhere else," declares he.

And in this assertion I recognize the true Gotham ring. The inhabitants of other large towns have their artless pride, notably the dwellers in Boston; but they have not so far lost themselves in the contemplation of their beauties that they expect the cold world to understand how superior they really are. The New Yorker, however, is both grieved and surprised does anyone venture to question whether life may