[Chicago—Wednesday, 23 October 1872]
Chicago. Wednesday. October 23. We came in to this vast new world of experience last Sunday morning. Mr. Griggs publisher and bookseller a kind good man met us on the train. We were just endeavoring to recuperate after a night in the sleeping-car and were feeling heated, dusty and unrefreshed. He came to bring us at once to his comfortable house, where, after a drive of a few miles, between 4 and 5 all in the city limits, we found ourselves comfortably settled at breakfast.
The morning was warm and soft—a perfect autumn day—the leaves were aglow in the Park, chiefly oak-trees making the front and sides of the house shine with added light, the great lake Michigan lay quiet and blue at one side. Our night ride had proved sufficiently uncomfortable therefore we hardly ventured out all day (Jamie took a short drive) but were fresh for dinner when our host and hostess invited Professor Matthews & his wife (he is Professor in the University which is just across the road) and two neighbors, Mr. & Mrs Cowles, Mr. Cowles being the editor of the Chicago Tribune. I grew desperately sleepy before they went away though they were considerably early & I fear did not sustain my part in the small drama. Matthews [sic] is a bookish man, enamored with literature. He hangs round dear J. in a touching fashion. Every moment he can spare he is running in to compare notes over De Quincy, Christopher North, Macauley or some other writer whom he knows for the most part by heart. His wife is a quiet, hard working conscientious little country woman, with an eye to the fashions, of excessive neatness, of wifely devotion—just such a woman as one might expect brought up in an university town without a strong bias towards literature but in a certain position. They live in the cold lofty university chambers, they have no children, her quarters are marvellously neat and her life much devoted to the care of the poor students—while he lives in his books and is oblivious to almost everything else. It has been most touching to see how he would run over before breakfast and stay until the last moment at night talking with dear Jamie. He seemed to cling to him & saw us leave Mr. Griggs’s hospitable door as if we were leaving this world altogether for some brighter sphere to which he was not yet called. At the last moment he thrust into our hands an article cut from a newspaper with which his pockets appeared perpetually to overflow. Dear Dickens with his sympathetic heart and quick eye would have rejoiced over him.
We were most kindly allowed to get early to bed Sunday and on Monday we started early to see the Burnt District of poor Chicago. Long rows of new stone fronts rise loftily where one year ago all was dust and ashes, but the burned trees standing with naked arms stretched up into the blue heavens give pathetic evidence of what has been. The fine stone and iron enclosures too on the North side cracked or ruined show where noble residences surrounded by gardens, once stood. One house, the repairs of which and refitting had just cost $60,000, went into ashes with the rest and Mr Arnold’s home with that of his married daughter was so entirely and hopelessly annihilated, one of the most perfect establishments of the North Side that the family barely escaped with their lives. And a few days after the fire Mrs Scammon, the wife of one of the most powerful bankers of Chicago, told me she met Miss Florence Arnold on the street. Stopping to speak for one moment she glanced down at her feet. The delicate boots in which she had left their burning house had been destroyed by fire and her toes were entirely out of them. Why, Florence, have you no other shoes, she said—none was the reply—we saved nothing. Mrs Scammon herself opened private relief rooms where for 3 months she passed every day the hours between 9 and 1 A.M. and devoted the afternoon to correspondence relating to the reception & distribution of goods. Everybody thinks every body else much changed in appearance—and they meet now socially almost for the first time since the universal calamity. We think our hostess certainly much shaken in nervous fare. What she was before we do not know but her mind is certainly in a precarious condition of health just now. On our arrival she told me she had never yet seen the burnt district nor the ruins of their beautiful house on Michigan Avenue, but the last day of our stay of her own accord she carried me over the place. She is a woman accustomed to luxury and cannot understand anything else and the change in her manner of life as well as the disaster affects her visibly.
Our first desire of course was to see dear Robert Collyer and Unity Church. It was easier to find the latter because it is already half built and the vestry finished. We went all over it and I could scarcely keep down the old choking of the throat as I climbed the new half finished stairs. As for Mr. Collyer it was quite another matter to find him. There is no directory yet to tell you where people are beside he had just moved for the 2d time since the burning. Not even his son could tell us just how to go to him. So we were obliged to give it up trusting to our meeting him at the lecture in the evening. J’s first evening in Chicago went to the address of the lecturer.
[Here follows a page, written in pencil, that is smudged and indecipherable.]
