Page:Slabs of the sunburnt West.djvu/22

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8
The Windy City
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It is easy to come here a stranger and show the whole works, write a book, fix it all up—it is easy to come and go away a muddle-headed pig, a bum and a bag of wind.
Go to it and remember this city fished from its depths a text: "independent as a hog on ice."Venice is a dream of soft waters, Vienna and Bagdad recollections of dark spears and wild turbans; Paris is a thought in Monet gray on scabbards, fabrics, façades; London is a fact in a fog filled with the moaning of transatlantic whistles; Berlin sits amid white scrubbed quadrangles and torn arithmetics and testaments; Moscow brandishes a flag and repeats a dance figure of a man who walks like a bear.Chicago fished from its depths a text: Independent as a hog on ice.
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Forgive us if the monotonous houses go mile on mileAlong monotonous streets out to the prairies—If the faces of the houses mumble hard wordsAt the streets—and the street voices only say:"Dust and a bitter wind shall come."
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