It Was A World In Itself,
And The Dustiest Of All The Worlds.
It contained, when I was
there, half a million bushels of wheat - or a very great many, as I
might say in other language.
But it was not as a storehouse that
this great building was so remarkable, but as a channel or a river-
course for the flooding freshets of corn. It is so built that both
railway vans and vessels come immediately under its claws, as I may
call the great trunks of the elevators. Out of the railway vans
the corn and wheat is clawed up into the building, and down similar
trunks it is at once again poured out into the vessels. I shall be
at Buffalo in a page or two, and then I will endeavor to explain
more minutely how this is done. At Chicago the corn is bought and
does change hands; and much of it, therefore, is stored there for
some space of time, shorter or longer as the case may be. When I
was at Chicago, the only limit to the rapidity of its transit was
set by the amount of boat accommodation. There were not bottoms
enough to take the corn away from Chicago, nor, indeed, on the
railway was there a sufficiency of rolling stock or locomotive
power to bring it into Chicago. As I said before, the country was
bursting with its own produce and smothered in its own fruits.
At Chicago the hotel was bigger than other hotels and grander.
There were pipes without end for cold water which ran hot, and for
hot water which would not run at all.
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