keeping of an open house to worthy and distinguished persons. The reception he gave to the Emperor and Empress of Brazil was perhaps the most notable gathering ever assembled in any private house in America. There were six hundred guests, and Mr. Childs' was the first private house at which the Emperor and Empress had ever been entertained.

Among his English visitors were the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham, the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke of Newcastle, Lords Dufferin, Rosebery, Houghton, Ilchester, Ross, Iddesleigh, Rayleigh, Herschel, Caithness, and Dunraven; Sir Stafford Northcote, Lady Franklin, Dean Stanley, Canon Kingsley, Charles Dickens, George Augustus Sala, Joseph Chamberlain, M. P.; James Anthony Froude, Professor Tyndall, Professor Bonamy Price, Admiral Lord Clarence Paget, Sir Philip Cunliffe Owen, Colonel Sir Herbert Sanford, Charles Kean, Marquis de Rochambeau, John Walter, M. P.; Sir Charles Reed, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Hughes, M. P.; Sir John Rose, Sir Edmond Thornton, and Robert Chambers, D. C. L.

Mr. Childs was an intimate friend of General Grant and of many of the representative men of this country and Europe. A friend of his "When

says:

I carried letters from him to Europe, in 1867, his name was a talisman, and it was pleasant to see how noblemen like the Duke of Buckingham honored the indorsement of an American who thirty years ago was a poor boy."

His closest personal friend, probably, was Mr. Anthony J. Drexel, the banker. They were intimately associated both in business and social matters, and there was a long-continued partnership of the two in charitable work. Every morning in pleasant weather Mr. Childs could be seen at the same hour walking down Chestnut street to his office by the side of his friend, Mr. Drexel, and in the afternoon the familiar figures could be seen returning together. "Remembering their good deeds," says one writer, "the reader of Dickens was very apt to think of the Cheeryble Brothers as he saw the plump and smiling figures of the two friends as they walked up Chestnut street on an afternoon."

Mr. Childs died in Philadelphia, after a brief illness, on February 3, 1894. In person Mr. Childs was rather below the medium height. He was inclined to be stout, but made it a rule to walk to and from his office and to live very temperately. He had a bright, smiling, amiable face, and was never known to be out of temper. He was gifted with the faculty of placing every one at ease in his company, and it was said of him that he gave a Christmas dinner to newsboys and bootblacks or dined traveling dukes and earls with the same ease and familiarity.

"Perhaps I cannot better sum up my advice to young people," writes Mr. Childs, "than to say that I have derived, and still find, the greatest pleasure in my life from doing good to others. Do good constantly, patiently, and wisely. and you will never have cause to say that your life is not worth living."

MARSHALL FIELD,

THE MODERN BUSINESS MAN.

THE term "New West" to most of us is apt to call up a picture of the growth of a great agricultural country; of vast areas of land brought under cultivation; of enormous crops raised; of improved processes in farming and mining. But the new West in reality includes a great deal more than this. With the growth of the country have sprung up great cities, which are just as typical features of the West as the mines of Colorado or the wheat farms of Dakota. The most important crop, after all, is the crop which is raised in cities as well as in the country,-the crop which indeed raises the Marshall Field is one of the men who has made the new West. His influence on the growth, trade, and habits of mercantile life would be hard to measure. A more complete contrast between the West of to-day, and the West as it was when he became a part of it, would be hard to find.

cities, namely, the crop of men.

Marshall Field was a country boy, born in Conway, Massachusetts, in 1835. His father was a farmer, a man in moderate circumstances, able to give his son the moderate but sound education which every intelligent New England farmer considers indispensable. He had in his boyhood the advantages of good public schools, and later of the Conway Academy. Marshall was a quiet, thoughtful boy, always inclined to make the most of his opportunities. He never liked arming, however, but from his earliest years inclined toward a mercantile life;

In

and when he was seventeen left the farm and went to Pittsfield, where he obtained employment in a country store. Here he remained four years, and exhausted the opportunities of the situation, so far as business training was concerned. these four years he developed a determination to reach something higher than was attainable in a New England country town. The tendency of the time was toward the West, and in 1856 he left Massachusetts and made straight for Chicago, where he became a salesman in the wholesale dry-goods house of Cooley, Farwell & Co.

When Marshall Field reached Chicago, the city, and the whole country as well, was in a state of wild unrest and feverish growth. Chicago had been originally built on the prairie level; not high enough above the waters of the lake to permit cellars underneath the houses, or to allow facilities for drainage. The grade of the street was being raised some eight feet, and the buildings also had to come up to the same level. The streets were in a state of chaos, and going round them was a perpetual going up and down stairs.

The most characteristic feature of western life in the year preceding the