The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

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THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

struction. Scantlings were laid on the prairie soil, to which
planks were spiked, and as these soon sank into the ground,
green and black slime oozed up between the cracks in wet
weather, splashing the face of the pedestrian and befouling
his clothes. The drinking water of the city was furnished
by the lake, then as now; but then it was pumped from the
basin inside the breakwater, and was sold by the barrel, and
it was not safe to use it until it was filtered and boiled. A
small section of the South side was lighted by gas; elsewhere some kind of oil was the illuminant for streets and
houses.
Chicago was then without a system of sewerage. In
lieu of sewers, deep ditches were cut on both sides of a street,
its whole length, and these were bridged by planks in front
of the houses. In wet weather the streets were rivers of
mud; in the dry season they were veritable Saharas of dust.
The prairie breeze not only kept the dust in perpetual motion, but caught up the litter and debri8 strewn about the
streets, and sent that whirling through the air in clouds that
blinded the eyes, and choked the throat and nostrils. People bore these inflictions with much good nature, because
they were optimistic and expected better things in the future. They even joked over their discomforts. An omnibus
was stuck fast in the mud in the middle of Clark street, and
remained there until it was frozen in; and all through the
winter it upheld a signboard bearing the prohibition, " Keep
off the grass!" The houses corresponded with the streets.
Thrown together in a hurry, without the conveniences for
respectable housekeeping, to say nothing of decent living, it
was not an easy thing for a New England housekeeper who
had brought with her the Lares and Penates of her Eastern
home, to know how and where to bestow them in a Chicago
domicile of that day.