midnight
Steel pillars , girders , and trusses towered skyward , -- skeletons to be clothed in flesh of brick and stone . Suburbs were sprouting , almost daily , from the mould of the market-gardens in the purlieus . Corporations were contending for the possession of the natural highway approaches to each growing city . Street-railway companies pushed their charters to passage at midnight sessions of boards of aldermen , seized streets in the night-time , and extended their metallic tentacles out into the fields of dazed farmers . On the frontiers , counties were organized and populated in a season . Every one of them had its two or three villages , which aped in puny fashion the achievements of the cities . New pine houses dotted prairies , unbroken save for the mile-long score of the delimiting plow .