sized sculptures of American animals, one skirts the Electricity Building. On the other side of this is the Mining Building, and still beyond is the monstrous Transportation Building, the decoration of which alternately suggests a kaleidoscope and the band-wagon of a circus.

Leaving out the State buildings there are only three conspicuous blotches on the beauty of the Exposition as a whole. They are the Transportation Building, the Illinois Building, and the United States Government Building.

A remarkable thing about the Exposition is the number of interests that have been given separate representation. The Woman's Building is an instance of this. Education is illustrated in a thousand forms. Almost every Government has turned its educational department loose, and the result is a wilderness of charts, models, books and statistics, that, in a measure, confuses and overwhelms the average spectator.

Provision has been made for the transportation of sixty thousand persons an hour to and from the grounds. The elevated railway, the Illinois Central Railway, the ordinary street cars and a fleet of steamboats, have been organized into a complete system. Passengers who travel by water are landed at the portal of the great water court, while all the railways terminate in a beautiful building on the grounds.

On the steamboat pier are moving sidewalks. The outer sidewalk moves at a rate of three miles an hour, so that passengers can step upon it while it is in motion. They can then step to an inner sidewalk which has a speed of three miles faster, so that they are carried along the pier at the rate of six miles an hour and can get on or off at will without inconvenience.

Close by is a fine harbor for visiting yachts, and it is known that there will be a fine attendance of yachtsmen from all parts of the country and from Europe.

Lines of coaches will be run to and from the Exposition, and this fine out-door sport will be revived in royal fashion.

Fifty thousand people can be fed.

And the mothers, too, have been provided for. There is a building where babies can be checked just like a hat or coat or umbrella. The charge is moderate and the nurses are good.

Aside from the cost of the great buildings the following are among the sums

which have been spent in preparation of the Exposition grounds: Grading and filling, $450,000; landscape gardening, $323,500; viaduct and bridges, $125,000; piers, $70,000; waterway improvements, $225,000; railways, $500,000; steam plant, $800,000; electric lighting, $1,500,000; statuary, $1,000,000; vases, lamps, etc., $50,000; lake front adornment, $200,000; water supply and sewerage, $600,000; other expenses, $1,000,000. Total, $5.943,500. The total expense of organization, administration and operation of the exposition is estimated at $5,000,000. This takes no account of the sum spent by the Government, the States, or foreign nations.

One hundred and twenty car-loads of glass, enough to cover twenty-nine acres, were used in the roofs of the various Exposition structures. More than forty-one car loads, or eleven acres, were required by the great Manufactures Building

alone.

A thing that will impress itself upon the thoughtful observer is the fact that every branch of science and industry has been split up into minor departments. This is the age of the specialist. Each separate thread is taken by an independent division of workers and followed out minutely. Visitors to the Exposition will be confused until they recognize this fact. Agriculture, horticulture and forestry are apart. Electricity, mining, steam machinery and artillery engineering are divorced from each other. The artist and the merchant are no longer under one roof.

This impressive lesson is, of course, only to be learned in the departments of the greater nations. The old style still holds with the Japanese, the East Indians, the South Americans and the South Sea Islanders.

And after the student has spent weeks in the various buildings, he can sit down in the open air and watch the world pass before him-Turks and Russians, Greeks and Bulgarians, Japs, Esquimaux, Indians, Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, Dutchmen, Switzers, Peruvians, Chileans, Brazilians, Moors, Swedes, Danes, Cingalese and the people of all lands, come to honor the memory of a man who built his fame on faith and courage. For a mile around him will be palaces, flower gardens and the wealth of civilized man in its highest form challenging criticism. Here Saint-Saens and the Garde Republicain Band will pour out harmony;

there the wand of a great leader will wave over an army of violins. Great chorals will swell from the lips of innumerable singers.

A hundred thousand armed and uniformed soldiers will be massed in Chicago this summer. This great camp of American warriors will be in August. Militia organizations from every State in the Union will be present, besides a large representation of troops from the regular army. To these must be added military companies and perhaps regiments from foreign countries. The military display will be one of the grandest ever seen in this country.

HORTICULTURAL DISPLAY.

Two years ago Jackson Park, Chicago, was a sandy waste, with a few puddles of water which the waves of Lake Michigan had washed over the beach into the hollows. There was one little hillock near the centre of the plot, covered by a growth of shaggy oaks.

When the World's Fair landscape gardeners took hold of the park to put it in shape for the reception of the buildings, they deepened the hollows, made silvery lagoons of the mud-puddles, and an island fringed with rushes of the wooded knoll. Walks, roads and avenues of trees followed, and the lake was hemmed in by a stone embankment, along which there is a magnificent promenade.

The islands are fringed with shrubbery and great stretches of wild flowers growing in colonies, as they do on the prairies and borders of woodlands and in marshes all through Northern Illinois. Semiaquatic plants troop down to the brink; tall reeds and other water-plants rise from the lagoon itself, and on its quiet surface lily leaves float dreamily, while the low outlying isles are tinged a living green by the sedgy things that creep to the water's edge.

There have been planted on the islands and in the other parts of the grounds 12,618 trees, 50,644 shrubs, 151,394 hardy perennial, herbaceous, and miscellaneous plants, 136,678 aquatic and semi-aquatic plants, 3,300 ferns, 8,582 vines, climbers, and ornamental grasses; 60,000 willow cuttings, 114,920 bulbs and similar plants, and a great collection of native plants, which were used by the car-loads. The trees used were principally willows, poplars, water-maples, cherries, elms, and lindens. The shrubbery consists of various

kinds of low-growing willows, cornuses, spiræas, loniceras, lilacs, snowballs and barberries. These form the basis of the groups, but to give variety and test their adaptability to the climate many rare shrubs were added.

The inner, higher part of the wooded island, reserved for the use of the Floricultural Department, was laid out in lawns, flower beds and a rose garden, while the extreme north end space was set apart for the Japanese temple and garden, which are to remain as a permanent reminder of the patience, ingenuity, gentleness, good-will, and love of beauty of that nation of artists. The flower exhibits on the island will form a long and charming procession. The wooded island is about sixteen acres in extent, ten of which are devoted to the plantations of trees, shrubs and native plants already described.. Through the middle is the long sweep of lawns and flower garden, about six acres in all. At the south end of this space will be shown for the first time in the West, it is believed, a combination of plants and style of grouping that is seen on large places in the East, notably on the grounds of the Newport home of the late Miss Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, consisting of azaleas and rhododendrons, and in the partial shade of these shrubs great clumps of lilies in many varieties will be planted. The bulbs and shrubs bloom at different seasons, and thus the arrangement affords double pleasure.

Over the lawns north from this fine exhibit will be seen a green and flowery wall, the first hint of the rose gardenthe glory of the island. This is a plot of one and one-quarter acres, oblong in shape, and it will be inclosed by a wire fence supported by posts nine feet high set at intervals of eight feet. Between the posts the wire netting droops in curves, the lowest point of each curve being six feet above the ground. The fence will be lined with climbing roses and draped on the outside with many kinds of light-growing creepers. The gracefully-shaped vine-covered, flowerstarred wall will be in itself a thing of beauty. Access to the interior will be at four points only-in the middle of each side and at the middle of each end-so the garden will possess the first requisite of a garden-seclusion. It will also possess the second-flowers.

In addition to the floral displays on

the island, Chief Thorpe has arranged for exhibits of flowers in the Horticultural Building, which will extend throughout the months of the fair, varying from time to time as the season advances.

A DREAM CITY.

66

'HE title, A Dream City," is that

Tunder which Mrs. Candace Wheeler,

president of Associated Artists of New York, and director of decoration in the Woman's Building, at the Exposition, contributes to the May number of Harper's Magazine a paper on the buildings of the World's Fair and their surroundings. Mrs. Wheeler is thoroughly familiar with her subject, and her description, which is from a stand-point. new to periodical literature, is one of the most vivid and entertaining yet published. "A Dream City" is illustrated with fifteen engravings. We take the following pages from the article:

The fair! The fair! Never had the name such significance before. Fairest of all the world's present sights it is. A city of palaces set in spaces of emerald, reflected in shining lengths of water which stretch in undulating lines under flat arches of marble bridges, and along banks planted with consummate skill.

Unlike any city which ever existed in substance, this one has been built all at once, by one impulse, at one period, at one stage of knowledge and arts, by men almost equally prominent and equally developed in power. The differences in their results are indications of individuality alone, and not of periods, circumstances, and influences.

No gradual growth of idea is to be traced, no budding of new thought upon a formulated scheme. The whole thing seems to have sprung into being fully conceived and perfectly planned, without progressive development or widening of scope.

For the building of this city the privileged few have been called. It has been said to them, practically: Bring together all your dreams of beautiful architecture; remember the best work of the races who have lived and built before our time; recall all that has been dedicated to religion, or devoted to luxury, or given to national use,-and from them all devise something of to-day which shall take its place in all men's minds as a symbol of

the power of to-day to imagine and construct. Let it represent the present as well as recall the past; make it shadow forth the highest, tendencies as well as the practical uses of the present. You may have labor and material in limitless quantities, and the best skill of the world is at your disposal. If any man of American blood has special gifts, call him to you and command his power. Painters and sculptors and creators of beauty in landscape shall collaborate with you, and according as you express the ideal of a nation nobly you shall be honored and praised.

And so the result stands to-day, under a blue or a cloudy sky, beside a lake which smiles one moment and rages the next, a vision and foretaste of how the world will one day build in earnest.

Some one, considering only the celerity with which this fairy spectacle was created, has called it a sketch; but it is not even that, for a sketch has at least a chance of preservation. It is a dream which will vanish when the purposewhich called it into being is fulfilled. It is foredoomed to evanishment. The wood and the iron upon which it was shaped, even the creamy-white staff which covers all the skeletons of the palacelike structures, and gives them such a look of travertine as takes one back to Roman walls and streets, are already sold to the highest bidder; and when the Fair is over, these imposing temples will come,. one by one, to the ground, and their ma-terials go into other uses, more in keeping with every-day mortal habitudes than these.

At first this thought runs like a wail through all the delight of seeing; but gradually, very gradually, one falls into. a mood almost of self-gratulation that theworld has been vouchsafed one perfect. vision which will never suffer from decay, but remain like a translated city,. all its premeditated and accidental beauty preserved in the translucent amber of thought and memory.

I can imagine, too, that its impermanence is one of its charms. If it were to remain, one might gradually find flaws in its beauty; things which are least beautiful would grow more insistent, and the things which are most beautiful might become a matter of course, and so less and less an excitement to the senses, till as time went on, and one had learned to discriminate between good and best, he

In spite of the first impression of ethereal and pervading beauty, after a few days of indulgence in unmixed and enthusiastic admiration, buildings begin to advance and recede in order of preference, and perhaps of excellence, in one's mind. Certain of them are capable of arousing enthusiasm day succeeding day, while others become a secret subject of sinful criticism.

At first it seems sacrilege to suffer this. The earliest detrimental thought which comes creeping into the mind regarding one of these shining architectural wonders is like an evil thing lifting its head against a consecrated one. The impression of the whole shames it.

The impression of the whole is not due alone to architecture, or to landscapegardening, or to decorative painting, or to sculptural adornment, although these arts are carried so far and with such success. It owes its last and crowning charm to color and reflection.

The doubling of beauty gained by water reflection could hardly have been taken into account in the first inception of the plan, unless, indeed from the landscape-gardener's point of view, but it was a more than fortunate adjunct, and its effect upon the general glamour is beyond calculation. The constant repetition of beautiful forms of architecture, starting in immaculate and ivory whiteness from the green strip of lawn on which the structures so lightly stand, to the highest point of crowned cornice; or of aerial domes of gold or crystal, flashing facets of color against the sky; or of waving flags and gonfalons, softened in outline, varied in color, and crimped by ripples from moving launches and gondolas: this, seen under a sunset sky, filled with bits of winged and floating cloud, is enough to overfill the heart of the most prosaic of mortals, or to delight stray spirits of air..

Much has been written, and well written, of the architecture of the fair buildings. It is thoroughly understood that, as a whole, the buildings are beautiful beyond all precedent or expectation, but there are certain of them around which all regards cluster, and concerning which all opinions coincide. Architects, painters, and sculptors have singled out the

and jewel of the whole; and, indeed, I think a layman, a totally unthinking and uneducated one, if shut up in a landscape with the frontage of the Art Building, would become possessed with its charmwould be conscious of the fact that that particular vision had reached perfection of line and absolute beauty of proportion. It is useless to say that it was designed or built by such or such a man. It was the angel or archangel who possessed him when that particular vision came who designed it. Perhaps some freed spiritual intelligence who had had experience in the building of the New Jerusalem became conscious of a possible improvement, and longing to verify it, came down for a brief period to join the band of builders and distinguish his share of work in the Dream City. To see this miracle of harmonious form at sunset, with all its lovely length shining down the lagoon, is easily to believe in its heavenly origin.

But the most peaceably human of all the buildings is the Woman's Building. It is like a man's ideal of woman-delicate, dignified, pure, and fair to look upon. upon. It has made no bid for popular admiration, and seems an effort only to reach a permitted and sanctioned ideal. There is a feeling of indescribable rest and satisfaction in coming to it day by day, and I have a fancy that if all these buildings should sing together at midnight, this building would lift a pure. soprano note like a flute, the voice of the Art Building would be a thrilling_tenor, and mighty trumpets and beats of drum would accompany them from all the others.

"The Woman's Building is one of the good buildings," said one who knows; and good in this city of beauty means beautiful. That is what it is in truth; one of the most satisfactorily beautiful of them all.

The building was a gift to the Woman's Commission from the General Administration, as an acknowledgment of the help expected from women. Its design was the first independent work of a clever woman architect, Miss Hayden, who answered, from the scholarly city of Boston, the call for a woman who could design an important national building. The best characterization of it I have heard was from a chance woman visitor, who, after prolonged and critical study, declared, "It is not too much of any

thing; it is just enough;" and that characterization holds good after much familiarity. One feels like emphasizing the dictum, "It is just enough." It is especially true of the ornamentation. The long classic-looking front, with its pillars and arches, is surmounted by a richly modelled pediment, but except for that and the bands of ornament which divide the stories and outline the arches, it is quite simple and plain of surface.

There are eight winged groups at the angles of the roof balustrade, representing certain virtues which are supposed to be peculiarly feminine. The sculpture, in its choice of symbolism, follows the lead of thought which dominated the building; that is, it is essentially feminine, and appears consciously to avoid anything bold or even insistent in style. The sculptor was Miss Rideout, of San Francisco; and the architect and sculptor, having the breadth of the country between them, have yet joined hands in making a building which perhaps expresses the "just enough" and "not too much" of woman's aspirations in this aspiring century.

But while sculpture and painting have contributed so much to the ideal beauty of the fair, it could not afford to lack the crown of color and glory which has been offered by the landscape art.

Everywhere are stretches of greenest lawn, so close and full as to seem like a painted foreground of a picture. Pansy beds lie along the sides of some of the white palaces, an eternity of seedlings showing first buds or first blossoms as a foretaste of the carpets of velvet bloom they are preparing to spread for the eyes of the coming world. All that is done looks as if it had grown forever on that one same spot, and is being tended and cared for because of its happy effectiveness in that position, and not at all as if it had been thought out as part of a scheme; and all that is being done in the way of transplantation or creation is with such exquisite naturalness of thought that it may stand as absolutely the work of nature. One only knows that the lakes and lagoons and islands grow their own kind-wear their own hair, as it

were.

No long-leaved rhododendron or Japanese hydrangea reflects its color in the winding lagoon, but a constant succession of bloom which belongs just here does its best to be beautiful, and easily succeeds. When the blue lake water rushed in to

JANTA CLAWA

9

take the bed prepared for it, it found that a delicate attention to its likings had fringed the borders with the heavenly blue of the arrow-head, the scarlet of the lobelia, and the dwarf sunflower and yellow sunbeam so dear to its watery heart. Nothing had been neglected to make it at home. What wonder, then, that it lies so placidly and contentedly in its bed, reflecting heaven and earth with thankful beauty! Enough to say in praise of all this wonderful and successful planting is that the law of appropriateness, which underlies all art, seems never once to have been violated. It has never entered into the heads of the blue-winged water birds which haunt the shores of the lagoon and islands to doubt the spontaneity of the water plants, or their free selection of habitat, or that of any one of their floral friends who are growing here. He who planned and planted all this beauty knew by nature and by instinct the law which governs every green thing, and could compel its highest grace. He foresaw every charm of leaf and flower, of shadow and reflection, and placed each plant where its highest possibility of beauty was inevitable. If ever man whose breath of life has all too quickly ceased lives in his work, how truly this one still lives in every leaf which here keeps time to pulses in the air, and in every plant which thrills responsive to the sun! Here, as in the hearts of the friends and fellowartists who talk of his work with loving enthusiasm, he surely and vitally lives.

But not landscape art alone has worked its magic in the grounds of the great fair. Gardening and floriculture have also played a potent part. played a potent part. Around the palaces, and along the great basin, with its marble margins and royal flights of steps, where arches and colonnades and fountains lift themselves, and statues stand in royal groups, turf cultivated to superfineness is everywhere. No English lawn of a hundred years of cultivation ever spread a finer, closer, evener web than these strips of greenness. The closely shaven blades of grass are like the hair on the back of a well-clipped colt for fineness, thanks to the prairie loam which underlies them, and to the constant rain of the sprinkler which the great reservoir of fresh lake water makes possible.

One of the large islands made by the mould lifted from the lagoon beds is devoted to a rose garden. Thousands and thousands of varieties will blossom there