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poverty and emergency that were really around his birth. The Manger, in this case, is a nice, clean sort of platter or basket, perhaps such as French horses eat and drink out of, for they may be supposed to be dainty in their tastes and habits, with the nicest and whitest of fine new straw, all ready to welcome the wonderful little stranger. In a word, it is French through and through, and so characteristic that we could not well help making special note of the same. The French exhibit seemed to have the largest plain glass vases in the exhibition, and the largest decorated clay or stoneware vases; the two immense, symbolic ones, near the centre of the building, or near the southwest corner of the French department, the one representing the efforts of the nations towards liberty and improved industry a hundred years ago, and the other the fruits and attainments of liberty, as presumably realized, especially in France and America, in these Centennial days. There are, through the exhibit, many pleasant marks of French sympathy with American life and history and ideas. Washington's face, in one shape and another, appears so often as to make the visitor query whether or not he has really not got back again into the American department of the Exposition. But as a matter of fact, there is in the heart and history and constitution of the two peoples much to justify these expressions of sympathy, and the surprise soon reaches natural assent.

The English exhibit, especially when including the exhibits of the English colonies, is truly a grand expression of the genius, life and culture of the British race. Taking the plain, dull clay and sand of the English earth, our plodding and persevering progenitors have made perhaps more and greater varieties of wares out of the bare soil than have the inhabitants of any other country. There are plates and dishes, cups and saucers, pitchers and jars, vases, crucibles, furnaces, moulds, pipes, tubes, and a nameless host of other articles, some plain, some elaborately wrought and decorated with various colors burnt in, made by different processes out of the different textures of common English sand and clay. The processes in this as in other cases are perhaps too intricate to describe, but they may be sketched in a word or two, as "by the way of burning out the bad and keeping in the good, and then moulding according to the will of man." The clay and stoneware exhibit of Messrs. Doulton & Co., Lambeth, England, manifests amazing variety in colors and shapes and sizes as well as in uses and designs. And some of their vases have a quaintness and dignity and purity of taste and skill in their designed execution equal to the best specimens of the Japanese and Chinese, though wholly in a new and modern European line. Again, taking the common woods of England, the English have cut and designed and carved and trimmed and generally shaped it, the oak and walnut particularly, into what some have pronounced the most beautiful and elaborate wood-work in the exhibition. Taking the wool from their sheep, and cotton and silk from warmer climes, they have made the richest carpets and rugs to be seen at the great fair. Their ladies' dress goods are as rich, though a little heavier in design than the French. There is a greater variety of cloths and cassimeres than elsewhere, and very perfect in manufacture. Every tool that man can use, the English have made and well-made, and every luxury that could be desired they have prepared at

the least expenditure of money and strength and time. They have taken the ores and melted and moulded and wrought them to the purest specimens of art and beauty.

In fact, the crowning glory of the English exhibit will be found in the bronze, steel and silver-ware department, notably and supremely in the exhibit of Messrs. Elkinton & Co., of London. The Milton Shield, wrought in silver and steel and gold, and valued at $15,000, illustrating the ideas of Milton's "Paradise Lost," for which ideas the grand, blind poet and statesman could hardly get £20 in his lifetime to help him keep the kitchen warm, is the richest thing of the sort in the exhibition, and shows how lavish people are in expenditure over the ideas of the poets after the poets are dead It surpasses in some degree, the handsomest Spanish shields, and is beyond compare, finer than anything else to be named in its line. In the same exhibit the Helicon Vase, wrought in silver and steel, something after the idea of a boat or ship, with a miniature Gothic temple rising out of the midst, symbolic of the triumph of music and poetry, and valued at $30,000, is also a rich triumph of the best British genius. It is China and Japan Gothicised and gone to pure art, and the purest religion concieveable at the hour; a solid, royal exhibit, well worthy the best struggles of the last two thousand years. The exhibits of the English Colonies are simply modified attempts at producing the same grades of goods out of, say the soil and growths of India, Canada and Australia, that the fathers have produced in the mother country. Of these, Canada, of course, approaches the nearest in the ways of general manufacture, and her exhibits of dry-goods, hardware, wood, china and glass ware, compare very favorably with those of the leading nations of the world. The India exhibit is simply remarkable for the fact that so much of England could be got into and out of India in comparatively so short a time. Australia has an interesting exhibit of hides, and native woods, and ores, especially a typi cal pyramid of the precious gold that caused such a cry of on or off to Australia; or with us, "off to California," sʊme years ago.

The exhibit of Sweden offers some popular specialties. Its groups of wax or composition figures, representative of domestic life, of the hunt, and the management of out-door travel by reindeer and sleds over the mountains, and through the snow drifts of those Northern lands all have a quaintness that touches the American visitor with an amusing sort of interest. Their works in the departments of modern manufacture, of silver and glass-ware, of stone and majolica, of dry-goods and articles of warm clothing, are of course well done. There is no purer blood in Europe than that of the Swede; and the north winds keep it pure and clean. But really, the great feature of the exhibit of Sweden is its hardware; its steel saws, so large and perfect, as if they could cut a mountain in two, and its great varieties of iron manufacture, built up into a vast pillar of different shapes and sizes.

Naturally enough, Norway's exhibit has many things in common with that of Sweden. There are similar groups and quite as attractive; there is greater skill observable in its wood-carving, a splendid canopy bed almost equalling its opposite neighbor's work in the exhibits of China and Japan, But here again the Norway iron and the ways the Norsemen have of taking a bar of cold iron, the diameter of a

man's wrist and curling it around like wire, and tieing it up in knots, like rope or twine, making knotted iron rope lad ders out of the same; all this shows us how the prowess of old Thor still keeps on its way in the North lands, and how nature in one light or another compensates her children in all corners of the earth, giving each nation to excel as soon as the inhabitants strike the harmonies of the soil and work with the genius thereof and the powers therein.

In the northwest corner of the Main Building is the exhibit of Italy; varied, pretty and almost beautiful. There is no striking characteristic except perhaps this: that into every case of goods and into every article therein, there has entered the dilettanti, the artistic, or effort at the artistic spirit and feeling. It is a charming medley. The modifica tions of all the tastes of Europe are here, but no pronounced and emphatic character or trait of any kind. The red clay ornamental modeling is neither coarse nor fine, hot nor cold. It is better far than common mechanism, but it does not reach to fine art. Even the cases of straw hats have the swing and flow of Italian art and artists. This same fancy and queer mixture of the funny and fanciful and beautiful pervades the Italian exhibits in the Art Buildings too, but of this in our next number. Here in the Main Building it is plain enough. The jewelry is pretty, very pretty, but it is not as brilliant as that of the other nations mentioned, and in the lines of general modern manufacture, there is little that is striking or worthy of note. There is magic in the name of Italy. It is the last fragment of so many grandeurs, and the Italian exhibit has a rare fascination and charm, but the hand that wrought it is not as steady as of old. It has felt all the impulses of change, but has not yet plucked the

new vitality from the new times and the new ideas of the day. To get the full effect, the true impression of the enti and beautiful productions we have simply hiren gizaning u, one needs to visit and revisit and study and restudy ther buildings and their contents scores of times, and to remembe that two or three hundred years ago our grandfathers grandmothers here and in most European nations dressed ir very plain homespun, had no printed books, or loactive, or steamships, but spun their own frocks and cats an paddled their own canoes as best their muscle wou d alime So shall we kindle a true spirit of reverence for what has been done, and find our patriotism and hope and smbitios rising to the highest pitch of ability for the accomplishme of what yet remains to be executed in the days that are 1

come.

NOTE-During the month of August, the Cerrend managers have reduced the price of admission to twenty dive cents on certain Saturdays, for how many or how few the announcements do not fully agree. They have also curciaded to issue packages of tickets at regular fifty cent rates, so that if a man now spends $2.50 or $5.00 at a time for tickets can really get in on one of them, and the supposed a "ranrage to be gained is this, that benevolent persons can cstribute tickets among their friends, to whom they would not feel st liberty to offer fifty-cent notes, old or new, or even the dem silver coin. If the managers would only pat the admissive everyday at twenty-five cents, with children at ten cents a head, and run the concern as all successful minigers of great shows do, they would prove themselves more competent per sons and be better servants of the stockholders and the community at large.

OBITUARY.

Floyd County. From this time his course was one of steady and quick advancement. In 1856 he was elected a member of the Indiana Legislature, and reelected the following year. In 1862 he was chosen reporter for the Superme Court of Indiana, and in 1864 was elected a Democratic member of the Thirty-ninth Congress,

Michael C. Kerr.-Just as we go to press, the telegraph | efected City Attorney, and in 1855 Prosecuting Attorney of announces the death of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and we feel constrained to offer a sincere, though brief, tribute to the honest man and worthy politician whom even his political opponents respected and esteemed. Mr. Kerr was a native of Pennsylvania, having been born near Titusville, Crawford County, on the 15th of March, 1827. His father was a farmer, but appears not to have been very fortunate, for, in 1852, he was compelled to sell his farm; he received $9,500 for it, and within four years the same land sold for a quarter of a million of dollars, oil having been discovered thereon in the interval. Mr. Kerr was what is called a self-made man. After passing through the village school, he went to the Erie Academy, and graduated at the age of 18 years. He gave a few years to teaching, and soon married a Miss Coover, a school-teacher of Erie, whose good judgment and ambition are said to have been of great service to her husband in his upward career. Later he went West, entered the Louisville University, and graduated in 1851. In 1852 he removed to New Albany, Indiana, which was his place of residence till he died. In New Albany he began the study and practice of the law. In 1854 he was

He was reelected to the Fortieth and Furty first Congress, served at different times on several important committees, and on the assembling of the session of Congress just ad journed, was elected Speaker. The popular wave of slanter. through the lips of one Lawrence Harney, touched him, but did not hurt his character, though doubtless, in the entical state of his health, it hurt his body and mind. Early th summer he went to Rockbridge Alum Springs, Virginia, hoping the mountain air might revive his energy, be it was too late. The steady strain had been too long endured, and after protracted and intense suffering, patiently, calmly and bravely borne, he died at Rockbridge on the evening of th of August, at twenty minutes past seven o'clock, and baremains, after due honors, are to be borne for interment to the scenes of his young manhood and his successful years.

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XXI. THE FAIRBANKS HOUSE, DEDHAM.

there were doubtless built chiefly of logs, wa thatched roofs. In 1664, when there were mine!T houses there, only four of them were valued as high as one hundred dollars. The greater number were worth from fifteen to fifty dollars each.

THE appearance of a view of the Curtis House, | neighbors. The dwellings of the first settlers Jamaica Plain, and the paper on the subject in the March number of the MONTHLY, has called into notice another candidate of a similar character for the honor of great longevity and of long family occupation. It is the Fairbanks House, in Dedham, Massachusetts, which was built in 1636, three or four years before the erection of the Curtis House, at Jamaica Plain. It has been occupied by the Fairbanks family, in successive generations, ever since it was built until now; and it is yet a substantial and comfortable dwelling-house. I am indebted to Mr. Eben. N. Hewins, of Dedham, and the Norfolk County Gazette for considerable information concerning the house, the family and the locality.

Dedham is a pleasant village situated on a plain bordering on the Charles River, about ten miles southwest from Boston and containing eight thousand inhabitants. It is the shire town of Norfolk County. It is connected with Boston by a branch of the Boston and Providence railway, and is a favorite place of residence for the business men of the New England metropolis.

The settlement of Dedham was begun in 1635, when the General Court of Massachusetts, sitting at Newtown (now Cambridge), granted land on both sides of the Charles River for the purpose; and the first recorded public meeting was held there at the middle of August, 1636, when the grantees, nineteen in number, bound themselves by a covenant, each "to give information concerning every person who applied for admission, to submit to such fines as might be imposed for the violation of rules, and to obey all such bylaws and regulations as the inhabitants shall judge necessary for the management of their temporal affairs, for religion, and for loving society."

The first settlers at Dedham were principally from Watertown, a swarming New England hive not far off; the remainder were chiefly from Boston. Among the latter was John Fairbanks, a native of Staffordshire, England, who came to the New England capital in 1633. He appears to have been a man of substance in temporal affairs, for when he built his mansion in Dedham, three years after his arrival, it far outshone in elegance and was much more spacious than those of his

When the first rude village of Dedham wi built there were very few carpenters and masti in the colony of Massachusetts Bay, and there was no saw-mill there. One was erected two or three years later at the falls of the Piscataqua, now in New Hampshire; but the town of Dedon did not possess one until 1664, when Joshua Fisher erected one on the Neponset River. Te first flouring-mill there run by water was built a 1640. Almost every family had brought w them small hand-mills with stones about two feet in diameter, for grinding their grain.

The only boards that these first settlers used were sawed by hand with a cross-cut saw worked by two men. That the roofs were combustible s attested by an ordinance of the town, which re quired the owner of every house to have a ladder continually fixed, extending from the ground to the chimney, for use in case of fire. By a law, suggested by the danger to be apprehended from hostile Indians that were roving the forests, tre settlers were required to build their houses per to each other, and for this purpose the land was divided into narrow lots extending from the uplands across the meadows to the river. The recessity for adhering to this law continued fuli fi"y years. When the inhabitants felt that they could live in safety from the inroads of savages, on their farms, they built houses on them, and the township was soon dotted with isolated dwellings.

In the course of about seventy years, this rule village was abandoned, and the then stately FTbanks House was the only one that remained and was occupied. When, in 1793, Dedham became the shire town, the parent village budded and blossomed in the presence of the Fairbanks Home, then one hundred and fifty-seven years old. Te first place for the public worship of Almighty God, in which the principal seat was assigned to the largest taxpayer, had been torn down over one hundred and twenty years before, and a larger one, with galleries in which the men were seated

on one side and the women on the other, with boys and girls in front, had been erected on its

site.

The Fairbanks House has always stood alone in its dignity. Its external appearance is well delineated in the engraving at the head of this paper, as it appears now, with a more modern addition. It is on the eastern slope of a hill, with the land falling off west and south of it into low meadow, and is surrounded by a number of venerable elms of noble stature. Its ancient high and steep roof, off which the heavy snowfalls might readily slide, is gray with moss, but its timbers are as strong as when John Fairbanks first set up the posts and laid the sleepers. The shingles that form the outer covering of the roof and the clapboards that cover its sides, all gray with age, are young compared to its huge timbers within, for they form a part of a series of successive coverings which have been put on in the course of its life of two hundred and forty years. No paint has ever defaced the old dwelling. In simple truthfulness to nature it stands, in the modest and honest neutral tint with which the fingers of decay touch wood exposed to the storms, and showers, and sunshine, rebuking by its perfect harmony with the surrounding trees and shrubbery and grass the wretched taste that dapples our rural regions with discordant, staring, intrusive white houses, with the ever-present green window-blinds. If paint must be used for its preserving qualities, good taste demands that some subdued and harmonious color-gray, light-brown, or drab-should be employed, with no strong contrasts of shade. The colors of the whole structure should so intermingle with surrounding tints and the blue above that they may seem to melt into perfect accord, like sweet melody.

The Fairbanks House has quaint-looking windows with small panes of glass, the whole of them set low in the walls. The large portal swings into a narrow passage, from which one may enter the parlor or the kitchen by side doors. In that house the plasterer never plied his vocation.. The partitions are all made of boards, and the sides of the rooms are wainscoted. The great chimney-stack stands in the centre of the house, where there were once huge fireplaces for burning superabundant wood. On one side of the kitchen fireplace an oven has been built, and on the other side a flue for a stove-pipe. Into that oven the dwellers a hundred years ago used to put a pot of beans on a

Sunday morning, when the family went to public worship, with the assurance, from long experience, that they would be baked to a nicety on their return. In that kitchen may be seen a huge beam, extending from the chinney across the room, and from this smaller beams, like ribs from a backbone, extend at right angles.

The little parlor or sitting-room of the Fairbanks House is lighter than the kitchen, for the latter is dingy with the smoke of centuries of wood burning there. The parlor is furnished with quaint pieces. The ceiling, like that of the kitchen, is low. Much of the broad fireplace built at the beginning has been bricked up, and one of modern form and moderate size is now used. There may be seen ancient brass-mounted andirons, with shovels, tongs and bellows to match. In one corner of the room is a chest in which old crockery is carefully treasured. Among the pieces are some blue and white china plates, and two cups that belonged to John Fairbanks, the first owner of the house. There are newer sets of china that belonged to later generations, the newest of which is seventy years of age.

This ancient dwelling stands near East street, in Dedham, and the addition made to it is seen on the right of the great tree in the picture. That addition is one hundred and fifty years old. The drawing of the building was made from East street, south of Railroad street. A writer in the Norfolk County Gazette, who visited the house three or four months ago, gives us some graphic sketches of the present occupants of the mansion and things that may be seen there. The occupants are two maiden sisters, Miss Sarah and Nancy Fairbanks, aged respectively eighty-one and eighty-six years. They are lineal descendants of the first settler, John Fairbanks, and were born and have always lived in that house. One of them is feeble, the other is robust in mind and body. That visitor saw there, hanging upon hooks in the great beam in the kitchen, the family gun, an old-fashioned flint-lock musket, with a barrel nearly five feet in length, and, with the stock, it stands six feet three inches in height. The stock extends nearly to the muzzle. It was owned by the original settler, who bequeathed it to his son Joshua. It has descended in regular order from father to son. One of the present occupants heard her grandfather give it, in solemn trust, to her father, saying: "Eben, never part with the long gun; keep it in the place where grandfather put it." There it has remained.

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