a Monday morning as you ever would wish to
see. At eleven the city was alive with a gay
crowd to witness a grand military display.
General Dix brought out ten thousand men—
when lias the city seen so brilliant a pageant!
And while the crowd looked and admired, the
patient women worked and swept and gar
nished and got ready for the evening.
The beauty of the opening evening, the
grand tableau which burst even on the fa
tigued eyes that had seen every detail, the
superb music, the great choral anthem, which
rose from a hundred throats to swell and die
away amid the fluttering banners which draped
the arches, the admiring, enthusiastic crowd,
these things were tilt, but cannot lie described.
The Floral Temple, one of the gems of this
building, was designed by a, Philadelphian,
Mr. Edward Potter, son of your excellent
Bishop. New York is proud to owe so at
tractive a feature of its Fair to its sister city.
It was Moorish in design, covered with ever
green, and sheltered perhaps as lovely a set of
women as ever clustered beneath poor MariX
Antoinette’s ornate Dairy at Versailles. I
need not mention their names, “the world
knows them by heart.” If “beauty be its
own excuse for being,” and being anywhere,
these fair human flowers had a good excuse
for being, day and evening, in the Floral
Temple.
Casting your eyes upward from the beauties
and the roses, your thoughts mounted to a
holier and a sadder plane. There, in immor
telles, on a dark-green ground, were those
eloquent words, “ Antietam, Gettysburg, South
Mountain, Fredericksburg.” There and then
we remembered our Dead Heroes,
“And Honor corner, a pilgrim groy,
To mark tho spot where sleeps their clay,’
and the flowers beneath, dedicated as they were
to the gaiety and life that throbbed and pul
sated there, sent their soft perfumes aloft, like
incense wafted before a shrine, and the hearts
of tender women and brave men swelled anew
as they thought of the nameless graves on
whose green turf no loving hand can scatter
flowers. But the spring shall deck them with
violets, and the country shall watch over them,
and, for their sake, shall the whole land be
consecrated ground.
Colonel Aspinwall, of the Twenty-second
Regiment, was the host of the Fair. That is,
his armory, and the buildings added to it,
formed one main building, so, with that hospi
tality “ which speeds the parting guest,” he
lent us his drummers to beat a Rat-a plan! at
ten o’clock, a signal for departure. It proved
an excellent reminder, and no disagreeable
accidents occurred in the dispersion of so large
a crowd.
A long lifetime would be too short in which
to write out the things you could see, the
things you could do, the things you could say,
TTIR ID .A. ILY IF'.AIR-IE:-
and the things you could buy at the Fair.
Imagine fifteen thousand people an hour,
changing like a kaleidescope, with all the ad
ditions of flowers, music, beautiful objects of
interest, and all that subtle intoxication of a
gay crowd, and you have human nature under
such highly stimulating conditions, that it is
impossible to render a fitting account.
The book room was a calm and pleasant re
treat; here you bought Mr. James W. Gerard’s
“Book of Bubbles,” the work of New York
wits; there also everything else, from the
Harlcian Miscellanies to Tcpper’s “Latest
Lyric;” there too were many thefts, and some
gentlemen with white neckerchiefs were seen
going off with choice volumes, under a very
clerical cloak, without returning the compli
ment in greenbacks. Whet tier the pickpocket
disguised himself ns a clergyman, or the
clergyman disguised his propensity to be a
pickpocket, I don’t know; certainly these
cloaks, like charity, covered u multitude of sins.
The people poured in Tuesday, Wednesday
and Thursday in an uninterrupted stream.
There was movement in the thing; it was a
success, and here a most singular phenomenon
occurred. When the prices were lowered to
twenty-five cents a day, it was a Banquet
Hall deserted! No one would come.
An American disdains “ the shilling day.”
The same spirit which makes the first class
carriages in Europe “sacred to Americans
and Princes,” affects also the American at
home; he is always ready to pay his money,
whether he takes his choice or not.
Should my reminiscences interest your
readers, they will hear again from Axon.
TRUE AND GOOD.
A surgeon at one of the Beaufort (S. C.)
hospitals, relates the case of a soldier who was
given over to die; disease and despondency
combined had robbed him of all energy and
hope. In changing his bed, a Sanitary Com
mission patchwork quilt was put in place of
the ordinary bed spread. It arrested his at
tention, which for days nothing had been able
to excite; there was evidently something fa
miliar in it; he became thoroughly aroused,
examined it more carefully, and presently dis
covered his wife’s name nearly written in one
corner. His interest in life returned, and he
rapidly recovered. The chances that this quilt
would be put on the right bed were not one in
ten thousand, and the housewife whodedicated,
perhaps, one of her treasures to the soldiers,
could scarcely have dreamed that it would be
the means of restoring her own good man to
health. The story seems almost too delightful
to be true, yet true it certainly is, on the word
of an army surgeon, and anybody who pre
sumes to doubt it shall be fined a dollar (after
worthy Jacob Grimm’s fashion of punishing
unbelievers) and the proceeds added to the
Sanitary fund.
[Extract from a letter hy Prof. Lieber.]
A STORY FOR THE TIMES.
Napoleon, on one occasion, when speaking
of the French Revolution, calls it notre belle
revolution. 1 was reminded of this fact when
Senator Butler, of South Carolina, told me of
the following occurrence, in 1835, soon after
the excited times of nullification :
Mr. Calhoun, in a conversation with Senator
—then Judge —Butler, repeatedly called nul
lification, a beautiful remedy. The assertion
of State sovereignty, against an unconstitution
al act of Congress, appeared beautiful in the
eyes of Mr. Calhoun.
“ Mr. Calhoun,” replied Judge Butler, “ I
am as determined a nullifier as any one, and I
am as ready to go as far in the assertion of
State sovereignty as you can possibly be ;”
(Judge Butler and many others had, indeed,
preceded Mr. Calhoun in the open avowal of
nullification,) “but, to save my life, I cannot
see the beauty of it. Nullification is all right,
but as to its being beautiful, that is another
thing.”
I cannot help thinking you will agree with
me that this anecdote is worth preserving for
men like ourselves who recollect Mr. Calhoun,
and those times, from personal intercourse and
observation ; and I suppose you will also agree
with me that a man might have replied to Na
poleon: “Sire, whatever the French revolution
may have effected, leaving aside all discussions
of this sort—to save my life, your Mujesty, us
to the beauty of the guillotine, I have never
been able to see that!”
The .Jacobins used to call the guillotine, St.
Guillotine,* but I doubt whether even the Jac
obins presented to themselves this benignant
saint, as a heavenly being of Raplnelic beauty
radiant like a Madonna.
*Not unlike the Hindoos of whom Bishop Ilr.nnß tells
us that they worshipped the newly introduced and raging
Scarlet fever as Shiva in a new avatar.
A GEOGRAPHICAL NECESSITY.
Many years ago there lived in Berks county,
Pennsylvania, two neighbors—both Germans,
of course ; the one a hard-working, peaceable
man ; the other a notorious brute. It came to
pass in the course of time that they quarreled
about a ten-acre field, and after two or three
personal encounters, “ worked the case,” by
the aid of two attorneys, into a lawsuit.
“ I always dinked,” said a neighbor, “from
de way dat land lay, dat dem two fellers vas
pound to quarrel— specially ven I heard llans
Schmidt schiccar dat he meant to lick everypody as
lived mitin ten miles of him.”
We commend this story to the consideration
of those who profess to believe that the sepa
ration of the North and South was always “a
predestined geographical necessity.”
Francis Libber