CHAPTER XVII
A Rainy Day — The Plaisance Again — The Glass-works — The German
Village — The Irish Village — Farewell to the Phantom City.
The boys had seen a number of unpleasant days at the Fair, but their last day was the worst. It did much to reconcile them to going away. Not only did it rain in a fine, penetrating drizzle, but the wind blew a gale, and kindly carried the dampness where it could not have gone by itself. While walking outdoors, the boys saw nothing amusing in the weather. But Mr. Douglass, in order to cash a check, had to call upon one of the gentlemen whose office was in the Electricity Building; and, waiting for him, the boys sat at a window that looked out upon the Court of Honor, and then found that the storm had its funny side.
Visitors seemed to object to walking straight, and leaned over against the wind like a fleet of fishing-smacks on a rough day. The launches going northward found their propellers only a luxury, for their awnings made excellent sails. Hats left their owners’ heads, and started to see the Exposition alone. Small boys and men played short-stop at a moment’s notice, and became very skilful in “dropping upon the” hat as it rolled by upon its brim.
“Hats blown off while you wait!” said Harry, laughing as he saw a vigorous man spear his own hat with a thrust of his cane. The boys counted four similar hunts in a few minutes.
Women coming around the corner of the Administration Building seemed suddenly impressed with the beauty of the MacMonnies Fountain, and started for it at a run; but, quickly changing their minds, beat back again to their true course. The flags floated stiff upon the gale, and the water in the Lagoon changed color continually.
“I feel,” said Mr. Douglass, “that it is rather a pity to spend our last few hours here in a visit to the Midway Plaisance. We should really prefer to go again to the Art Gallery, which we have not half seen.”
“I know,” said Harry; “but the Art Building is long and time is fleeting. The advantage of going to the Midway is that the poor shows are not worth staying through, and the good ones are few.”
Entering the Midway they found that the rain had dampened the enthusiasm of even this crowd—usually the liveliest and gayest on the grounds. They passed by the “Congress of Beauty,” and the Philadelphia Working-man’s Model Home (Philip wondered why they did not show an Idle-man’s Home beside it), and selected the Libbey Glass-works for their first visit.
Within a rounded building they found a tall brick chimney, the lower part of which was made into a glass-heating furnace. About this boys were carrying upon iron rods lumps of what looked like hot coal. When the glass was just right, it was handed to a man, who cut and molded and trimmed the lump of glass into a bottle, or goblet, or globe. The men were so skilful that it was difficult to make out how they did their work; and, somehow, they never seemed to be making any of the more interesting pieces that were exhibited in the show-cases. The only bit of skill the boys could discover was that shown in keeping the ball of molten glass rounded. Whenever one of the rods was put down for a few moments, the glass would become stretched by its own weight to a long drop, and then had to be reheated.
When one of the workmen wished to cut a finished piece of work from the end of the rod, he would hold a pair of cold pincers against it for a few moments and it would snap away at a touch.
The tickets of admission to this show were announced to be good for twenty-five cents applied upon any purchase made in the building. But the boys concluded, after an examination of the prices, that it was easy to see through that little scheme. In fact, Harry declared that if postage-stamps had been on sale there, the price of two-centers would have been “two cents and a ticket.”
They bought little. Philip paid ten cents “and a ticket” for a spun-glass book-mark, and Harry bought a tiny cup of white and ruby glass. The compartments about the central hall contained, besides show-cases, a loom for weaving glass threads, a glass-cutting wheel, and, most interesting of all, a glass-spinning wheel. The boys studied this for quite a while. There was a big wheel with a broad, thin metal rim kept cool and moist. The workman sat at one side holding a glass rod before a blowpipe and moving it round and round and slowly forward so as to keep it melted fast enough to feed the single long thread to the rapidly revolving wheel.
“How do you suppose he begins the spinning?” said Philip, turning to Mr. Douglass.
“I can only guess,” Mr. Douglass replied; “but I suppose he heats a glass rod in the middle, drawing the two ends apart until he makes a thread, and then attaches an end of that thread to the wheel, turning it slowly at first.”
“I should think it would be hard to feed the wheel just fast enough,” said Harry; “but the man seems to take it easy”; and he did, for he was laughing and winking at the crowd.
The Venetian Glass-works were just opposite, and as the charge was only ten cents, the party went there also. The process was much the same; but the men were foreigners, and therefore seemed more picturesque. Their work was more interesting to watch. One man was making a sort of spray of glass, and affixed leaves, pressed them with molding-pincers, and twisted them so quickly that it needed close watching for the boys to comprehend the work. He cut the softened glass into scallops with scissors as easily as if it had been dough—every now and then reheating the bit of work. The boys were amused to see him fasten on several ornamental medallions—for he used lumps of red-hot glass for glue.
In the rooms where the Venetian glass was on sale, there was no trace of the businesslike sharpness so noticeable in the American establishment over the way. Here the salesmen moved around as slowly as their own gondolas in contrast with the electric-launch movements of the American shop-people. Leaving the glass-works, they were attracted by a “Japanese Bazaar,” and walked through what proved to be only a magnified Japanese store, such as they had often seen. But as they went out, they saw a small boy who was delighted to have found a great cloth fish upon the little lawn outside. With a joyful cheer, he tried to raise it up so that the wind would fill it. But another and very fierce small boy yelled out, “Here, you!—let that fish alone!” and the first boy’s cheering stopped at once.
Upon the same side was the Javanese village, to which they now made a second visit; but it was swept by gusts of cold wind and rain, and bore little resemblance to the sunny, bright little settlement they remembered. The band was silent, there was no chiming of gongs, and the merry little Javanese were soaked and sad. The bazaars, or shop-counters, were deserted except by those on duty, and they were huddled together trying to cheer one another by feeble old Javanese jokes.
Upon the veranda of one of the houses, the boys saw a family of natives at dinner, and one little boy put his hand into the dishes and helped himself. He was not reproved, however, by his father or mother, for they were doing the same thing.
“Here,” said Harry, as they passed the middle of the grounds, “is something that only sings louder when it rains”; and he pointed to the musical waterwheel that has been already described; but this time they noticed there was an idol near by—a queer, grotesque figure with which no self-respecting scarecrow would care to claim an acquaintance. He looked as if a hairbrush would have been a shock to his nerves. Only one more thing needs mention.
“There goes five,” said Philip, and Harry caught sight of a Javanese boy chasing his fleeing straw hat across the road.
Having been advised to see the German village, they took that next, and found it well worth a visit. It contained specimens of old German houses—for instance, a “Black Forest House” dated 1480. The boys and Mr. Douglass walked into its main room, and were becoming a little sentimental over the antique furniture, pictures, and carvings, when a voice brought them back four hundred years by inquiring: “Vill the shentlemans come see my soufenirs? Here are some fine soufenirs!” They declined to see souvenirs, and became absorbed instead in a towel-rack. The roller upon which the towel hung was supported in the hands of a jolly young peasant’s figure, who seemed smilingly to hold it forth. Next to this came a Bavarian dwelling, the outside of which was all the party cared to see, for they suspected that the German village required a longer visit than they had intended to pay. And when they had come to the museum, built in the form of a German castle, they were glad they had not stopped to see the Bavarian and other model houses.
The collection in the museum began with suits of armor from the rudest of chain-armor to the ornamented plate of later centuries. Arranged upon the wall were specimens of old arms—halberds, pikes, hooks, maces, lances, swords, daggers—every sort of iron tool which would serve to mince one’s fellow-man. Besides the array upon the wall, there were show-cases also containing weapons, as well as knives, forks, spoons, and tools.
Philip was amazed to see how much the tools of the Middle Ages resembled those of to-day. What difference there was, told in favor of the old-time workmen, as they seemed to care far more how their instruments looked, decorating the handles and putting ornamental flourishes on the metal parts. The scissors, forks, and knives also were carved and inlaid with gold or silver. Harry saw one enormous pocket-knife that he would have liked to smuggle out. The handle was some six inches long, and the knife had four blades—one plain, one a saw, one a chopper, and the last a pruning-hook. Probably it had been a Christmas present to the head gardener of some Serene High Mightiness, given in recompense for having rescued one of Their Little High Mightinesses from the horse-pond.
The last room in the German castle was filled with dummy figures dressed in various historic German costumes. They were grouped as if attending a reception, and faced a great figure typifying “Germania” surrounded by warriors in helmets and armor.
Harry said he wondered that “no one had thought of calling the World’s Fair City, ‘A City of Dummies,’” for all the nations of the earth had gone into doll-making to furnish it with a resident population—a quiet, orderly, law-abiding race, though not full of intelligence.
Just across from the German village, an enormous placard claimed for a Panorama of the Alps the distinction of the “only medal awarded for an exhibit on the Plaisance.” It is needless to say that this captured our visitors. They went in and began the ascent of an inclined passage. It curved spirally round and round until they heartily wished it wouldn’t. But a party just ahead of them cried out, “Here we are!” and soon they emerged upon a high platform in the middle of the great Swiss Mountains. Harry said he recognized the Matterhorn, the Clatterhorn, the Spatterhorn, and the Flatterhorn; but the lecturer gave other names than these. The lecturer, with frequent allusions to “when I was there,” and one condescending “doubtless some of you have heard of Interlaken,” conducted a sheep-like crowd of sight-seers along a spiral iron fence that was meant to keep people from escaping till they had been at least twice around.
Harry, who was not fond of fences as a rule, took in the situation at a glance, and solved the difficulty by sneaking under the rails to the exit. Philip went after, and Mr. Douglass saw nothing to do but to follow suit. But although they did not care much for the lecturer, the panorama was a fine piece of painting, and Harry said that “if not the Alps it was at least a very good alp for a quarter, even with the lecturer thrown in—still better if he had been thrown out!” But Harry was unfair to this worthy man: most of the visitors enjoyed his clear explanations of the painting, and walked at his heels around all the spirals.
“Samoa”—the South Sea Island show—consisted of a theater and grounds. The grounds were what Philip called “muddish” (a new word to Mr. Douglass, but one he could not disapprove), and the boys stopped only long enough to buy two bark hats,—pointed nightcaps, very elastic and a beautiful brown in color,—and to look in at a Samoan house where, according to the sign, “the boy, for a trifling fee, will show how to kindle a fire by rubbing two sticks together.” But the boy sat huddled in a corner, looking as sour as a lemon, and they left him to dream of his native land.
Besides, there was a stamping and a pounding and a yelling going on in the theater that no healthy American boy could long keep away from. When Harry was at the Plaisance one afternoon he had met the manager of this show, and that gentleman had given him passes for the two cousins; so in they went, to find a little stage whereon a gang of savages, naked to the waist, were trying to give people their money’s worth so far as stamping, yelling, and racket would avail. They had not even “kept their shirts on,” but were all in chocolate-tinted negligé. When the curtain (painted with a Moorish landscape) hid the row, there was only a short intermission before the stage-manager hung out a sign-board announcing a “Religious Dance.”
After that act was stilled, Harry said: “I didn’t know shinny was a religious dance, but I think now it must be. Perhaps among some of the Pacific Islands a foot-ball scrimmage would be considered a kind of prayer.” The dance really was clever, consisting of wheeling about and clattering long and short sticks together rhythmically. The next act was some guttural singing by several women and all the men, who sat in rows cross-legged along the stage. It was just like the song “Swee-ee-eepo—sweepo-o-o! Sweep-ee-o—sweep-o!” that may be heard from certain dusky residents of Manhattan Island on the Atlantic coast. A Fiji war-dance came next, and consisted in showing how bravely they would jab an advancing enemy with a paddle provided he would not go and spoil the little game by warding off or hitting back. It was grand, and the boys were especially delighted to see one of the younger girls come in at the back of the stage and go through the whole dance. “She’s a regular Tomboy Fiji,” said Philip.
There was more to the program, but the boys tired of it, and betook themselves to one of the Irish villages.
Here were souvenirs of peat, of bog-oak, of lace, all sorts; all sold by tidy little Irish girls with a brogue that it was hard to resist. Mr. Douglass picked up a black bog-oak cane. He seldom carried a cane, and had little idea of buying it. But the Irish girl looked at him with so cordial a smile that he felt bound to say something.
“How much is it?” he asked.
“’Tis a dollar and a half, sir,” she answered in a tone of heartfelt regret. Then confidentially, “But it is a fi-i-ine cane, that is, sir!”
He bought it, and the boys grinned. They had seen that the “blarney stone” was at the Fair, and were on their guard. Nevertheless they each bought a tiny black pig cut out of the same bog-oak, and were, as a matter of course, blarneyed in turn.
“How different the people in here!” said Mr. Douglass. “Did you notice that there was a row at the gate, and nothing but joking within?”
“Yes; it reminded me of New York at once,” said Harry; “just as Irish Day did.”
It was now time for them to leave the grounds; and although they were glad to get home and rest from sight-seeing, they felt very sentimental about taking their last look. They stood in the Court of Honor gazing silently about them, feeling as one feels in giving a parting hand-shake to a loved friend; and then they turned away, knowing that the beautiful dream they had seen and lived in was no more than a dream: that the day would come when all that beauty would be a memory, and the “Ghost City” only a legend.
But the phantom city has taught the American nation that they are a great people, who will some day make true in marble all that was imagined in that short-lived fairy-story of staff.