THE LONE FISHERMAN: "Keep afloat as long as you can. I promise to call help in a few months."-From Judge, June 24.

UNCLE SAM : "Gosh! I've got this critter lassoed right enough, but how in thunder am I going to git him over thar t› China?"-From Wasp (San Francisco).

AN ENGLISHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS AT THE FAIR.

BY REV. F. HERBERT STEAD, M.A.

[OUR readers who are so familiar with the pen of the founder and English editor of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS from the large contributions it makes to every number of the magazine, are not so well acquainted with that of his younger brother, Rev. F. Herbert Stead, M.A. For some time Mr. Herbert Stead was the editor of the Independent, a London weekly religious paper of broad scope and high standing. In the arena of British theological and religious discussion Mr. Herbert Stead bids fair to attain a position as distinguished as that occupied by his brother in the field of politics and social reform. He made a flying trip to Chicago to witness the opening of the World's Fair and wrote his impressions for the English edition of the REVIEW. They will be even more interesting to American readers, if we mistake not, than to British. They are not only valuable because they let us see through the eyes of an intelligent Englishman on his first visit to America, but they constitute a most charming and picturesque description of the Opening Day scene worthy of preservation as one of the best pieces of World's Fair literature.-THE EDITOR.]

A

DISMAL scene of swamp and storm presented itself with the first morning which woke me in Chicago. Weeks of rain had culminated in a day of deluge. The great city rose like a dusky Venice out of an Adriatic of mud. In the direction of Jackson Park the roads, which were only partly laid down, formed mere strips of morass. Cottage Grove avenue, the principal highway to the Fair, consisted of a pier of stone tramroad dividing two rivers of slime, which on their further side were bounded by irregular banks of timber sidewalk. Over this route the cable car mercifully conveyed me to a point where one had only a few yards to wade in order to enter the grounds. I found the World's Fair en déshabille. It was within twenty-four hours of the Opening Ceremony, and, like other beauties seen before their toilette is complete, the Columbian Exposition threatened at first to show to disadvantage. The roads within the gates were even more miry than those without. Picking one's precarious way under an umbrella well pelted by the storm, one noticed much of the unfinished ends of things. One saw what promised to be a noble Corinthian column suddenly terminate in a skeleton of spars and laths. Winged Victories in plaster were swinging in mid-air, on the way to their destined niches. The disjecta membra of a whole host of statues lay about on less obtrusive spots; here the wing of a seraph, with its rough wooden framework uppermost, there an ingenious combination of lath and canvas, which proved to be the under side of a goddess' bust; helmeted heads, bare arms, and greaved legs of heroes in profusion, all plainly betraying the secret of their origin. Little copses of scaffolding and swarms of workmen about gave the same impression of gross incomplete

ness.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

But whatever feelings of disparagement had been aroused by these details, the first glimpse of the whole Park instantly swept away. What I saw when I gained the northern and eastern balconies of the

Administration Building surpassed and surprised my highest expectations. After all that pen and pencil had done to prepare me for the sight, I felt that not one-half had been told me. The great white city which rose before me, silent and awful, seemed to belong to an order of things above our common world. It was a poem entablatured in fairy palaces, only to be done into human speech by the voice of