two miles in circumference and
has three stories of prodigious height; it would easily hold five or six
buildings like our Palace of Industry, and it is of glass; it consists,
first, of an immense rectangular structure rising toward the center in a
semicircle like a hothouse, and flanked by two Chinese towers; then, on
either side, long buildings descend at right angles, enclosing the garden
with its fountains, statues, summer houses, strips of turf, groups of
large trees, exotic plants, and beds of flowers. The acres of glass
sparkle in the sunlight; at the horizon an undulating line of green
eminences is bathed in the luminous vapor which softens all colors and
spreads an expression of tender beauty over an entire landscape.

Always the same English method of decoration--on the one side a park and
natural embellishments, which it must be granted, are beautiful and
adapted to the climate; on the other, the building, which is a monstrous
jumble, wanting in style, and bearing witness not to taste, but to English
power. The interior consists of a museum of antiquities, composed of
plaster facsimiles of all the Grecian and Roman statues scattered over
Europe; of a museum of the Middle Ages; of a Revival museum; of an
Egyptian museum; of a Nineveh museum; of an Indian museum; of a
reproduction of a Pompeiian house; of a reproduction of the Alhambra. The
ornaments of the Alhambra have been molded, and these molds are preserved
in an adjoining room as proofs of authenticity. In order to omit nothing,
copies have been made of the most notable Italian paintings, and these are
daubs worthy of a country fair.

There is a huge tropical hothouse, wherein are fountains, swimming
turtles, large aquatic plants in flower, the Sphinx and Egyptian statues
sixty feet high, specimens of colossal or rare trees, among others the
bark of a Sequoia California 450 feet in height and measuring 116 feet in
circumference. The bark is arranged and fastened to an inner framework in
such a manner as to give an idea of the tree itself. There is a circular
concert room, with tiers of benches as in a Colosseum. Lastly, in the
gardens are to be seen life-size reproductions of antediluvian monsters,
megatheriums, dinotheriums, and others. In these gardens Blondin does his
tricks at the height of a hundred feet.

I pass over half the things; but does not this conglomeration of odds and
ends carry back one's thoughts to the Rome of Caesar and the Antonines