with another waiter, whom I am sure she had never met in
Lake City, nor anywhere else.

"See here, Mary! If this is the way you're going to behave, you go
straight back to Lake City on that boat, and don't see one bit of the
Fair."

Her manners were mended till we were actually in Jackson Park, but then:

"She's a philanthropist, Belle, a lover of _man_kind--Columbian Guard,
Gospel Charioteer, Turk in the bazaar. The creed or the color doesn't
matter so long as he calls himself a man."

I am afraid I was cross, for it did not take one day to realize what an
undertaking it was going to be to keep track of my family, who had never
before seemed too numerous. Daily at 10 A. M., in the Michigan Building,
did I hand over to Will Axworthy the most troublesome of the lot, and
daily did I wish he would keep her for better or worse.

On the Fourth of July cannonading began at daybreak, and for once I
sympathized in my mother's objection to the license accorded to young
Americans. They set off firecrackers, not by the bunch but by the
bushel; kerosene and dynamite were their ambrosia and nectar. What with
fighting for lunch in overcrowded restaurants, and then retaliating by
stealing chairs out of the same, hunting through the various booths in
the Midway to collect my three younger sons when it was time to send
them home, and rescuing my two little girls from an over-supply of ice
cream sodas and chocolate drops, I did not specially enjoy the glorious
Fourth.

Toward evening there was not a foot of Fair ground undecorated by a
banana skin, a crust of bread, or a flying paper. Belle considered the
signs "Keep off the Grass" quite superfluous, and pulling one up by the
roots she sat down on it, thereby keeping the letter, if not the spirit
of the law.

"Now, Dave," said she, "the family are all safe off the grounds, and you
can go and get a gondola to come and take us for a sail before dark.
Everybody is moving toward the lake front to wait for the fireworks, and
the lagoons are not so crowded as they were. Let's pretend we're on our
honeymoon."

So seldom does Belle wax sentimental over me, I hailed her proposition
with outward indifference but inward joy. Securing a gondola to
ourselves, in it we were gently swayed through canal and under bridge in
the mystical evening light.

The distant rumble of a train on the Intramural, or a quack from a
sleepy duck among the rushes, alone broke the stillness.

"This is where I