turf
and shrubbery meant to brighten the _entourage_, especially at the
carriage concourse on the east front, we can hardly hope will fare so
well. The defence of their native soil, to prevent its being rent from
them by the heedless tread of millions and scattered abroad in the
shape of dust, will demand the most untiring struggles of the guardian
patriots in the Centennial police service.

Shall we step northward from the middle of this building to Memorial
Hall, or thread the great nave to the western portal and enter the
twin tabernacle sacred to Vulcan? The answer readily suggests itself:
substantials before dessert--Mulciber before the Muses. Let us get
the film of coal-smoke, the dissonance of clanking iron and the
unloveliness of cog-wheels from off our senses before offering them
to the beautiful, pure and simple. We come from the domain of finished
products, complete to the last polish, silently self-asserting and
wooing the almighty dollar with all their simpers. We pass to their
noisy hatching- and training-ground, where all the processes of
their creation from embryo to maturity are to be rehearsed for
our edification. We shall here become learned in the biography of
everything a machine can create, from an iron-clad to a penknife or
a pocket-handkerchief. In the centre of the immense hall, fourteen
hundred and two by three hundred and sixty feet and covering fourteen
acres, the demiurges of this nest of Titans, an engine--which if
really of fourteen hundred horse-power must be the largest hitherto
known--is getting together its bones of cast and thews of wrought
iron, and seems already like the first lion "pawing to be free." Its
first throb one would fancy inevitably fatal to the shell of timber
and glass that surrounds it.

[Illustration: AGRICULTURAL BUILDING.]

Before it is brought to the test let us explore that shell. To
our eye, its external appearance is more pleasing than that of the
building we just left. The one central and four terminal towers, with
their open, kiosk-like tops, are really graceful, and the slender
spires which surmount them are preferable to the sham of sheet-iron
turrets. Thanks, too, to the necessity of projecting an annex for
hydraulic engines from one side of the middle, the building is
distinguished by the possession of a front. The main cornice is forty
feet in height upon the outside; the interior height being seventy
feet in the two main longitudinal avenues and fo