atisfy all possible craving for news from that or any other quarter
in the Press Building. This metropolis of the fourth estate occupies
a romantic site on the south side of the avenue and the north bank of
the lake. Such a focus of the news and newspapers of all nations
was not paralleled at either of the preceding expositions. American
journalism will be additionally represented in the different State
buildings, where files of all the publications of each commonwealth
will be found, embracing in most cases a greater number of journals
than the entire continent boasted in 1776, and in each of the States
of Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania more than the extra-metropolitan
press of either France, Austria, Prussia or Russia can now boast.

[Illustration: GERMAN BUILDING.]

The commercial idea is so prominent in this, as in all expositions,
that it is difficult to draw the line between public and private
interest among its different features, and particularly among what
may be called its outgrowths, overflowings or addenda. Here is half
a square mile dotted with a picturesque assemblage of shops and
factories, among which everything may be found, from a soda-fountain
or a cigar-stand up to a monster brewery, all devoted at once to
the exemplification and the rendering immediately profitable of some
particular industry. In one ravine an ornate dairy, trim and Arcadian
in its appurtenances and ministers as that of Marie Antoinette and her
attendant Phillises at the Petit Trianon, offers a beverage presumably
about as genuine as that of '76, and much above the standard of
to-day. A Virginia tobacco-factory checkmates that innocent tipple
with "negrohead" and "navy twist." A bakery strikes the happy medium
between the liquid sustenance and the narcotic luxury by teaching
Cisatlantic victims of baking-powders and salaeratus how to make Vienna
bread. Recurring to fluids, we find unconquered soda popping up, or
down, from innumerable fonts--how many, may be inferred from the fact
that a royalty of two dollars on each spigot is estimated to place
thirty-two thousand dollars in the strong box of the exposition. Nor
does this measure the whole tribute expected to be offered at these
dainty shrines of marble and silver. The two firms that bought the
monopoly of them pay in addition the round sum of twenty thousand
dollars. It speaks well for the condition of the temperance cause
that beer is the nearest rival of aerated water. An _oc