covering
egress, I made another tour of them, but still could not find where
I had entered. A solitary American was seated in the reading-room
looking weary and homesick, and I asked him if he could tell me the
right road out of the American commission. He said he hardly knew:
this was his first visit, but he'd try. So both of us went prospecting
around and opening all the doors we met, while a deaconish old
gentleman behind a desk looked on apparently interested, yet offering
nothing in the way of information or suggestion. I presume, however,
this is the only amusement the man has in this forlorn place. I
was beginning to think of descending by way of the windows when the
strange American at last found a door which led into the main entry,
and we both left at the same time, glad to escape.

I will do one side of the American department in the exhibition stern
justice. It commences with a long picture placed there by the Pork
Packers' Association of Cincinnati, descriptive of the processes which
millions of American hogs are subjected to while being converted into
pork. There are hogs going in long procession to be killed, and
going, too, in a determined sort of way, as if they knew it was their
business to be killed. Then come hogs killed, hogs scalded, hogs
scraped, hogs cut up into shoulders, hams, sides, jowls; hogs salted,
hogs smoked. Underneath this sketch are a number of unpainted buggy
and carriage wheels; next, a pile of pick-handles; not far off, a
little mound of grindstones; after the grindstones, a platoon of
clothes-wringers; next, a solitary iron wheel-barrow communing with a
patent fire-extinguisher; following these a crowd of green iron pumps,
with sewing-machines in full force. Such is a bit of the American
department.

It is the fashion here that every one should have a growl at the
general slimness and slovenliness of our department. Every one gives
our drooping eagle a kick. This is all wrong. We can't send our
greatest wonders and triumphs to Europe. There is neither room nor
opportunity in the building for showing off one of our political
torchlight processions, or a vigilance-committee hanging, or a Chicago
or Boston fire, or a steamboat blow-up, or a railway smash-up. Were
the present chief of the commission a man of originality and talent,
he might even now save the national reputation by bundling all the
pumps, churns, patent clothes-washers, wheel-barrows and pick-handles
out of doors, a