tow-path above represented water-carriage. Good
railways came in from every quarter of the compass, but none of them
brought the locomotive to the neighborhood of the grounds. In the matter
of tram-roads for passengers the Viennese distinguished themselves over
the Londoners and Parisians by the possession of _one_. In steam-roads
they had no advantage and no inferiority. At each and all of these
cities the packing-box and the passenger were both confronted by the
vexatious interval between the station and the exposition
building--often the most trying part of the trip. Horsepower was the one
time-honored resource, in '73 as in '51, and in unnumbered years before.
Under the ancient divisions of horse and foot the world and its
_impedimenta_ moved upon Hyde Park, the Champ de Mars and the Prater,
the umbrella and the oil-cloth tilt their only shield against Jupiter
Pluvius, who seemed to take especial pleasure in demonstrating their
failure, nineteen centuries after the contemptuous erasure of him from
the calendar, to escape his power. It was reserved for the Philadelphia
Commission to bring his reign (not the slightest intention of a pun) to
a close. The most delicate silk or gem, and the most delicate wearer of
the same, were enabled to pass under roof from San Francisco into the
Main Building in Fairmount Park, and with a trifling break of twenty
steps at the wharf might do so from the dock at Bremen, Havre or
Liverpool. The hospitable shelter of the great pavilion was thus
extended over the continent and either ocean. The drip of its eaves
pattered into China, the Cape of Good Hope, Germany and Australia. Their
spread became almost that of the welkin.

Let us look somewhat more into the detail of this unique feature of the
American fair.

Within the limits of the United States the transportation question soon
solved itself. Five-sixths of the seventy-four thousand miles of railway
which lead, without interruption of track, to Fairmount Park are of
either one and the same gauge, or so near it as to permit the use
everywhere of the same car, its wheels a little broader than common.
From the other sixth the bodies of the wagons, with their contents, are
transferable by a change of trucks. The expected sixty or eighty
thousand tons of building material and articles for display could thus
be brought to their destination in a far shorter period than that
actually allowed. Liberal arrangements were conceded by the variou