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attic, constituting, for this part of the building, a third story of small rooms, opening on each side on roof-gardens, which should extend over the end pavilions, surrounded by an open screen formed of an order of light Ionic columns, with caryatids over the loggia below, all after the manner not unusual in the terraced gardens of Italian palaces. The central hall is 67% feet wide by nearly 200 feet long, and attains an exterior height of 64 feet.

Under the circumstances explained, the design is rather lyric than epic in character, and it takes its proper place on the Exposition grounds

with a certain modest grace of manner not inappropriate to its uses and to its authorship.

After an extremely vigorous and hardly contested competition among sculptors of the gentler sex throughout the Union, the sculpture of the main pediment, and of the typical groups surmounting the open screen around the roofgardens, was awarded to Miss Alice Rideout, of San Francisco. It is needless to say that the subjects are emblematic of woman's great work in the world, and that criticism will be glad to recognize in these compositions all the noble and poetic qualities of art which they aim to set forth. Henry Van Brunt.

THE SUNSET THRUSH.

【S it a dream? The day is done
The long, warm, fragrant summer day;
Afar beyond the hills the sun
In purple splendor sinks away;
The cows stand waiting by the bars;

The firefly lights her floating spark,
While here and there the first large stars
Look out, impatient for the dark;
A group of children saunter slow

Toward home, with laugh and sportive word,

One pausing, as she hears the low Clear prelude of an unseen bird— "Sweet-sweet-sweet

Sorrowful-sorrowful—sorrowful!"

Ah, hist! that sudden music-gush
Makes all the harkening woodland still,-
It is the vesper of the thrush,-
And all the child's quick pulses thrill.
Forgotten in her heedless hand

The half-filled berry-basket swings;
What cares she that the merry band
Pass on and leave her there? He sings!
Sings as a seraph, shut from heaven

And vainly seeking ingress there, Might pour upon the listening even His love, and longing, and despair

"Sweet-sweet-sweet

Sorrowful-sorrowful-sorrowful!"

Deep in the wood, whose giant pines
Tower dark against the western sky,
While sunset's last faint crimson shines,
He trills his marvelous ecstasy;
With soul and sense entranced, she hears
The wondrous pathos of his strain,
While from her eyes unconscious tears
Fall softly, born of tenderest pain.
What cares the rapt and dreaming child
That duskier shadows gather round?
She only feels that flood of wild
Melodious, melancholy sound-
"Sweet-sweet-sweet-

Sorrowful-sorrowful-sorrowful!"

Down from immeasurable heights

The clear notes drop like crystal rain,
The echo of all lost delights,

All youth's high hopes, all hidden
pain,

All love's soft music, heard no more,

But dreamed of and remembered long-
Ah, how can mortal bird outpour
Such human heart-break in a song?
What can he know of lonely years,

Of idols only raised to fall,
Of broken faith, and secret tears?
And yet his strain repeats them all
"Sweet-sweet-sweet-

Sorrowful-sorrowful-sorrowful!"

Ah, still amid Maine's darkling pines,

Lofty, mysterious, remote,

While sunset's last faint crimson shines,
The thrush's resonant echoes float;

And she, the child of long ago,

Who listened till the west grew gray,

Has learned, in later days, to know
The mystic meaning of his lay;

And often still, in waking dreams

Of youth's lost summer-times, she hears Again that thrilling song, which seems The voice of dead and buried years "Sweet-sweet-sweetSorrowful-sorrowful — sorrowful!"

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Elizabeth Akers.

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her baggage. Her trunks-bigger and more numerous than I should dare to state-had been sent on from Salzburg by some method or other which gave her no concern, and already she had come to feel that if ever in her life she was to have a chance to dress, these halls of pride should be the witness of her magnificence. Already she began to sniff triumph in the air, and she found it easier now to forgive Zeitgeist for having peremptorily told her that it was impossible and unnecessary to drag those portentous chests through the Val d'Ampezzo, and across the complication of chains and passes which make up the country of south Tyrol; while the series of protests and bickerings which had accompanied those huge constructions across Switzerland came to be only a hazy recollection. Aurelia had been sheathed in woolen walking-skirts and heavy shoes for more than two months, and she was beginning to feel an irresistible desire to burst into bloom a process to which time, place, and circumstance now all conduced. She conceded that she was beautiful, she acknowledged that her dresses were handsome, and she was only too certain that the daughters and nieces of the Baroness were doomed to absolute eclipse. One of her gowns, in particular-but we shall reach that presently. The entire castle and its belongings seemed but a parterre contrived for her efflorescence. History and romance, legend and adventure, trophies and tapestries, armory and picturegallery, chapels and chambers, turrets and stairways, horses and hounds, stewards, tutors, chaplains, lackeys, and foresters, worshipful tenants, and reverencing peasantry-what a background before which to trail the latest confections of Paris! All this for her, Miss Aurelia R. West of Rochester; and yet there were those who postponed Paradise beyond this present life! Yes, it was Paradise; nothing was wanting but the serpent, and the serpent came along promptly enough.

Aurelia, who was always rendered restless and uneasy by the vicinity of vendible merchandise, and who already had communicated a touch of the subtle poison of shopping to the Chatelaine, had felt herself impelled, on the very first morning after their arrival, to go down to Meran to make a few purchases. Not for two weeks had her petticoats grazed a counter, and her gnawing desire to chaffer and bargain was as insufferable as the torture of the opium-eater when his favorite drug is withheld. The Chatelaine was also beginning to feel the need of meeting requirements heretofore hardly dreamed of, and so the Baroness sent them down on wheels together.

As they were strolling along the arcades of Unter den Lauben a scrap of paper caught on

the bottom of Aurelia's dress. It was a corner torn from the "Fremdenblatt," whose publication had just been resumed with the beginning of the early autumn season; and as she stooped to see if picking would do for her what shaking would not, a name all too familiar flashed from the type to her eyes. She crumpled the bit of paper in her hand, and at the first convenient opportunity she was reading an account of a concert which Mlle. Eugénie Pasdenom had given at the Kurhaus on the previous evening. And if she had turned the paper over she would have learned not only that Mlle. Pasdenom was stopping at the Habsburgerhof, but that Tempo-Rubato and Fin-de-Siècle were at the Erzherzog Johann.

It may be imagined that if the Duchess. (with a voice so limited by nature and a constituency so limited by place and season) was attempting concerts in the Tyrol, her original plan had undergone considerable modifications. In fact, the tour projected in the first place had turned out none too satisfactorily, and she had brought it to an abrupt termination several weeks before. After all, she was abroad largely for recreation, she had plenty of other things to occupy herself with, and three or four of the secondary lights of her troupe were quite enough for the carrying out of her latest idea. Doubtless this new departure had been an embarrassment to her manager, yet there were other managers that she had not merely embarrassed, but ruined. And possibly it was a bit trying to the humble members of the chorus and orchestra, too; but then the Duchess never descended to details. Upon her breaking with her impresario, Tempo-Rubato, whose selfconfidence was equal to any undertaking, had thrown himself into the breach. He was willing to engineer any new enterprise that she might care to embark in. He would be her impresario or her financial sponsor; he would do the baritone parts, or the leading tenor ones if they could be brought down a third; he would take tickets, or he would shift the scenery. On the spur of the moment he proposed a little tour on the other side of the Alps: Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, and so on, ending with Milan, where the people would, no doubt, be overjoyed to have a revival of "Orphée aux Enfers" on the stage of La Scala. And when she seemed likely to resent this obvious sarcasm, he intrepidly suggested another tour-one beginning at Trieste and running along the coast of Dalmatia; he himself would charter a steamer. There was Capo d'Istria, where ten thousand people had probably been waiting all their lives to form an acquaintance with Offenbach and Le Cocq; there was Pola, the principal station of the Austrian fleet, whose officers would rally as a man; there was Fiume, and she could then

say that she had been in Hungary; there was Zara, where she might count upon the influence of a good friend of his, a personage once high in the political world and a devoted supporter of the opera, but now residing in retirement and cultivating roses, as Diocletian at Spalato had cultivated cabbages; there was Spalato itself, and Ragusa, and Cattaro, where they might give the Turks a chance to form an opinion of "Fatinitza," and where she might buy a prayer-rug, if she fancied.

The Duchess ignored the amphitheaters, and cathedrals, and Venetian campaniles of the Dalmatic coast, but she shed angry tears at the prayer-rug-two of them, one from each eye. He was not to speak to her in that way; she would not listen to anything of the kind. He retorted that she should listen, to anything of that kind or of any other kind. Then there had been neither listening nor speaking for three days, and then they had come together through the Vorarlberg into the Tyrol. And then, two days after the arrival of the Governor's party at Meran, they crossed over the Brenner to Italy.

But before she departed, Aurelia West had a glimpse of her. One afternoon the Frau Baroninn ordered out her coach, in whose crested panelings and so on Aurelia took great pride, and bowled her young visitors down to Meran again. As they rolled along the Wassermauer they observed a couple strolling along intimately enough under the poplar-trees close to the stream. The costume and carriage of the lady would have distinguished her anywhere, and the gentleman, who walked along with his head inclining over toward his companion, and who trolled a small pug-dog in their wake, was easy enough to recognize. Aurelia looked straight ahead with a noncommittal stare, and the Chatelaine, about whose ears the leaves of the tree of knowledge had lately been rustling, looked sternly in the opposite direction; but the Baroness deliberately put up her glasses and gave the pair a leisurely and minute survey. Seldom before had she seen her abstruse and self-absorbed son exhibit such an effect of unconsciously ecstatic complacency, and she was interested in noting the person who could bring about so striking a change. Aurelia's feeling, however, was far from being one of curiosity. She was impatient with Zeitgeist, and indignant at him. She was beginning to feel that she had more cause to complain of him than he of her; and as the couple passed along the walk in a state of smiling preoccupation, Aurelia's wits began to work still more rigorously and insistently upon a problem which had lately come to occupy her, and which was daily taking more and more of her attention.

Here was Bertha, the Chatelaine of La Trinité, a beautiful young creature, well born, well bred, fair, fresh, wholesome, with position, family, estate, yet who was there that appreciated her? Not Fin-de-Siècle, whose interest was hardly above the level of an impertinent curiosity. Not Tempo - Rubato, whose treatment of her had scarcely been more than an indulgent condescension. Not Zeitgeist, surely, who, with the best opportunities of all, was finding more of interest at this very moment in the strange woman from Paris. What was this creature's charm? She was not really beautiful; she was not actually clever; she certainly could lay no claim to family. Was it style, was it audacity, was it experience, was it the genius of worldliness? Could this be the model that the great work of reconstruction designed by her, Aurelia West, must followa model so shocking, yet so impelling? But was it so shocking, after all? Who, if not the Pasdenoms, gave the tone to the capital which she herself had voluntarily selected as a place of residence? Who else set the pace, governed the mode, suggested and regulated manners, costumes, amusements? But deliberately to pattern the reconstructed Chatelaine on such lines as these-oh, no; there must be a dreadful hitch in her logic somewhere; surely there must be some other theory upon which she could proceed, and she must have the wit to frame it.

Aurelia, in fact, was feeling within her the impulse to produce a work of art. Some of the ideas on this subject that Fin-de-Siècle and the Governor had battledored back and forth had fallen on the ground,— good ground,- and now, watered by Aurelia's assiduous regard for the Chatelaine, promised to spring up and to produce an abundant harvest. Aurelia had no hope of achieving a work of art that could be ranged in any conventional or recognized class. She fully realized that the grandest productions of the native American genius had not been brought about by the work of man in clay, or color, or catgut, or calligraphy, but by the working of man on man. She would not attempt to subdue marble or to make color captive, but she was anxious to show what might result from the working of woman on woman.

Well, then, to go over the ground again, carefully and in a different direction,- here was the Chatelaine, whose attractive personality had been thoroughly canvassed already. Consider, now, her status. She was the last of a long race: two grandfathers, four greatgrandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers, and so on and on, each of the series possessed of a name and title, a niche in history, and a portrait in the family gallery. She held her

position in her own right; on her had descended the accumulated fortunes of the family; from her high-perched castle she swayed it over a valley of peasantry, doting and complaisant, no doubt, to a degree. What position more lofty, more gracious, more noble? Ah, she had it! The whole situation was brilliantly clear, absurdly simple. It was merely a case of goddess and pedestal; only the goddess must be made to feel that she was a goddess, and to see that her proper place was not beside the pedestal, but upon it. And now a friendly Intelligence had come to show the divinity how to mount to her place, or, if need be, actually to lift her to it. And under these altered conditions worship would follow as a matter of course.

Such, in brief, was the program evolved by the transported Aurelia while the carriage rolled rapidly along on its graveled way, and the Baroness and the Chatelaine sat silent side by side. Not merely those uncertain young men were to see what she could do, but the Governor himself should be a witness to her skill; he was to see all of his own lofty lucubrations about arrangement and presentation and the rest reduced to working order. And as for her own poor self-that was a paltry candle to be snuffed forthwith, since all the light was to fall on quite a different part of the stage. So overjoyed was she to think that Providence had sent the Chatelaine a friend so dexterous, so sympathetic, so self-sacrificing, that she broke the stern silence with a laugh, a most undeniable one. Both her companions looked at her disapprovingly, and she felt that in the Chatelaine's eyes she had slipped back to the precarious ground on which she had stood at Lucerne, while the aspect of the Baroness was such as to make it seem likely that the rest of her visit might have to be spent in reinstating herself in her hostess's good graces.

Aurelia fancied that she had already made a very fair estimate of the castle, but she received quite a new impression of the possibilities of the place and of the general pleasantness of hereditary distinction on the occasion of the celebration of Zeitgeist's own birthday, for which fête the banners were, indeed, hung on the outward walls, and the cry might well have been, "They come!" The magnates of the district came with their wives and daughters; the sons came with their spurs and sabers; the tenantry came tramping up the valley and flocking down from the mountains with music and addresses and torches and hurrahs. What a delightful situation, thought Aurelia, this right to cheers as a mere matter of rank and descent! How vastly better than the situation in poor, crude America, where if a man wanted hurrahs he must hurrah for himself. The turmoil of preparation for this observance put our

enthusiastic Aurelia quite beside herself. What a grand opportunity to take the Chatelaine's measure, to hold a full-dress rehearsal of the drama which was to be enacted at La Trinité, to revise the draperies of the statue before it came to rest on its own proper base! With what emotion did Aurelia lift these draperies from the recesses of the biggest of her big trunks! They appertained to the one conspicuously magnificent creation of the entire wardrobe, a Parisian inspiration, the emanation of a master mind,-a talent of such a high order that to many of its patrons only a thin partition divided it from genius,—a mind that, when it judged itself, broke through even this. It was this garment that Aurelia herself had fondly hoped to wear; but with a look of high resolve she thrust this flattering idea aside, and when she glanced at herself in the mirror she was rewarded by seeing, if not a martyr, at least a heroine. Her mind was big with one idea, her imagination was in a state of conflagration; and it lighted up an image of a beautiful creature (adequately attired) sailing in stately fashion down the crimson covering of a marble staircase, while a loud announcement heralded the coming of The Most Noble and High-born (supposing that to be the proper form), the Lady Berthe Gloiredesalpes (supposing that to be the exact name), the Chatelaine of La Trinité, and the This of That, and the That of The Other (which sketchy string of titles stood subject, of course, to revision in light of later and more detailed information). After which burst of poetic frenzy the sibyl confessed herself exhausted, and threw herself upon her bed.

But not to lie there long; she was too excited to rest, and there was a good deal to do before she could adjust the Chatelaine to her new attire. For the Chatelaine had none too high a notion of her own merits, and she was inclined to hang back a little bashfully from so novel an experience; even when she had finally been induced to try on things experimentally, it was seen that a good many changes would have to be made before the ideal was reached. There was also the matter of gloves and shoes; Aurelia's hands and feet were absurdly small. These and kindred matters necessitated a good deal of snipping and basting within the castle, as well as repeated excursions down to Meran.

But the end crowns the work, and when the Chatelaine finally came to stand before the clustered wax-lights that surrounded Aurelia's long mirror, and took a final view of herself previous to treading the crimson-covered marbles that had filled so important a place in the mind of her imaginative friend, the artist joyfully expressed her unqualified satisfaction. The Chatelaine gazed at her own reflection with big, startled eyes, and as she moved about, and heard the

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