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ROM the huge, round-shouldered bath-chair of an entrance, topped by its tailor-made girl, to the filigreed candlestick of a tower straddling the Court of Honor near the Trocadero, there stretched during the past summer a great park, crowded with big and little pavilions, palaces, kiosks, booths, and towers of varying degrees of beauty and ugliness, known to the footsore and weary as the Exposition of 1900.

The iron candlestick, with its searchlight of a candle and its elevator crawling like a fly up and down its thousand feet of height, was an old friend, and, as the "Eiffel Tower," had served the purposes of a former international display. The bath-chair of an entrance was new. It was not, as was the candlestick, made of iron, but was fashioned from lath, plaster, broken glass, putty, old lace curtains, and glue. As every beholder, except the man who designed it and the committee who accepted it, was inspired with an almost irresistible impulse to topple it over into the Seine, it is to be hoped that its sphere of usefulness has already been terminated by the closing of the late Exposition.

This iconoclastic tendency, however, ceased the moment that one entered from the Place de la Concorde and, passing through the bath-chair with its incomprehensible flag-poles of stained glass standing guard on either side, stepped into one of the many gardens that everywhere gladdened the grounds of the Exposition. Copyright, 1900, the Outlook Company.

The walks were level, trimmed to a nicety, covered with gravel screened to a size and kept scrupulously clean, and sprinkled the moment they became dry. They were bordered by thousands of seats, and patrolled by nearly as many gendarmes, courteous as they were alert. The flower-beds were raked, weeded, and watered. The flowers bloomed at their best. The famous big trees, dear to the heart of every Parisian, threw grateful shadows. The grass was as fresh as that of a spring meadow.

These pleasure-gardens were so extensive that a bird's-eye view of the Exposition would have presented only a noble park. studded with trees, brightened by a glistening river running its entire length and spanned by great bridges—a park crossed and recrossed by avenues and boulevards on which thousands of pleasure-seekers were constantly wandering.

Nor would the park have differed apparently from many of the other vast breathing-spaces adorning Paris. Indeed, one could well believe that had some former habitué of Paris returned unexpectedly and stood on one of the bridges that linked together both sections of the Exposition grounds-on the Pont d'Alma, for instance-and had he looked down upon the great display, he would have found it difficult to realize that this particular section of the great city differed from any other section with which he had once been familiar. Certainly the crowds. that thronged its avenues and streets would

not have seemed any larger or busier than those which he had once known along the boulevards. Nor would the buildings have appeared more costly, the general effect more artistic, or the whole more imposing. He would have seen a new bridge, of course the Pont Alexandre-a wonderful bridge, the most picturesque in all the world. And he would have seen two new art palaces on the left bank of the river fronting the Champs Elysées, in place of the old familiar Palais de l'Industrie. His eye would have caught a row of rounded greenhouses glistening in the sun's rays, and a forest of minarets, domes, and towers thrust above the tree-tops, besides rows of queer kiosks, temples, and booths lining the water, the whole gayly decorated with flags. But it would hardly have occurred to him, as he remembered the years of his absence, that all or any part of this conglomerate mass contained an Exposition commemorative of the arts and progress of the French Republic during the past century, or was other than one more expression of the gay and pleasure-loving spirit of the Parisian.

It would still be Paris to him-a greater Paris than he had seen years before more Paris, perhaps, than he had expected to see but still only Paris. If, to reassure himself, he had looked up the Seine, or down toward the Tuileries and Notre-Dame, and taken in the sky-line, the same vistas that had delighted him years before would have delighted him again. The bridges would have still hooped over the river, the swift steamers darting like swallows under the tunnel of their arches. His old friend, the Eiffel Tower candlestick, would still have raised its filigreed shaft high into the blue, the bold front of the Trocadero with its massive turrets still crowned the hill that dominates the Champ de Mars.

Beyond all this his curious eye would, of course, have lighted upon the great upright Ferris Wheel balanced on the horizon like a child's hoop. He would have noticed, too, the huge Globe touching the earth like a grounded balloon, a few more round or square buildings-but none of these objects would have counted in the sweep, nor would they have altered the landscape in his memory. "Paris is the metropolis of the world," he would have said they improve it every year."

This illusion would have been heightened by the ease with which the Exposition grounds were reached. For the little steamers that ply the river landed their passengers at the very front steps of the several pavilions; the cabs stopped just outside the ticket-stands, within stone's throw of the principal palaces, and the trams and 'buses gathered their crowds at the exit gates. There would have been but one new feature to account for a greenpainted fence twice as high as his head. It would only have been after he had passed through one of its many openings, and had left a franc behind for the privilege, that he would have begun to realize that something unusual confronted him—Paris being always wide open to all her devotees.

But, the gate once passed, he would still be in the city, the same people jostling him; here and there, perhaps, an Oriental in gay costume, or a Dahomey chief out on a holiday from the Jardin d'Acclimation. He would find the buildings less interesting than many of the superb structures on the other side of the fence, infinitely less beautiful than the Palace of the Luxembourg with its marvelous gardens, or the Park Monceau, or the Tuileries. For the high green painted fence kept only the cabs and omnibuses out; everything else inside this two inches of plank was the Paris that he had known for years.

The impression of this being only Paris after all was one of the disappointments of the Exhibition. The Government was not altogether to blame. No other site was possible. Part of it had been used twice before for similar enterprises, and there was no other space available within easy reach of four millions of Parisians, the Exposition's chief reliance. So they fenced in this section of the city itself, and squeezed into its already crowded space enough pavilions and palaces to hold their own and the world's exhibits.

It was, therefore, this transformation, or rather condensation, which robbed the present Exposition of many of those inspiring features of dignity and harmony which have distinguished other exhibitions of recent years, while the necessary huddling together of many of the buildings prevented the grouping of the more important structures into an architectural whole.

Some of the existing features—such as