The guard was removed to the hospital, while the workmen were laughing their heartiest. In an hour the stricken officer was back at his post.
That afternoon, as the family climbed the stairs to the station on their way back to the hotel, Uncle Jeremiah was a study to the student of human nature. The size of the Exposition had dazed and awed him. He wore a neat paper collar with an old-fashioned ready-made necktie pushed under the points. The slouch hat was down over his ears, as a heavy wind was tearing across the high landing. His manner was that of one oppressed by a great sorrow. He looked at the turrets and domes and the hundreds of dancing flags and shook his head solemnly. When the people around him gabbled and pointed their fingers and piled up the same old adjectives he glanced around at them timidly and then stepped softly away where he could gaze without being interrupted. After boarding the car he stood up between the seats and held on to the railing. At each curve of the track, as new visions swung into view, he shook his head again and again, but said nothing. He had been for a good many years taking in a daily landscape of stubble-field, orchard and straight country roads. His experience had taught him that a red two-story hay press was a big building. To him the huddle of huckster stands at the county fair made a pretty lively spectacle. Then he was rushed into Chicago. With the roar of wheels still in his ears and the points of the compass hopelessly mixed, he found himself being fed into the Exposition gate with a lot of strange people. The magnitude of the great enterprise was more than any intellect could fully grasp. His mind perceived so much that was strange and new that he became as that one who saw men as trees walking. His eyes were opened to a new world. He was now a living part of the intellectual vision and prophecy of the "Dream City."
CHAPTER III
AROUND THE WORLD FOR TWENTY CENTS
The next day, when the "Alley L" road let them off at the station next to the electric road, they decided to ride around and view the "White City" from that elevated position. The intramural road is about three miles around, and makes the trip in seventeen minutes. It was like going around the world in that time, so much was to be seen on either side.
The four made a fine picture of age and youth gathering mental breadth from this great exhibition of human wisdom and achievement. They passed around the west end of Machinery hall and along the south side of it, then between the Agricultural annex and the stock pavilion. Here they emerged into what seemed to be the waste yard of the Exposition, debris of all kinds, beer houses, lunch rooms, hundreds of windmills flying in the breeze and heavily loaded cars, back of which could be seen bonfires of waste materials, these making a striking contrast to the white beauty and massive art on the opposite side of the car.
The queer looking Forestry building flew by, the leather exhibit was passed, and the train ran around a station not far from the Krupp gun works. They had not yet made the grand tour of the grounds, but another investment in tickets sent them back again, the way they had come, on the parallel track. When they reached the west side they looked away from the massive buildings across Stony Island avenue at the amusing medley of hotels, booths for lunches, and tents for blue snakes, sea monsters, and fat women strung along the front. Little merry-go-rounds buzzed like tops in cramped corners between pine lemonade stands and cheap shooting-galleries. Looking eastward, the eye rests with satisfaction upon the gilded satin of the Administration dome, and then it may take an observation to the westward of a flaunting placard: