The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair / Their Observations and Triumphs

by C. M. Stevens

In their "dance," as it is termed, they take a step forward with the right foot, and drag the left after it. This is repeated until they stub their toes on the orchestra, when they swarm back and go through the difficult feat of advancing by a series of hops on one foot. All of this is to the discordant pounding of drums and scrap-iron, where tune could not be discovered with a search warrant.

That evening Fanny visited the C. C. of C. C. and arranged for a family picnic at Washington Park the next day. She was to be hostess, and they were to have an outing with her in the city's artificial fields and forests that would recall the merry life of the country, and yet they would be surrounded by all the artistic embellishments that money and genius could secure.

Johnny went post haste for Louis, and the two boys were made bearers of the lunches, guides of the expedition, the vanguard of the march and the responsible protection of the company. They were eight merry young folks who took possession of the grip-car on the Cottage Grove Avenue cable line that morning. They stopped at the park hot-house and spent two delightful hours in the wilderness of flowers and of palm forests. On the outside were rustic seats about a pond where, in waters made tepid by steam heat through iron pipes, all kinds of tropical plants flourished in a profusion perhaps not excelled anywhere on the equator or along the banks of the Amazon. The great flower clock and the immense flower globe showing the geography of the earth, the old English castle gate and the carpeted lawns showed them the skill of the gardener's art. A quiet nook was found near the water's edge of one of the ponds. With a newspaper for a table-spread they enjoyed a lunch where hunger was a sauce better than Worcestershire, and the sod a better resting place than a throne.

After their lunch and a good rest they returned to the business part of the city and spent the remainder of the day in the Mystic Maze, the Labyrinth and the Panoptican. These were places where electricity and mirrors were arranged with the object of reversing every conception the eye had ever given to the mind. In one place the visitors entered a triangular room in one corner of which there was a large vase of flowers. The walls were solid mirrors and the six girls found themselves as if in a host of people and a wilderness of flowers. From this they passed on into a room which the attendant said was forty feet square and contained thirty-eight mirrors six feet by eight set at different angles between posts evenly distributed about the room. As they stepped forward they found themselves among countless hordes of people, again they were alone, all at once they found themselves in a line of girls that stretched on either side apparently for miles. One time they would be brushing around among people about two feet high and two feet thick; again they would be surrounded by thousands of girls eight or ten feet high and correspondingly thin. It was exasperating to say the least. When they became weary of this novelty they looked about them for the attendant but he had mysteriously disappeared. Leila said she knew the way out and she started with all the confidence that a usually level headed girl can have, but alas! she nearly broke her head by running into one of the big mirrors. Nannie happened to look in a certain direction when she saw the door and the curtains about it as plainly as she ever saw anything in her life.

"There I see the door," she cried, "come this way," and she started with her hands out before her like some one feeling his way in the dark, though it was as bright about them as the electric lights could make it. All at once the door she had in view disappeared like magic and she stood before herself in a mirror ducking her head backwards and forwards like two young chickens with their beaks just touching in the preliminaries of a fight. The situation was becoming too serious to be amusing any longer.

"What shall we do?" said Fanny, who had read of death in the mysterious labyrinths in ancient times. The roof was low, and even if the sky had been their roof they had no wings, like Daedalus, whereby they might escape.

The girls began to get nervous, and several million of them seemed to huddle together as they discussed the situation.

"I say, let's yell!" said Mary.

"But what is the use to yell," one said, "if they have determined that we are to die here?"