THE CRYSTAL PALACE.
There are large and beautiful pleasure grounds all around the Crystal Palace, and all the great national fetes, concerts, and open air demonstrations, take place here. Patti, Nillson, and Sims Reeves, sing here in benefits for charitable associations, and for a shilling, a person may listen to ballads on Saturday afternoons, at these concerts, sung by the greatest living English tenor. Then there are acres of restaurants and dining saloons inside and outside of the Crystal Palace, and apparatus and cooking utensils are on the premises, whereby ten thousand people may find dinner, all at one time, and sit down to tables in five minutes after dinner has been ordered. During the long summer evenings, promenade concerts are held at the Crystal Palace, and fireworks are let off in the presence of great crowds, who enjoy the sports and junketings much as a New York crowd may do on a Fourth of July night, in the City Hall, or Madison Park.
The contents of the Palace itself are calculated to puzzle the brains of a philosopher. Everything wonderful, curious, precious, or difficult to find at any other place, may be found at the Crystal Palace.
Specimens of architecture, sculpture of all ages, tombs, temples, busts, statues, capitals, hieroglyphs, from Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Italy, portions and entire courts from the glorious Alhambra, gigantic relics and ruins from the Palaces of Babylon, Susa, and Nineveh; fragments of the Christian temples of Italy, the castles and churches of Germany, the Chateaux of Belgium and France, and the Cathedrals and Mansions of England, from the earliest ages to the present time, all of which are arranged in "courts" in the most systematic order.
Beside these there are many Industrial "Courts" containing the most wonderful and useful inventions of the genius and scholar. Then there are gigantic models of the tremendous animals who existed before the flood, with models of huge and hideous reptiles, and saurians, who did their level best in the same period.
Some sunny Saturdays as many as fifty thousand people pay visits to the Crystal Palace, and to see and enjoy all these wonders, the charge is only one shilling, including concerts, music, fireworks, and flirtations.
The last time I was there it was on the occasion of the Royal Dramatic Fete, for the benefit of the profession, and fully a hundred thousand persons were present, including the Prince and Princess of Wales, and many of the nobility.
COST OF GROUNDS AND BUILDING.
The entire cost of grounds and building, with works of art and curiosities, was seven million dollars. There were 15,000,000 of bricks, 6,000 tons of iron, 20,000 loads of timber, 300,000 superficial feet of glass, 1,200 iron columns, one mile and a half of clerstory windows, and other materials in proportion, used in the construction of the edifice, and the space of ground enclosed under the transparent roof is twenty-five acres, being one-fifth greater than the area of the base of the Great Pyramid.