We wandered for hours among the grand Victoria Regias, the sweet-scented Heparusa longifolios, the superb Gloxianas, the tiny Hopdedoodle calaboosas, and the stately Acacias. Fountains of rose-water splashed their sparkling drops among the dense and brilliant foliage; cataracts of soda-water scattered misty bicarbonate sprays upon the ornamental verdure. There were walks of shady palms, groves of graceful maples, African cedars, and South American vines. The hall, like the waist of Athen’s maid, was zone encircled. We paused for an instant beneath an India-rubber tree and gave full stretch to our imagination. We wondered what this world would be without flowers—a body without a soul. If the soul of man is God’s breath, the flowers are His smile. “Love flowers,” we said, imaginatively, to the people around us; “the promises of Heaven are written on their leaves. At births and marriages they are symbols of death, for with the fading sunlight they too fade; but white and pure upon the breast of the silent sleeper, ’tis life they typify, the life which knows no night—love flowers and teach your children to love them.”
Thinking of flowers and children brought to mind the
Swedish Nursery and Kindergarten
erected upon the grounds, and we resolved to visit it before nightfall.
We arrived there just in time to witness a good old-time spanking in the Swedish style, which is the Norway of doing it also. Both the delight and labor afforded the two participants in the operation seemed very unequally divided. We heard the schoolboy yell in Swedish, however, and learned how Swedish nightingales were made. The Swedish scholar is evidently not a model, though his school-house may be. But we must admit that the American youth surpasses all others in mischievous precocity. This fact was made painfully apparent just previous to the opening of the exhibition, in the trial of a little boy four years of age, son of one of the Park Guards, for larceny. Judge Finletter occupied the bench. We will insert
The Case.
The Park Commissioners furnish a certain quantity of old horse shoes, nails, and scraps of iron, semi-weekly, for the purpose of keeping the fountain of iron water in the Park up to the proper medicinal standard. This material is placed in the charge of one of the guards, YOUTHFUL
DEPRAVITY.and the lad had been in the habit of abstracting quantities of the metal and disposing of it, it was alleged, to the Phœnix Iron Works. This latter allegation is not yet proven. Should such be the fact, we must deploringly conclude that a large quantity of the iron used in the construction of the Girard Avenue Bridge was obtained from this source. We shall suspend judgment, however, and continue using the bridge as usual until the firm is heard from and the matter settled. The boy was hanged.
We obtained permission from the Superintendent of the Kindergarten to relate this little incident to young Sweden. We warned him against having Park guards for fathers, and demonstrated the pettiness of such a business as selling old iron, when the very highest price to be realized therefrom, under the most favorable circumstances and general state of commerce, is half a cent a pound. The children rose in a body when we had concluded and passed us a vote of thanks, so we left the establishment in the consciousness of duty well performed, and resolved to send our children of the future to Sweden to be kindergartened.
Next morning we started out very early, with the determination of proceeding at once to the Main Building to make a tour among the foreign exhibitors, but our progress was arrested by the most remarkable occurrence ever happening in a civilized country.
The day previous, Alderman Carpenter, of the Central Station, had invited