German emigration to St. Louis began about 1820 and increased at the time of the rebellion of 1848, so that, like Milwaukee, St. Louis has to-day a very strong German flavor. By the terms of the city charter all ordinances and municipal legal advertising are printed in both English and German, and the "Westliche Post" of St. Louis, a German newspaper founded by the late Emil Pretorius and now conducted by his son, is a powerful organ. The great family beer halls of the city add further Teutonic color, and the Liederkranz is, I believe, the largest club in the city. This organization is not much like a club according to the restricted English idea; it suggests some great, genial public gathering place. The substantial German citizens who arrive here of a Sunday night, when the cook goes out, do not come alone, nor merely with their sons, but bring their entire families for dinner, including the mother, the daughters, and the little children. There is music, of course, and great contentment. The place breathes of substantiality, democracy, and good nature. You feel it even in the manner of the waiters, who, being first of all human beings, second, Germans, and waiters only in the third place, have an air of personal friendliness with those they serve.
Aside from his municipal and national activities, Mr. Lehmann has found time to gather in his home one of the most complete collections of Dickens's first editions and related publications to be found in the whole world. It is, indeed, on this side—the side of cultivation—that St. Louis is most truly charming. She has an old, exclusive, and delightful society, and a widespread and pleasantly unostentatious interest in esthetic things. In fact, I do not know of any American city, to which St. Louis may with justice be compared, possessing a larger body of collectors, nor collections showing more individual taste. The most important private collections in the city are, I believe, those of Mr. William K. Bixby, who owns a great number of valuable paintings by old masters, and a large collection of rare books and manuscripts. As a book collector, Mr. Bixby is widely known throughout the country, and he has had, if I mistake not, the honor of being president of that Chicago club of bibliolatrists, known as the "Dofobs," or "damned old fools over books."
An exhibition of paintings owned in St. Louis is held annually in the St. Louis Museum of Art, and leaves no doubt as to the genuineness of the interest of St. Louis citizens in painting. Nor can any one, considering the groups of canvases loaned to the museum for the annual exhibition, doubt that certain art collectors in St. Louis (Mr. Edward A. Faust, for example) are buying not only names but paintings.
The Art Museum is less accessible to the general citizen than are museums in some other cities. Having been originally the central hall of the group of buildings devoted to art at the time of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, it stands in that part of Forest Park which was formerly the Fair ground. Posed, as it is, upon a hill, in a commanding and conspicuous position, it reveals, somewhat unfortunately, the fact that it is the isolated fragment of a former group. Nevertheless, it must take a high place among the secondary art museums of the United States. For despite the embarrassment caused by the possession of a good deal of mediocre sculpture, a legacy from the World's Fair, which is packed in its central hall; and despite the inheritance, from twenty or twenty-five years since, of vapid canvases by Bouguereau, Gabriel Max, and other painters of past popularity, whose works are rapidly coming to be known for what they are—despite these handicaps, the museum is now distinctly in step with the march of modern art. The old collection is being weeded out, and good judgment is being shown in the selection of new canvases. Like the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, the St. Louis Museum of Art is rapidly acquiring works by some of the best American painters of to-day, having purchased within the last four or five years canvases by Redfield, Loeb, Symons, Waugh, Dearth, Dougherty, Foster, and others.
Another building saved from the World's Fair is the superb central hall of Washington University, a red granite structure in the English collegiate style, designed by Cope & Stewardson. The dozen or more buildings of this university are very fine in their harmony, and are pronounced by Baedeker "certainly the most successful and appropriate group of collegiate buildings in the New World."
It is curious to note in this connection that there are eight colleges or universities in the United States in which the name of "Washington" appears; among them, Washington University at St. Louis; Washington College at Chestertown, Md.; George Washington University at Washington, D. C.; Washington State College at Pullman, Wash., and the University of Washington at Seattle.
The skins are handled in the raw state ... with the result that the floor of the exchange is made slippery by animal fats, and that the olfactory organs encounter smells not to be matched in any zoo