St. Louis needs to be taken by the hand and led around to some municipal-improvement tailor, some civic haberdasher
over the building. We envied Mr. Powell the privilege of being housed in such a palace, and Mr. Powell, in his turn, tried to talk temperately about the wonders of his school, and was so polite as to let us do the raving.
Do you remember, when you went to school, the long closet, or dressing room, where you used to hang your coat and hat? The boys and girls of the Soldan School have steel lockers in a sunlit locker room. Do you remember the old wooden floors? These boys and girls have wooden floors to walk on, but the wood is quarter-sawed oak, and it is laid in asphalt over concrete, which makes the finest kind of floor. Do you remember the ugly old school building? The front of this one looks like Hampden Court Palace, brought up to date. Do you remember the big classroom that served almost every purpose? This school has separate rooms for everything—a greenhouse for the botanists, great studios, with skylights, for those who study art, a music hall, and private offices, beside the classrooms, for instructors. Oh, you ought to see this school yourself, and learn how schools have changed! You ought to see the domestic science kitchen with its twenty-four gas ranges and the model dining room, where the girls give dinner parties for their parents; the sewing room and fitting rooms, and the laundries, with sanitary equipment and electric irons—for every girl who takes the domestic-science course must know how to do fine laundry work, even to the washing of flannels.
You should see the manual-training shops, and the business college, and the textile work, and the kilns for pottery, and the very creditable drawings and paintings of the art students (who clearly have a competent teacher—again an unusual thing in schools), and the simple beauty of the corridors, so free from decoration, and the library—like that of a club—and the lavatories, as perfect as those in fine hotels, and the pictures on the classroom walls—good prints of good things, like Whistler's portrait of his mother, instead of the old hideosities of Washington and Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, which used to hang on classroom walls in our school days. Oh, it is good to merely breathe the air of such a school—and why shouldn't it be, since the air is washed, and screened, and warmed, and fanned out to the rooms and corridors? Just think of that one thing, and then try to remember how schools used to smell—that rather zoölogical odor of dirty little boys and dirty little slates. That was one thing which struck me very forcibly about this school: it didn't smell like one. Yet, until I went there, I should have wagered that if I were taken blindfold to a school, led inside, and allowed a single whiff of it, I should immediately detect the place for what it was. Ah, memories of other days! Ah, sacred smells of childhood! Can it be that the school smell has gone forever from the earth—that it has vanished with our youth—that the rising generation may not know it? There is but little sadness in the thought.
Having thus dilated upon the oldtime smell of schools, I find myself drifting, perhaps through an association of ideas, to another subject—that of furs; raw furs.
The firm of Funsten Brothers & Co. have made St. Louis the largest primary fur market in the world. They operate a fur exchange which, though a private business, is conducted somewhat after the manner of a produce exchange. That is to say, the sales are not open to all buyers, but to about thirty men who are, in effect, "members," it being required that a member be a fur dealer with a place of business in St. Louis. These men are jobbers, and they sell in turn to the manufacturers.
Funsten Brothers & Co. work direct with trappers, and are in correspondence, I am informed, with between 700,000 and 800,000 persons, engaged in trapping and shipping furs, in all parts of the world. Their business has been considerably increased of late years by the installation of a trappers' information bureau and supply department for the accommodation of those who send them furs, and also by the marketing of artificial animal baits. In this way, and further by making it a rule to send checks in payment for furs received from trappers, on the same day shipments arrive, this company has built up for itself an enormous good will at the original sources of supply.
The furs come from every State in the Union, from every Province in Canada, and from Alaska, being shipped in, during the trapping season, at the rate of about two thousand lots a day, these lots containing anywhere from five to five hundred pelts each.
The lots are sorted, arranged in batches according to quality, and auctioned off at sales, which are held three days a week. Even Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Florida, and Texas supply furs, but the furs from the north are in general the most valuable. This is not true, however, of muskrat, the best of which comes from the central and eastern States.
The sales are conducted in the large hall of the exchange, where the lots of furs are displayed in great piles. The skins are handled in the raw state, having been merely removed from the carcass and dried before shipment, 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—or school—the blended fragrance of raccoon, mink, opossum, muskrat, ermine, ringtail, house cat, wolf, red fox, gray fox, cross fox, swift fox, silver fox, badger, otter, beaver, lynx, marten, bear, wolverine, fisher—a great orchestra of odors, in which the "air" is carried most competently, most unqualifiedly, by that master virtuoso of mephitic redolence, the skunk.