AN OLD-FASHIONED MAIL-COACH: GOVERNMENT BUILDING.
“FURTHEST NORTH”: GOVERNMENT BUILDING.
There were in cases different kinds of fish-hooks, twisted and turned into all European shapes, besides some eccentric ones of their own, spoons and other devices for trolling, snells and lines, not very different from those used in America and Europe. Their sail-boats differed, however, from ours in the way the sails were made. Instead of being in one piece, the sails were in perpendicular strips fastened together by a network of cords so as to leave open spaces.
Philip saw a young Japanese (he looked young, but may have been fifty) who was eating lunch in a corner of the room, and asked him the reason of this arrangement. “To hold wind less,” he said; but the American boy was not quite satisfied, for he could not see why a smaller sail would not meet the same need. He thought it more likely that the sails were so made in order to stow away more easily. The Japanese boy saw nothing queer in the boats, but Philip’s camera was to him a great wonder, and he politely asked an explanation of its working. This Philip gave, and took the little Jap’s picture in the course of his lecture on cameras. He also gave the foreigner a memorandum of the name and price of the camera, whereupon courteous Japan presented a catalogue of the exhibit and a business card.
THE BIG TREE: GOVERNMENT BUILDING.
In the main hall the State of Washington had hung an enormous “humpbacked whale” skeleton nearly forty-eight feet long, and showed the jaws of another as a gateway to its inclosure. Norway showed great harpoons and guns to project them. Baltimore, Ireland (a critical passer-by said, “How very Irish to have a Baltimore in Ireland!”), showed a model fishing-school, a set of tiny buildings with little dolls at work making nets. The dolls’ idiotic faces took away all likeness of the exhibit to nature; and Philip, just from the tiny Japanese fishermen, so perfectly modeled, thought the difference spoke strongly in proof of the artistic sense of Japan.
Philip examined the models of German fishing-craft, and was particularly curious to know about a small boat moored to a tiny tree, one of three trunks below the surface of the water. He consulted the label, and found out that this was a “Miesmuschelzucht in der Kieler Bucht,” and with that information written down carefully he departed, satisfied to wait until he had more time and a German dictionary.
