Harry said he wondered that “no one had thought of calling the World’s Fair City, ‘A City of Dummies,’” for all the nations of the earth had gone into doll-making to furnish it with a resident population—a quiet, orderly, law-abiding race, though not full of intelligence.
Just across from the German village, an enormous placard claimed for a Panorama of the Alps the distinction of the “only medal awarded for an exhibit on the Plaisance.” It is needless to say that this captured our visitors. They went in and began the ascent of an inclined passage. It curved spirally round and round until they heartily wished it wouldn’t. But a party just ahead of them cried out, “Here we are!” and soon they emerged upon a high platform in the middle of the great Swiss Mountains. Harry said he recognized the Matterhorn, the Clatterhorn, the Spatterhorn, and the Flatterhorn; but the lecturer gave other names than these. The lecturer, with frequent allusions to “when I was there,” and one condescending “doubtless some of you have heard of Interlaken,” conducted a sheep-like crowd of sight-seers along a spiral iron fence that was meant to keep people from escaping till they had been at least twice around.
Harry, who was not fond of fences as a rule, took in the situation at a glance, and solved the difficulty by sneaking under the rails to the exit. Philip went after, and Mr. Douglass saw nothing to do but to follow suit. But although they did not care much for the lecturer, the panorama was a fine piece of painting, and Harry said that “if not the Alps it was at least a very good alp for a quarter, even with the lecturer thrown in—still better if he had been thrown out!” But Harry was unfair to this worthy man: most of the visitors enjoyed his clear explanations of the painting, and walked at his heels around all the spirals.
“Samoa”—the South Sea Island show—consisted of a theater and grounds. The grounds were what Philip called “muddish” (a new word to Mr. Douglass, but one he could not disapprove), and the boys stopped only long enough to buy two bark hats,—pointed nightcaps, very elastic and a beautiful brown in color,—and to look in at a Samoan house where, according to the sign, “the boy, for a trifling fee, will show how to kindle a fire by rubbing two sticks together.” But the boy sat huddled in a corner, looking as sour as a lemon, and they left him to dream of his native land.
Besides, there was a stamping and a pounding and a yelling going on in the theater that no healthy American boy could long keep away from. When Harry was at the Plaisance one afternoon he had met the manager of this show, and that gentleman had given him passes for the two cousins; so in they went, to find a little stage whereon a gang of savages, naked to the waist, were trying to give people their money’s worth so far as stamping, yelling, and racket would avail. They had not even “kept their shirts on,” but were all in chocolate-tinted negligé. When the curtain (painted with a Moorish landscape) hid the row, there was only a short intermission before the stage-manager hung out a sign-board announcing a “Religious Dance.”
THE ALGERIAN THEATER.
After that act was stilled, Harry said: “I didn’t know shinny was a religious dance, but I think now it must be. Perhaps among some of the Pacific Islands a foot-ball scrimmage would be considered a kind of prayer.” The dance really was clever, consisting of wheeling about and clattering long and short sticks together rhythmically. The next act was some guttural singing by several women and all the men, who sat in rows cross-legged along the stage. It was just like the song “Swee-ee-eepo—sweepo-o-o! Sweep-ee-o—sweep-o!” that may be heard from certain dusky residents of Manhattan Island on the Atlantic coast. A Fiji war-dance came next, and consisted in showing how bravely they would jab an advancing enemy with a paddle provided he would not go and spoil the little game by warding off or hitting back. It was grand, and the boys were especially delighted to see one of the younger girls come in at the back of the stage and go through the whole dance. “She’s a regular Tomboy Fiji,” said Philip.
There was more to the program, but the boys tired of it, and betook themselves to one of the Irish villages.