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detached from the mass of the building, is sufficiently evident in the perspective views of the long fronts. They furnish the only strongly marked vertical lines in the composition, and by contrast suffice to relieve the design from the excessive predominance of its horizontal lines. It is to be noted that as yet the architectural expression of this building, the development of which we have been following in the natural order of design, has been confined to the exterior closure of a vast interior space. Before it had been happily determined to cover the interior court with a great glazed roof, it was the professional instinct of Mr. Post to indicate externally that the area enveloped by his façades was not empty, but had a magnificent interior central feature in his original circular hall. To this end, and in order that this feature might be come evident from afar as an essential element of design, it became necessary to cover it with a dome sufficiently lofty to be seen over the skylines of the inclosing galleries from usual points of view, and to form a crown and finish to the long, low mass of his building. This feature, if executed, would have exceeded any similar structure yet erected; but as it challenged comparison with the dome of the porch of the Exposition, the preeminence of which it was considered desirable to maintain, it was reluctantly abandoned. But the final treatment of the central court as a hall, 1287 x 387 feet in floor area, covered with a semicircular roof, whose longitudinal ridge rises far above the cornice of the façades, at once suggested an entirely different architectural aspect for the building. By the upward succession of cornice-line, 60 feet high, and clearstory-line, 108 feet high, culminating in a central ridge-line, 210 feet high, a pyramidal effect was secured; the low-lying mass at once obtained adequate height; its vast extent was condoned and explained; a dominant expression of unity was conferred upon the composition; the upper outlines of the façades were projected against a colossal roof instead of the empty sky; and the roof itself, wisely left to the majesty of its dimensions and to the simplicity of its structure for architectural effect, enhanced the refinement and purity of the architectural screens below.

Indeed, this design as a whole admirably illustrates the fact that reservation rather than expenditure of force is the secret of noble art. The modern architectural mind is an archæological chaos of ideas inherited from Egypt, from the far East, from Greece and Rome, from the middle ages, and from the Renaissance. Under these circumstances the highest virtue which can be exercised by the educated architect of

to-day is self-denial in the use of his treasures. He who squanders them in his work betrays his trust, and depraves the art of his time. He who can be refined in the use of the splendid resources furnished by his knowledge of the past, who can be simple in the midst of the temptations to display his wealth, is rendering high service to a civilization which, in the midst of its complications and sophistications, needs the refreshment and chastisement of pure types.

It is evident that within his classic Roman frame Mr. Post has desired, in his detail of decoration, to bring his design into sympathy with modern civilizations; for we shall see that the luxury of Napoleon III. affects the sculpture of his spandrels and panels, and that nearly all the ornament bears traces of the influence of the latest French Renaissance and the last Paris Exposition. Moreover, in order to relieve his design from the serious expression imposed upon it by the grandeur of his leading motives, he makes a very proper concession to the festive and holiday aspect which should pervade the place by planting permanent standards and gonfalons on his triumphal arches, and by decorating his battlements with banner-staffs and bunting.

We have repeatedly stated that these papers do not embody either a description or a criticism, nor yet an apology, but constitute an attempt to explain the architectural development of the Exposition buildings. But it may be proper, before leaving the consideration of the largest of these buildings, to look back upon Mr. Post's immense façades, and to ask whether, if they had been treated with the variety, contrast, and balance of motives customary in the works of the Renaissance, if they had been broken by towers and campaniles, or tormented by gabled pavilions, they would not have presented a somewhat confused and incoherent aspect, wanting in apparent unity of thought, and resembling rather a combination of many buildings of various use than a single building of one use; and further, whether the simplicity of treatment which he has preferred (and which some, not considering its detail and the unusual difficulties of the problem, might call poverty) has not resulted in a composition having architectural qualities which, instead of confusing and puzzling the mind, can be read, understood, and remembered with pleasure. The civilization of our time owes a debt of gratitude to any architect, or to any writer, who, in the midst of the temptations which beset us to force effects of beauty by affectations and mannerisms, dares to make his work at once strong, simple, and elegant.

Henry Van Brunt.

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"HE TURNED HIS BACK ON THE TENIS AND STRUCK OUT ACROSS THE SAGE-BRUSH."

VII.

JAD Alan only spoken on one of those two or three happy days before the London letter came! But a tendency to mischance of one sort or another was characteristic of the boy's headlong, sanguine temperament. The good moment passed, and a change in the household atmosphere created a new barrier between him and his father.

Dolly had ridden home at the top of Modoc's speed, to make up for all foolish delays; for Dunsmuir knew to a moment how long it took a rider to meet the stage, and was ever on the watch for its distant wheels and the messenger's return. She gave him the packet, and went to her room to make herself neat for lessons. In the dining-room Alan joined her, loitering behind, his eyes still upon his half-learned task. They knew that something was amiss from the answer that their father gave to Dolly's

"Excused for to-day. I have some business to attend to."

His step was not heard on the porch at his usual hour for exercise. Dolly, watering her roses outside the study window when the house shadow fell that way, heard him tramping about the room, and pronouncing words to himself in a deep, perturbed voice. At dinner the young people stood waiting for him to take the head of the table.

"Margaret, will you ask him if he's coming? He never minds you," Dolly pleaded.

Margaret sighed, and smoothed her hair back from her flushed face, and laid aside her kitchen apron before knocking at the study door.

"Will the denner wait, sir, till you 're by wi' your writing?" she asked when he had shortly bidden her, "Come!"

"What! is it dinner? Let the children sit down without me. Margaret, which of the men go to town to-morrow?" It was the day before the Fourth.

"Why, sir, I think they 'll all be going but

Job."

1 Copyright, 1892, by Mary Hallock Foote.

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"Tell Job that Long John may stop at the cabin, and Job is to come for me with the buckboard at nine to-morrow morning. We shall be back early. John may have his evening in town." "Will that be all, sir ?"

"That is all, thank you, Margaret."

"Wad ye eat a bittie if I fetch it entil yejust a morsel, to tak' the bluid from the head? Will ye no?" she pressed him, with motherly anxiety.

66

'Shut the door, and don't stand there bletherin'!" Dunsmuir shouted.

Nevertheless, an hour later the hand of Margaret noiselessly obtruded a tray into the room; on it was a dish of iced tomatoes with a mayonnaise, a plate of thin bread and butter, a slice or two of cold boiled ham, and a bottle of beer. When the tray was brought away, Margaret, who had stayed to do some ironing in the cool of the evening, saw with triumph that her offering had not been rejected.

"When he 's that way," she said to Dolly, "he's just like a fashious wean; he disna want a thing named to him."

She repeated to no one her master's orders for the morning; all that he wished said he would prefer to say himself. And so it happened that Alan went off at sunrise on his own scheme of pleasure for the day, having helped himself to a cold breakfast in the pantry, not knowing that his father was bound for the town, like himself. Alan had one or two acquaintances who were to take part in the procession of the "Horniquebriniques." He had been urged to choose a character and to join, but, in his usual way, it was at the last moment, and without premeditation, that he decided to do so. His arm was but just well. Except for the stolen joy, now and then, of a wild moonlight gallop, life, according to his ideas, had been a steady grind. He had never acknowledged his father's right to condition him as to the use of his own horse. As a matter of principle, then, he was holding out, and cultivating meanwhile a sentiment of injury to strengthen his resolution.

It was in this mood that he stopped at Dutton's ranch and, assuming the owner's consent, borrowed an old mule of Job's called Susan. He also helped himself to one or two articles found in the cabin, with which to piece out his costume for the part he had chosen in the Horniquebriniques. As in the far West this humorous dramatization is not a common feature of the day we celebrate, a few words of description may help to explain its intense attractiveness to lads of Alan's age. It is a procession of mummers, masked or otherwise, on horseback, afoot, or in floats, who burlesque in dumb-show the prominent characters and institutions of the town, setting forth in a rough extravaganza VOL. XLIV.-53-54.

their weaknesses in the popular eye. The costumes are ridiculous, the wit is often coarse, the personal hits more than a little cruel. Yet the drolling seldom fails, in one way or another, to make its point, and the whole exhibition is not without a rude, poignant signification from the moral point of view.

Dunsmuir and Job were making way slowly through the crowd. They were endeavoring to gain the corner near the office of Marshall & Read, Dunsmuir's lawyers; but they were too late. The Horniquebriniques had started, the crowd backing down before them; there was nothing for it now but to haul up by the sidewalk until the fun had rolled by. Mock musicians, calling themselves the City Band, marched ahead of the procession, performing with cow-bells, tinware, and Chinese instruments of sound. The humor was here so overpowering as fairly to drown its own applause.

Dunsmuir, who was chewing the cud of his last and bitterest disappointment, was somewhat grimly disposed toward the day's festivities. He took little notice of the mob, as it screeched and rattled and caracoled by; but as the nuisance seemed to abate, Job spoke to him, calling his attention to a passing group which the crowd was then cheering. He looked up and smiled. He saw a broad, stout, florid man, costumed as a river-nymph, in pseudoclassic draperies, looped and girdled in such a manner as to display without offense as much as possible of his muscular proportions. He bore upon his shoulder a Chinese whiskyjar, one of a wholesale size. The vase was labeled "Norrisson's Ditch." The nymph's girdle, which must have measured full fifty inches, was stuck full of "water-contracts." Bunches of the enormous native-grown vegetables, mingled with sage-brush torn up by the roots, decorated the processional car, which was drawn by four fat, patient oxen placarded "Eastern Capital." The supporting figures of this symbolical group were an impecunious ranchman hunting in his ragged pockets for the wherewithal to pay his water-rates, and an abject Chinese vegetable-gardener, upon whose head from time to time the goddess of fertility tilted a small quantity of the sacred water of the ditch.

Broad as was the joke, Dunsmuir found no fault with it. But now a burst of applause greeted a new actor, who silently paced down the street at a respectful distance from the car of Irrigation. The little boys lining the gutters and packed into the backs of farmers' wagons screeched their comments, by way of explanation, to one another: "Hurrah for the Last Ditch!" shouted one precocious urchin. "Says I to Sandy, 'Won't you lend me a mule?' 'Of course I will,' says Sandy,"

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sang another. Dunsmuir had taken these remarks as personal to himself until he turned and saw the quixotic figure intended to portray in its popular aspect the spirit of his well-known enterprise. Both he and Dutton had recognized Susan by her ear-mark, though she had been touched up anatomically with considerable skill and white paint to the likeness of a skeleton. She carried a slender, masked rider, dressed in pasteboard armor, relic of some amateur theatricals in the town. His crest was a sprig of sage united with the flowers of the wild thistle, and for a spear he carried, with some difficulty, it might be seen, an engineer's measuring-rod, to which a banneret was attached displaying the legend:

Don't tread on my Location!

This was plain enough for all to understand. The little boys pointed out to one another his big tin sword labeled " For Jumpers," and discussed the meaning of the device displayed upon his shield-a spread eagle perched on the rock-gate of the cañon, with the united crosses of St. George and St. Andrew flaming in the sky above it. This cognizance was a hasty inspiration of Alan's tossed off in the fury of conception, in red and white and black chalks. Any compunctions which the son of Dunsmuir might have had at the last moment must have given way before the artist's hunger for appreciation. To do Alan justice, he had not meant the impersonation for mockery, but merely as a good-natured acknowledgment of the wellknown facts concerning his father's ditch. Above all, he had not bargained for his father as a spectator. He trusted now to spare him the pain of a recognition; but this was not to be.

Susan had one white and wicked eye, which she turned back upon the crowd, now pressing noisily upon her sedate progress. Hitherto, whatever culminating sense of indignity she may have been nursing she had kept to herself; but now, without apparent premeditation, she bucked her rider into the middle of the street bolted past the ox-team which blocked the way ahead, and was seen no more in town that day. The knight's mask and helmet had tumbled awry with the jar of his fall; Alan was obliged to free his head before he could see about him. A dozen hands assisted him to rise, and all the town beheld his angry blushes and knew him for his father's son. Confused and bitterly mortified, he took the first chance of escape which occurred to him; he ran and jumped aboard the Norrisson Ditch car, and the Knight of the Location made his exit in the tail-end of it, among the vegetables, waving his guidon and smiling in the hope of seeming not to care

for the shouts of laughter which followed him. The crowd had "caught on " with a wild burst of cheers to this last, most unintentional point which Alan had supplied, with his father as witness.

VIII.

IT had been Alan's plan to remain for the fireworks on the evening of the Fourth, but his father's bitter face came between him and all further thoughts of a "good time." By sunset he was at home. He went straight to his father's room, and the two were shut in there together. Dolly awaited anxiously the close of the interview; but when the study door opened at last, she kept away, allowing Alan to escape without a question, even from her eyes. At the usual hour she went to bid her father good night. He detained her by the hand, leaning back in his chair and turning his face from the lamp. It was a close night, the sky overcast, the atmosphere heavy with an abortive effort to rain. The wind - what little there was - came up from the plains, a false, baffling wind, reversing the currents of coolness. It smelled of dust and wild sage, and in the pauses between the hot, prickly gusts mosquitos and moths swarmed outside the windows. All the screens were in; the lamp, lighted since dusk, increased the heat, and devoured the air of the room.

"Dolly, perhaps you will be wanting to speak to your brother to-night," said Dunsmuir, wearily. The lamp threw deep shadows over his lowered eyelids as he lay back in his great leather chair. It was some time since Dolly had seen him in that strong, direct light, of an evening; she thought him much worn, and thinner, even, since the spring.

"Has he gone out of the house?" he continued. "Say good night to him. We may not see so much of him for a time." He cleared his voice, which broke from nervousness or fatigue, and sat up, looking straight before him. "I shall not tell you his last ill-omened exploit. Perhaps he will tell you himself; it would cost him little, for I doubt if he sees what it signifies. I do not know how to reach him, nor indeed if there be any depth in him to reach. I have thought to try him now in earnest. Since he will not work, either for his love or his fear; since, it seems, he neither understands nor respects what we are here to do, nor enters into it, except in a low, clownish spirit—let him work now for his bread. To-morrow he goes below. He will live at the cabin, get his meals with the men, and take orders from Job. I will have no idle mockers at my table. Now, we'll say no more about it. Show him all the kindness in your heart-but remember, you are not to go seeking him at the cabin. After

to-night he is one of the force till he shall win home by the right road."

Dolly blushed redder and redder till the smarting tears stood in her eyes. She could not speak, or she might have had occasion to repent her words; neither would she leave the room while her heart was swelling with resentment of Alan's punishment. She looked up presently and smiled, with an effort at firmness, in the face of the judge, who was also the father. He thanked her with a speechless look. He had not thought that anything could have eased him like that smile of his woman-child; but at midnight, sitting by himself, his thoughts went darkly back to Alan's offenses, which were all of a sort peculiarly offensive to himself.

"The lad shows neither sense nor judgment, nor the conduct of a gentleman," he said aloud, in the silence, which he was accustomed to address in moments of deep spiritual disturbance. "Let him go where plain lessons are to be learned of plain men. There is not a man in my employ but can set my son the example of all I have failed to teach him."

Dolly waited up for Alan as late as she dared, for fear of disturbing her father, who liked the house to be quiet always at the same hour. It then occurred to her that he might already have gone up to his bed. She went to his room and knocked, but got no answer. Her room was next to his, both opening by low, casemated dormers upon the flattish slope of the roof. She leaned out and saw Alan asleep on the shingles outside his window, his head and arms resting upon the sill. His attitude kept the expression of the mood in which he had flung himself down. She crept out upon the roof and knelt beside him, whispering a little, choking prayer. The heavens were dark; as she lifted her face one big drop of rain fell upon her forehead, the sole birth from that night-long wrestling of wind and cloud.

Drought prevailed, and toward morning the sky slowly cleared. The wind blew Dolly's curtains wide apart. A sunbeam, striking the mirror propped up on her dressing-table, made quivering rainbow-patches on the walls. A stronger gust blew something off the windowledge, and, opening her eyes, she saw on the matting a huge, overblown giant-of-battles rose. Wrapped about the stem was a folded paper which explained itself.

I am not going to the cabin to take orders from my father's men. I'll pitch myself off the bluffs first. Father has been down on me this long while, so I may as well take myself off. They need not look for me in the river, nor in the low places in town. I am not going to play the fool, so no one need worry; and when I can show a decent bit of a record maybe I will come home. Goodby, Dolly; say good-by to good old Peggie. You

are the ones who will miss me. If ever I come back, it will be for your sakes. I was n't asleep when you kissed me last night. I did n't mind it, but I did n't want to talk.

Yours ever,

ALAN.

he takes back some things he has said. So you P. S. I shall not use my father's name until need n't go through the papers looking for news of one Alan Dunsmuir, for there 's "nae sic" a person.

With much hesitation, on account of its flippant tone, Dolly showed her father this message. Dunsmuir devoured the words with but one thought; it was little to him now, the lad's truculence or the spirit in which he bore himself under correction. The one agonized question pierced through all that could wait: "My son, where is he?"

They traced him to town, where he and Modoc were well known. He had borrowed a small sum of money of Peter Kountze, whom he had met at the Green Meadow, and had asked to be directed to the camp of engineers doing preliminary work on the Lower Snake; and thither, next day, they followed him. The search-party were informed that on the previous day a young stranger, light-haired, tallish, riding a pinto pony, had come down that way, asking for Philip Norrisson, who had never been with that division at all. The transit-man had told him that Philip Norrisson's party was in the mountains a matter of two days' journey from the camp. The young stranger, who gave his name as Robert Allen, had slept in camp and struck out early next morning for the mountains, expecting to reach the stage-station at the Summit by nightfall.

When the question was asked, What had he talked about the evening before? it was remembered that he had said he was intending to try for a position on Philip Norrisson's party; and when objection had been raised that the reservoir party would soon be through work and back in town, he had replied that it was no matter; Norrisson was a good fellow, who would be sure to put him in the way of something he could do; he was ready for anything. Peter Kountze, being further questioned, reported that Alan's first plan had been to strike. for the coast, where he proposed to ship aboard a sealer bound for the Bering Sea; else to work his passage south on a San Francisco steamer, and to take the chances in that direction. Peter modestly admitted that he had tried to dissuade Alan from these projects, and, failing, had refused to lend him money more than sufficient to keep him a few days, if he stayed near home. Alan had then endeavored to find a purchaser for Modoc, but without succeeding in getting anything like what he considered a fair price. So it appeared his

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