Building, that of the press, a monster dairy, a ditto brewery, and a medley of other outcroppings of public and private spirit.  To this motley and incoherent assemblage a quiet lakelet nearly in the centre would supply a sorely-wanted feature of repose, were it not to be vexed by a fountain, giving us over bound and helpless to the hurly-burly.  But that is what every one will come for.  When each member of the congregated world “tries its own expressive power,” madness not inappropriately rules the hour.  Once in a hundred years a six months’ carnival is allowable to so ponderous a body.  Civilization here aims to see itself not simply as in a glass, but in a multitude of glasses.  To steer its optics through the architectural muddle in the basin before us it will need the retina that lies behind the facets of a fly.

[Illustration:  John Welsh, ESQ., President of the Centennial board of finance.]

Eighteen hundred and eighty feet long, four hundred and sixty-four wide, forty-eight to the cornice and seventy to the roof-tree, are figures as familiar by this time to every living being in the United States as pictures of the Main Building.  At each corner a square tower runs up to a level with the roof, and four more are clustered in the centre of the edifice and rise to the height of a hundred and twenty feet from a base of forty-eight feet square.  These flank a central dome one hundred and twenty feet square at base and springing on iron trusses of delicate and graceful design to an apex ninety-six feet above the pavement—­the exact elevation of the interior of the old Capitol rotunda.  The transept, the intersection of which with the nave forms this pavilion, is four hundred and sixteen feet long.  On each side of it is another of the same length and one hundred feet in width, with aisles of forty-eight feet each.  Longitudinally, the divisions of the interior correspond with these transverse lines.  A nave one hundred and twenty feet wide and eighteen hundred and thirty-two feet long—­said to be unique for combined length and width—­is accompanied by two side avenues a hundred feet wide, and as many aisles forty-eight feet wide.  An exterior aisle twenty-four feet wide, and as many high to a half-roof or clerestory, passes round the whole building except where interrupted by the main entrances in the centres of the sides and ends and a number of minor ones between.

The iron columns which support the central nave and transept are forty-five feet high, the roof between rising to seventy.  Those of the side avenues and transepts are of the same height, with a roof-elevation of sixty-five feet.  The columns of the centre space are seventy-two feet high.  In all, the columns number six hundred and seventy-two.  They stand twenty-two feet apart upon foundations of solid masonry.  Being of rolled iron, bolted together in segments, they can, like the other constituents of the building, be taken apart and erected elsewhere when the gentlemen of the commission, their good work done and the century duly honored, shall fold their tents like the Arabs, though not so silently.