I will do one side of the American department in the exhibition stern justice.  It commences with a long picture placed there by the Pork Packers’ Association of Cincinnati, descriptive of the processes which millions of American hogs are subjected to while being converted into pork.  There are hogs going in long procession to be killed, and going, too, in a determined sort of way, as if they knew it was their business to be killed.  Then come hogs killed, hogs scalded, hogs scraped, hogs cut up into shoulders, hams, sides, jowls; hogs salted, hogs smoked.  Underneath this sketch are a number of unpainted buggy and carriage wheels; next, a pile of pick-handles; not far off, a little mound of grindstones; after the grindstones, a platoon of clothes-wringers; next, a solitary iron wheel-barrow communing with a patent fire-extinguisher; following these a crowd of green iron pumps, with sewing-machines in full force.  Such is a bit of the American department.

It is the fashion here that every one should have a growl at the general slimness and slovenliness of our department.  Every one gives our drooping eagle a kick.  This is all wrong.  We can’t send our greatest wonders and triumphs to Europe.  There is neither room nor opportunity in the building for showing off one of our political torchlight processions, or a vigilance-committee hanging, or a Chicago or Boston fire, or a steamboat blow-up, or a railway smash-up.  Were the present chief of the commission a man of originality and talent, he might even now save the national reputation by bundling all the pumps, churns, patent clothes-washers, wheel-barrows and pick-handles out of doors, and converting one of the United States rooms into a reservation for the Modocs, and the other into a corral for buffaloes and grizzly bears.  These, with a mustang poet or two from Oregon, a few Hard-Shell Democrats, a live American daily paper, with a corps of reporters trained to squeeze themselves through door-cracks and key-holes, might retrieve the national honor, if shown up realistically and artistically.

PRENTICE MULFORD.

GHOSTLY WARRIORS.

So strong a resemblance exists between a battle-scene of a mediaeval Spanish poet and the culminating incidents of Lord Macaulay’s Battle of the Lake Regillus, as to justify somewhat extended citations.  Of the Spanish writer, Professor Longfellow says, in his note upon the extract from the Vida de San Millan given in the Poets and Poetry of Europe, “Gonzalo de Berceo, the oldest of the Castilian poets whose name has reached us, was born in 1198.  He was a monk in the monastery of Saint Millan, in Calahorra, and wrote poems on sacred subjects in Castilian Alexandrines.”  According to the poem, the Spaniards, while combating the Moors, were overcome by “a terror of their foes,” since “these were a numerous army, a little handful those.”

And whilst the Christian people stood in this uncertainty,
Upward toward heaven they turned their eyes and fixed their thoughts on high;
And there two persons they beheld, all beautiful and bright,—­
Even than the pure new-fallen snow their garments were more white.