They aided to infect him, if free from it before, with the Centennial craze.  Their doors, though sealed, were eloquent, for they bore in great black letters on staring white muslin the shibboleth of the day, “1776—­International Exhibition—­1876.”  The enthusiasm of those very hard and unimpressible entities, the railroad companies, thus manifesting itself in low rates and gratuitous advertising, could not fail to be contagious.  Nor was the service done by the interior lines wholly domestic.  Several large foreign contributions from the Pacific traversed the continent.  The houses and the handicraft of the Mongol climbed the Sierra Nevada on the magnificent highway his patient labor had so large a share in constructing.  Nineteen cars were freighted with the rough and unpromising chrysalis that developed into the neat and elaborate cottage of Japan, and others brought the Chinese display.  Polynesia and Australia adopted the same route in part.  The canal modestly assisted the rail, lines of inland navigation conducting to the grounds barges of three times the tonnage of the average sea-going craft of the Revolutionary era.  These sluggish and smooth-going vehicles were employed for the carriage of some of the large plants and trees which enrich the horticultural department, eight boats being required to transport from New York a thousand specimens of the Cuban flora sent by a single exhibitor, M. Lachaume of Havana.  Those moisture-loving shrubs, the brilliant rhododendra collected by English nurserymen from our own Alleghanies and returned to us wonderfully improved by civilization, might have been expected also to affect the canal, but they chose, with British taste, the more rapid rail.  They had, in fact, no time to lose, for their blooming season was close at hand, and their roots must needs hasten to test the juices of American soil.  Japan’s miniature garden of miniature plants, interesting far beyond the proportions of its dimensions, was perforce dependent on the same means of conveyance.

[Illustration:  Facade of the Egyptian division, main building.]

The locomotive was summoned to the aid of foreign exhibitors on the Atlantic as on the Pacific side, though to a less striking extent, the largest steamships being able to lie within three miles of the exposition buildings.  It stood ready on the wharves of the Delaware to welcome these stately guests from afar, indifferent whether they came in squadrons or alone.  It received on one day, in this vestibule of the exposition, the Labrador from France and the Donati from Brazil.  Dom Pedro’s coffee, sugar and tobacco and the marbles and canvases of the Societe des Beaux-Arts were whisked off in amicable companionship to their final destination.  The solidarity of the nations is in some sort promoted by this shaking down together of their goods and chattels.  It gives a truly international look to the exposition to see one of Vernet’s battle-pieces or Meissonier’s microscopic gems of color jostled by a package of hides from the Parana or a bale of India-rubber.