At the Fair
age is ours, to bring all strange things near!—when as I emerged on the little plaza, a lighter emotion chased away the sublimities. For there the most enchanting group of gaily colored Spanish singer dancers were exciting tropical emotions in Puritan tourists. I never saw anything so vividly and mischievously gay as the flashing laugh which one or two golden beauties turned up into stodgy Yankee faces; nor anything so funny as the sheepish half-hearted smile they got in return. It seemed too good to be true—the little Spanish plaza with all this happy youth in it—Romeo-like boys, flashing gipsy-humored girls, twanging their guitars and singing and dancing on a level with us, to make the romantic old time live again.
As I left the two fairs behind me, their beauty faded before older memories. Why was there a magic in the Columbian fair which no other has possessed? Was it merely that I saw it in youth, and in my own city, where my friends had planned and built it? Or was it the softness of summer days and nights, which San Francisco misses, perched as she is on her hills between the fog-blown sea and the great bay? Neither of these reasons was quite enough to explain the persistent glory of that White City in Jackson Park which has gone the way of all flesh. No other festal city has been so spacious by land and water, with buildings so nobly grouped beside large lagoons. No other has achieved the Venetian magic of water life among palaces—little launches and gondolas moving from building to building between mirrored colonnades, or drifting around a
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