[Illustration: GENERAL ALFRED T. GOSHORN, DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE
CENTENNIAL COMMISSION.]

Knolls not appropriated by the villas of the old time, or from which
they have disappeared, offered admirable locations for some of the
buildings of the exposition, and a broad and smooth plateau, situated
precisely where it was wanted, at the point nearest the city, offered
itself for the largest two, the Main Building and Machinery Hall, with
room additional for the Art Building. The amphitheatrical depression
flanked on the east by this long wall of granite and glass, and
spreading northward to the heights occupied by Horticultural Hall and
the Agricultural Building, was assigned to the mushroom city to be
formed of the various State and foreign head-quarters, restaurants,
the Women's Pavilion, the United States Government 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.]