To me the baby is the fine arts, and it has always seemed that America’s gown buttons behind. Heretofore, the guilds of Europe and certain business men have done so, but I believe that this banquet was the first time in the history of mankind that commerce has ever honored the fine arts. Often after the day’s work was done we would go out to the Argo—a club in a real ship tied to the end of a long wharf. Our hosts were the brains of Chicago—a famous architect, great manufacturers, a noted editor, and among others a banker who afterward sat in the Cabinet at Washington. One started down the railway tracks—no path—cars shunting across the way. Finally, one saw the ship looming up. As one neared, noises came of the tackle; they were evidently coaling. Once close in under the belly, a big port opened very much like the holes in the bows of the lumber vessels at the wharf in Bangor. A stair before one, stewards, a warm welcome from the hosts. Then a great waxed floor, a perfect table, and a perfect dinner. Music, dancing, when some one would say: “How about the lake?” All would start for the bulwarks, and there below lay the “detachable _Argo_,” a small clipper steam yacht. The moon, dancing lights, coming and going (Chicago was the biggest port in tonnage in the United States), there was never anything like it! This fair at Chicago, of which Besant, the writer, said, “No Roman Emperor ever saw such pomp,” was for the world at large an advertisement of what we had to show them; but the _Argo_, with its pleasures of sight and sound, good wine, beautiful women, congenial company, was an expression of our hosts’ (the Argonauts) private pleasures. One would meet a band of foreign commissioners, their decorations gleaming on their breasts, bowing over the hand of the daughter of a Senator, Governor, or humble voter. No European country with its years of bacterial history could have produced this group—an emanation of the humus of our great virgin forests with a soil as yet undefiled. For me, coming, but for a short time while in New York, straight from France and England, and who had not seen my native land for thirteen years—for me, blue and lonely, five thousand miles from family, Chicago had been a shock and a horror. And then from it this flower, this _Argo_. I felt as if Munkittrick must have had the same situation in mind when he wrote his quatrain “To a Bulb.” Misshapen, black, unlovely to the sight, Oh, mute companion of the murky mole, You must feel overjoyed to have a white, Imperious, dainty lily for a soul. Incidentally, the _Argo_ had its right and proper shipwreck, I am told. One winter a boat, driving before the storm, ran into its bowsprit and was very thoroughly destroyed.