Within the last century, London has expanded rapidly and immensely, but especially toward the West, or up the Thames. Temple Bar, the western boundary of the city proper, (or ancient London,) is now considerably East, I think, of the center of the Great Metropolis; while the present residences of nearly all the nobility and gentry are built on grounds which were open country since the days of the Plantagenets and Tudors. In the center of this magnificent “West end,” between St. James’s Palace and Kensington Gardens, though much nearer the latter, stretches Hyde Park, one of the most spacious and pleasant expanses of sward and shade and water that eye ever feasted on. Boston Common would be somewhat like it, if it were ten times as large and twenty times as well watered as at present. Hyde Park is the favorite resort of the Aristocracy for equestrian and carriage exercise, and thoroughly justifies their choice. On the southern verge of this noble expanse, some three miles West of the Bank, Exchange, and London Bridge, the Crystal Palace was erected. It was not an imposing edifice. No stately gateway, no frowning turrets, no graceful spire, no lofty tower, marked the capacious structure from whose roof the flags of all nations rose and floated in perfect amity. Its slender ribs of iron, covered and hidden for some thirty feet from the earth by boards, like any house of wood, were thenceforth visible through the glass which formed the upper siding and roof, like a spider’s web on the grass of a dewy morning. Slender iron columns or pillars, rising at intervals unperceived from beneath the floor, helped to sustain the weight of the slight yet ponderous roof, through which, though covered with canvass to modify the heat of the few sunny days vouchsafed to an English summer, as abundance of light, not only under the murkiest London skies, but even during the prevalence of the great July eclipse, was at all times received. So immense was the volume of atmosphere enclosed, or so perfect the arrangements for ventilation, that no sense of exhaustion or of breathing vitiated air was at any time experienced; for the building was something more than a third of a mile in length from east to west, some three hundred feet wide, and rather more than a hundred feet from floor to roof, with eight or ten large doors for entrance and exit hardly ever closed during the day. On a volume of atmosphere thus extended, and constantly changing, the breathings of sixty thousand persons for hours could make no impression. In this vast bazaar, which a few months saw advance from its first conception to its perfect realization, and which yet was barely completed at the day appointed for opening the exhibition, the choice or characteristic products of all nations had already for some weeks been accumulating. Under the mere corner (though of itself covering more than an acre) devoted to machinery, mainly British, water-pipes and