It was strictly a business session, and the writer was interested to observe how simply and easily various widely differing details were disposed of, either directly or by reference to individuals or committees; details of the roofing contract, the power plants, the sewerage system; applications from would-be concessionaires; and Dedication Day arrangements—program-printing, livery charges, the military procession, plans for transporting and seating the vast throng of over an hundred thousand persons who were being invited to assemble under the lofty glazed and vaulted roof of the Manufacturers’ Building, to celebrate the quadri-centennial anniversary of one of the supreme events in the history of the world. And one of these details was the dispute, inherited from the Committee on Ceremonies, about the “Columbian Ode”—whether or not a portion of it should be read and sung before the great audience on the great day. The opponents presented their case; they were not satisfied with either the author, who should have been a poet of distinction like the aged Whittier, or the ode itself, which was too long for the occasion, and which contained, moreover, a sixty-line tribute to a deceased relative of the author—a tribute which she had declined to omit. The writer met these objections as well as she could, pointing out especially that the tribute in question—to the Fair’s first architect-in-chief—was due to his memory on this great day, especially as it was only three lines and a half long instead of the sixty-four complained of. Mr. Higinbotham asked the writer to read the questioned tribute, and then remarked: “It’s hardly enough to say of the great architect who planned the Fair, whose death at his post during that first year was the heaviest blow it could possibly have received. A poem for this dedication which did not refer to him would be gravely defective, in my opinion.” Mr. Higinbotham used to say afterwards: “Her poem had been asked for, approved by experts and accepted by the Committee on Ceremonies, and I made up my mind that as much of it should be read as we had time for in the program, including the tribute to John Root.” And it was so ordered. At last the long anticipated anniversary arrived. It is impossible to exaggerate the beauty of the late October day, the dramatic splendor of the festival, or the ardent spirit of that vivid audience, whose gay colors fluttered into rainbow brilliancy as the sun struck down through the glass roof. Mr. Higinbotham wrote in his report: