Another of them is that triumph of pure reason, chess, an unadulterated product of the brain--i.e., of phosphorus--i.e., of fish. Nobody stakes money on chess or offers a prize to the best player. Honor at that board is its own reward. So when we are told of the Centennial Chess Tournament we recognize at once the fitness of the word borrowed from the chivalric joust. It is the culmination of human strife. The thought, labor and ardor spread over three hundred and fifty acres sums itself in that black and white board the size of your handkerchief. War and statecraft condense themselves into it. Armies and nations move with the chessman. Sally, leaguer, feint, flank-march, triumphant charge are one after another rehearsed. There, too, moves the game of politics in plot and counterplot. It is the climax of the subjective. From those lists the trumpet-blare, the crowd, the glitter, the banners, "the boast of heraldry and pomp of power," melt utterly away. To the world-champions who bend above the little board the big glass houses and all the treasures stared at by admiring thousands are as naught. [Illustration: SCENE AT ONE OF THE ENTRANCES TO THE GROUNDS--THE TURNSTILE.] But man is an animal, and not by any means of intellect all compact. The average mortal confesses to a craving for the stimulus of great shows, of material purposes, substantial objects of study and palpable prizes. It is so in 1876, as it was in 1776, and as it will be in a long series of Seventy-sixes. It is the concrete rather than the abstract which draws him in through the turnstiles of the exposition enclosure. Separated by the divisions of those ingeniously-contrived gates into taxed and untaxed spectators, the masses stream in with small thought of the philosophers or the chess-players. Their minds are reached, but reached through the eye, and the first appeal is to that. Each visitor constitutes himself a jury of one to consider and compare what he sees. The hundreds of thousands of verdicts so reached will be published only by word of mouth, if published at all. Their value will be none the less indubitable, though far from being in all cases the same. The proportion of intelligent observers will be greater than on like occasions heretofore. So will, perhaps, be that of solid matter for study, although in some specialties there may be default. He who enters with the design of self-education will find the text-books in most branches abundant, wide open before him and printed in the clearest characters. What shortcomings there may have been in the selection and arrangement of them he will have, if he can, himself to remedy. There stands the school, founded and furnished with great labor. The would-be scholar can only be invited to use it. The centennial that is to turn out scholars ready-made has not yet rolled round. DOLORES.