At the rear of these fine streets of the newer St. Louis stands the chief park of the town, not very distinctive and famed chiefly as the site of the biggest World's Fair that was ever held, "considerably larger than that Chicago affair," your loyal resident will tell you. Our individual fancy rather turns to Tower Grove Park and the Botanical Gardens just adjoining it. Tower Grove is in no very attractive section of St. Louis, and as an example of landscape gardening it is rather lugubrious, little groups of stones from the old Southern Hotel, which was burned many years ago and was a fearful tragedy, being set here and there. But intangibly it breathes the spirit of St. Louis, and hard by is the Botanical Gardens that Henry Shaw gave to the city in which he was for so many years a dominating figure. And for even a casual traveler to go to St. Louis and never see Shaw's Gardens is almost inconceivable. In the first place, it is an excellent collection of plants and of trees and of exceeding interest to those folk who let their tastes carry them that way. And in the second place, Henry Shaw was so typical of the old St. Louis that you must stop for a moment and remember him. You must think of the steady purpose of the man visiting all the great gardens of Europe and then seeking to create one that should outrank all of them, in the mud-bog of St. Louis. For the St. Louis of war-times, the St. Louis to which Shaw gave his benefaction was little more than a bog. And Americans of those days laughed at parks. True there was Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, but the Fairmount Park of those days was a fantastic idea and hardly to be compared with the Fairmount Park of today. Henry Shaw went much farther than the banks of the Schuylkill, although he must have known and appreciated John Bartram's historic gardens there. Shaw was only forty years of age when he retired from business. He had saved through his keen business acumen and a decent sense of thrift, a quarter of a million dollars--a tremendous fortune for those days. He was quite frank in saying that he thought that $250,000 was all that a man could honestly earn or honestly possess, and he retired to enjoy his fortune as best it might please him to do. He traveled far and wide through Europe, and upon one of the earliest of those trips he visited the World's Fair of 1851, at the Crystal Palace, London; one of the very first of these international exhibitions. He was impressed not so much by the exhibits as by the fine park in which the Crystal Palace stood. A little later he was a guest at Chatsworth House, that splendid English home given by William the Conqueror to his natural son, William Peveril, and he became a frequent visitor at Kew Gardens. It was at that time he decided to make a botanical garden out of the place which he had just purchased outside of St. Louis. [Illustration: A luxurious home in the newer St. Louis]