And as Girard College and the University of Pennsylvania stand among the colleges of America, so stands Fairmount Park among the public pleasure grounds of the country. It was probably the first public park in the whole land, and a lady who knows her Philadelphia thoroughly has found many first things in Philadelphia--the first newspaper, the first magazine, the first circulating library, the first medical college, the first corporate bank, the first American warship, the unfurling of the first American flag, not least of these the first real world's fair ever held upon this side of the Atlantic. For it was the Centennial which not only made Fairmount Park a resort of nation-wide reputation, not only opened new possibilities of amusement to a land which had always taken itself rather seriously, but marked the turning of an era in the artistic and the social, as well as the political life of the United States. The Centennial was, judged by the standard of the greatest expositions that followed it, a rather crude affair. Its exhibits were simple, the buildings that housed them fantastic and barnlike. And the weather-man assisted in the general enjoyment by sending the mercury to unprecedented heights that entire summer. Philadelphia is never very chilly in the summer; the northern folk who went to it in that not-to-be-forgotten summer of 1876 felt that they had penetrated the tropics. And yet when it was all over America had the pleased feeling of a boy who finds that he can do something new. And even sober folk felt that a beginning had been made toward a wider view of life across the United States. It is nearly forty years since the Centennial sent the tongues of a whole land buzzing and the two huge structures that it left in Fairmount Park have begun to grow old, but the park itself is as fresh and as new as in the days of its beginning, and there are parts of it that were half a century old before the Centennial opened its doors. There are many provisions for recreation within its great boundaries, boating upon the Schuylkill, the drives that border that river, the further drive that leaves it and sweeps through the lovely glen of the Wissahickon.