foot-hills to the Alps of glass accommodate the executive and staff departments of the exposition.  They bring together, besides the central administration, the post, police, custom-house, telegraph, etc.  A front, including the connecting verandah, of five hundred feet indicates the scale on which this transitory government is organized.  Farther back, directly opposite the entrance, but beyond the north line of the great halls, stands the Judges’ Pavilion.  In this capacious “box,” a hundred and fifty-two by a hundred and fifteen feet, the grand and petit juries of the tribunal of industry and taste have abundant elbow—­room for deliberation and discussion.  The same enlightened policy which aimed at securing the utmost independence and the highest qualifications of knowledge and intelligence in the two hundred men who determine the awards, recognized also the advantage of providing for their convenience.  Their sessions here can be neither cramped nor disturbed.  So far as foresight can go, there is nothing to prevent their deciding quietly, comfortably and soundly, after mute argument from the vast array of objects submitted to their verdict, on the merits of each.  The main hall of this building, or high court as it may be termed, is sixty by eighty feet, and forty-three feet high.  In the rear of it is a smaller hall.  A number of other chambers and committee-rooms are appropriated to the different branches as classified.  Accommodation is afforded, besides, to purposes of a less arid nature—­fetes, receptions, conventions, international congresses and the like.  This cosmopolitan forum might fitly have been modeled after

            the tower that builders vain,
  Presumptuous, piled on Shinar’s plain.

Bricks from Birs Nimroud would have been a good material for the walks.  Perhaps, order being the great end, anything savoring of confusion was thought out of place.

[Illustration:  Judges’ pavilion.]

Fire is an invader of peace and property, defence against whose destructive forays is one of the first and most constant cares of American cities, old and new, great and small.  Before the foundations of the Main Building were laid the means of meeting the foe on the threshold were planned.  The Main Building alone contains seventy-five fire-plugs, with pressure sufficient to throw water over its highest point.  Adjacent to it on the outside are thirty-three more.  Seventy-six others protect Machinery Hall, within which are the head-quarters of the fire service.  A large outfit of steam fire-engines, hose, trucks, ladders, extinguishers and other appliances of the kind make up a force powerful enough, one would think, to put out that shining light in the records of conflagration—­Constantinople.  Steam is kept up night and day in the engines, which, with their appurtenances, are manned by about two hundred picked men.  The houses for their shelter, erected at a cost of eight thousand dollars, complete, if we except some architectural afterthoughts in the shape of annexes, the list of the buildings erected by the commission.