gastronomically speaking, of the finny people.  The shad remains not only to be naturalized in Europe, but to be reintroduced to the water-side dwellers above tide, who once met him regularly at table.  He is joined by delegates from the mountain, the great lakes and the Pacific coast in the trout, the salmon and the whitefish, and by that quiet, silent and slow-going cousin of the fraternity, the oyster, most valuable of all, as possessors of those qualities not unfrequently are.  Europe does not dream, and we ourselves do not realize until we come carefully to think of it, what the oyster does for us.  He sustains the hardiest part of our coasting marine, paves our best roads, fertilizes our sands, enlivens all our festivities, and supports an army of packers, can-makers, etc., cased in whose panoply of tin he traverses the globe like a mail-clad knight-errant in the cause of commerce and good eating.  Yet he needs protection.  All this burden is greater than he can bear, and it is growing.  System and science are invoked to his rescue ere he go the way of the inland shad and the salmon that became a drug to the Pilgrim Fathers.  It is not easy to frame a medal or diploma for the fostering of the oyster.  More effective is a consideration of the impending penalty for neglecting to do so. Ostrea edulis is one of the grand things before which prizes sink into nothingness.

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.