It was long after midnight when the last of the _convives_ { 052}went home; and when the sun rose next morning, Vienna contained an unwonted number of heads swollen to unusual size and bursting with the pain of too much drink the night before.
The words “West Portal” in very large letters. Man proposes and the police dispose. The police turned us off at one of the bridges, and would not allow us to go anywhere near the western entrance, but sent us away in the direction of the south portal. Then another lot of police stopped us a quarter of a mile from the gate, so that my ride to the Exposition was more in theory than in practice.
Vehicles of every description were depositing people at the gates, and thousands were going thither on foot. Many had come expecting to spend an hour in the building before the beginning of the _fête_, but in this they were disappointed, as the doors were closed at six o’clock, instead of seven, the usual hour. The crowd kept coming, and coming; you couldn’t find a vacant chair at any of the restaurants and beer halls, and you found it no easy matter to walk about. I think that by eight o’clock there were not less than a hundred thousand people in the grounds, and they kept coming as late as nine o’clock. As a _fête_, strictly speaking, the affair did not amount to much. Half a dozen bands of music were playing in various parts of the grounds, and at the spot known as the Mozart Platz, there was an Austrian singing-society.
That Sommerfest will be remembered by all who were there, and sadly by more than one respectable head of a family.
Another night there was a festival in the grounds around the Exposition building. I started for that place leisurely about five o’clock, under agreement to meet a friend near the west portal, and mounted to the deck of an omnibus which bore { 053}numbering about five hundred voices. Then there were electric lights, nearly a dozen of them, that made the spot brilliant, and when all their rays were thrown on the great dome they brought it out into bold relief.
“How magnificent that dome appears,” said an American near me to his friend; “you can see every part of it distinctly.”
“That may be,” said the other; “but you could see it a great deal better in the daytime without paying a cent.”