People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1893 — ORIENTALS AT THE FAIR. [ARTICLE]

ORIENTALS AT THE FAIR.

Babies from Far-Off Lands Who Add to the Interest of the Exhibits. Among the young people who are visiting the Columbian exposition this summer are a Javanese baby, three Chinese boys of from two to six years, a pickaninny from Dahomey, a dancing Soudanese baby, a little Bedouin girl who dances in the Arab encampment, a pappoose or two in the Indian village, and a half-dozen Egyptian boys who belabor the tiny gray donkeys in the Cairo street. These boys and girls did not visit the fair to see the curious things in the wonderful white buildings, but to be a part of the show. They are there to be looked at, not to look, and they are among ths most interesting of all the exhibits. The black baby lives in the Dahomey village, which is supposed to look as if it had been picked up in Africa and set down in Chicago. In some respects it certainly does resemble the hot country about which Mr. Glave has told us during the past year. The ground is sandy enough and the sunshine hot enough for Sahara, and the reedthatched huts which line the high board fence surrounding the village are uncomfortable enough in appearance to satisfy the most enthusiastic explorer. In the middle of the village is a larger hut, open at the sides and covered with thatch, and in this hut the dwellers of the Dahomey village dance the war dance of their native country every hour or two for the entertainment of the white people who stroll in to see them. All of these men and women are hideous in their gay calico clothing, with strings of teeth and strange-looking bits of stone and metal hanging about their necks and dangling from their arms and ears. But thq pickaninny is as cunning as most other babies are. When I saw him he war sitting in a puddle of dirty water With no clothing on to get soiled, watching his mother and older brother scouring two or three brass and silver rings with a bit of rag and a handful of sand. The little fellow wanted the rings to play with, and when he found that he could not have them he set up a howl that sounded very much like a white boy of two years crying because he could not have a porcelain clock or a circus wagon to play with.—Harper’s Young People.