I, having my wits more about me, could not conceive
how this could well be the case, seeing we had only looked at one out of
four sides. There is no one in these places to show them to strangers,
so we asked a respectable-looking person if there were any more rooms,
when he replied, "Oh, yes! you have only been looking at the _rejected_
models." Whereupon we entered on the second side of the square; but, to
confess the truth, the rejected and accepted ones seemed to us much of a
piece, and we were not sorry, on arriving at the third side, to find it
shut up and apparently empty, so we beat a retreat. We were told at
Baltimore that the collection was a very fine one, and doubtless it may
be very interesting to a person competent to judge of the details; but
the models, besides being shut up in glass-cases, and consequently very
inaccessible, were generally on too small a scale to be comprehended by
ordinary observers, and in this respect, the collection was of much less
interest to us than the exhibition we had lately seen in the unfortunate
Crystal Palace at New York, where the models exhibited were of the full
size of the machines meant to be used, and consequently almost
intelligible to an unprofessional person. Besides what may be strictly
considered models, there were in the rooms some objects more suited to
an ordinary museum.
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