Congress of Nations, grand pageant, given at 2:30 and 8 pm. Liberty race of twenty-one horses; Donnybrook Fair and Lancashire races; balloon ascensions on Tuesday and Friday afternoons by Prof. W. H. Donaldson.

“So I looked in at the Grand Hippodrome. The introductory pageant—‘Congress’—or something else—‘of all nations’ is a brilliant costly piece of claptrap, with its elephants & dromedaries, & scores or hundreds of fine horses & showy uniforms. The hard-rising, the chariot races, & so on, were really quite exciting, but it was painful to see these poor young women, some of them nice looking, decked out in their spangles & sham finery, risking their lives, ‘to make a Roman holiday.’ Two or three have been badly hurt, & one killed outright. But this last (as I was told by an intelligent & philosophical attendant) ‘had consumption pretty bad, & one of her lungs was most gone—not quite—so she couldn’t have lived much longer, anyhow.’ The blond & buxom victor in the ‘chariot race’—which was in fact desperate hard driving, with sharp corners to turn, fell the other evening under her horse—had one or two horses gallop over her as she lay prone, and then was at death’s door for some hours, with hemorages—ex utero. But our people look on & cheer, & the peril of the rides makes the spectacle more piquant. Were gladiatorial shows revived, a New York audience would soon learn to turn down its thumbs at the proper time.”

No mention of music.