[Illustration: A luxurious home in the newer St. Louis]
Henry Shaw must have remembered his boyhood days in St. Louis and the wonderful garden of Madame Rosalie Saugrain. In those earlier days St. Louis was small enough in population but large enough in the material for social enjoyment. The French element was still dominant, although Madame Saugrain was comparatively a newcomer, an accomplished lady who had brought the manners and tastes of Paris into the wilds of western America. Her garden, which was then in open country beyond the struggling town, was close to what is today Seventh street, St. Louis. Great skyscrapers and solid warehouses have sprung up where formerly Madame's roses and hollyhocks bloomed, and one would have to go weary blocks to find a spear of grass, unless within some public park.
But Shaw's Gardens still exist, although their founder lived to a ripe old age and has now been dead a quarter of a century. Older folk of St. Louis remember him distinctly, a vigorous and seemingly lonely man, unmarried, but who seemed to be content to live alone in his great house in the Gardens, giving a loving and a personal care to his flowers and then, as dusk came on, invariably sitting in his room and reading far into the night. They will show you his will when you go to the museum in the Gardens, a curious old document, keenly prepared and devising to the remaining members of his family, servants and intimates, everything from immensely valuable real estate in the very heart of St. Louis down to the port and sherry from his cellars. But the part that interested St. Louis most was that part which gave the Gardens to the town, although not without restrictions. And the old Missouri town made Shaw's Gardens quite as much a part of its existence as its County Fair.
The St. Louis Fair was a real institution. There have been far greater shows of the kind in our land, but perhaps none that ever entered more thoroughly into the hearts of the folk to whom it catered. Every one in St. Louis used to go to the Fair. It had a social status quite its own. When, after the hot and gruelling summer which causes all St. Louis folk who possibly can to flee to the ocean or to the mountains, they came home again in the joys of Indian summer there was the Fair--up under the trees of Grand avenue in the north part of the town--to serve for a getting together once again. It had served that way since long before wartime. And with it ran that mighty social bulwark of St. Louis, the Procession of the Veiled Prophet. One night in "Fair Week"--locally known as "Big Thursday"--was annually given to this pageant, frankly modeled upon the Mardi Gras festivities at New Orleans. Through the streets of the town the pageant rolled its triumphal course, all St. Louis came out to see it, and afterwards there was a ball. To be bidden to that ball was the social recognition that the city gave you.