Here he blurted right out, “I hain’t Theodore, though I’ve been took for him before, I’m President of a Gas Company.”

I wuz mortified for most a minute, but come to think it over I knowed such seeds of truth as I’d been a scatterin’ couldn’t help but do good even if the sile wuzn’t so rich as I’d spozed.

CHAPTER XVI.

Well, the next week we had a busy time, Josiah and Molly and I went mostly together, Blandina most always meetin’ Professor Aspire Todd somewhere nigh the entrance, I guess it wuz planned, but ’tennyrate I wuz willin’, plan or no plan.

And we visited every interestin’ spot from Morocco to the Model City and from Physicial Culture Hall to Nevada.

There wuz a meetin’ that scientific folks held there, and its main aim seemed to be to make light of the religion of Christ.  It madded Josiah dretfully, and he sez, “I feel it my duty as a deacon to go and give in my testimony and break up such wicked doin’s.”

Sez I, “Josiah you let ’em alone.  You couldn’t break it up, nothin’ but the power of the God they deny could do it.  But we’ll punish ’em by not goin’ near ’em.  That will mortify ’em and mebby make ’em see where they stand, denyin’ the power that gives em the breath they spend in such folly.”  So when Sunday come agin we went to the same M.E. meetin’ house and hearn a splendid sermon on what the Christian Religion had done for the World.  And we visited Lincoln’s Cabin and I had probable fifty emotions a minute all the time I wuz there thinkin’ of that wise, child-hearted man and what he did for humanity.

And I had about the same emotions in Grant’s Log Cabin.  Noble creeters, both on ’em!  They wuz cramped for room in these humble homes, and wuz probable put to it for comforts.  But they have room enough now, the Great World claims ’em, and they will walk down the ages together crowned with the love and reverence of the people.

And Josiah wanted to see the Boer War, and though a war wuz nothin’ I wanted to see I felt I musn’t cross him.  And all the while I sot there seein’ them contendin’ armies contend I wuz thinkin’ of poor Oom Paul and his brave fight for liberty, and at last losin’ all and dyin’ broken-hearted in a strange land.

But onbeknown to myself these words come to me: 

“The mills of the gods grind slowly
But they grind exceedingly small.”

I can’t look ahead and see jest what they’re grindin’ out for this brave people and them that conquered ’em, nor Josiah can’t.

And I took solid comfort in the Hall of Lady Managers seein’ how well they managed.  In this Exposition there is no seperate place fenced off for wimmen’s exhibit.  They carry the idee here that good work is equally valuable when done by man or woman.  They claim that works of art, invention, manufacture, etc., are as sexless as religion, and you know our Lord said plain of men and wimmen, “Ye are one in Christ.”