And I should have took sights of comfort viewin’ the magnificent seens spread out and growin’ and changin’ every minute if I hadn’t had to kep’ one eye onto Josiah Allen all the time, or as you may say two eyes, one my own gray orb and the other the eye of my specs.  The seen wuz so hugely grand, so magnificently stupendous, and the mind that it wuz my duty as first chaperone to guard wuz so small I sez to myself, could it be bombarded by that immense grandeur and not utterly collapse.  But Blandina wuz on the other side on him, so I didn’t feel as I should had the responsibility devolved on me alone.

But he bore it well.  He looked off on the seen grander than anything Fairy Land ever dremp on or ever will, I believe.  And then he looked pensively at my silk bag where I’d stored all the cookies and nut-cakes it would hold, to keep up his strength between meals.

And so gradually I dropped my agonizing anxiety and let my eyes drink in the onequalled beauty of the seen as we went by the tall glorious palaces towerin’ up in white magnificence.  Past sparklin’ water spaces filled with gay pleasure craft full of happy white-robed voyagers.  Past the spans of arched bridges leadin’ from one seen of glory to another, past tall white shafts carryin’ up to the listenin’ Heavens deeds of glory and valor.

Past white statutes more beautiful than poet’s dreams, risin’ up from green velvet lawns or marble terraces.  Broad highways would dawn on our vision, anon vistas of incomparable beauty way off, way off as fur as we could see would open up other views jest as fair.  Anon the columned walls of some nearby palace would seem to close in the view, and then agin the fur vision, and anon the blue waters flowin’ on and on.  And scattered all over the ground roamed the happy people, men, wimmen and children of every name and nation, clothed in every garb that folks ever wore under the sun, and some, it seemed to me, made up jest for that occasion, as Eve started her new fashion of fall dress, only this wuzn’t made of leaves, no indeed! fur from it.

But I believe the foreign costoom we see most of all wuz the Japan.  And all through the Fair that nation seemed to show off in the very first rank.  Well, I wuz willin’, I always kinder liked ’em, they’re so polite and courteous to everybody, and as for makin’ storks and folks settin’ on nothin’ and lookin’ perfectly comfortable settin’ on it, they go fur ahead of anybody else, and they have lots of other noble qualities.  In cleanin’ house time, now I have fairly begreched the ease and comfort of them Japanese housewives who jest take up their mat and sweep out, move their paper walls a little mebby and there it is done.

No heavy, dirt-laden carpets to clean, no papered walls and ceilings to break their back over, no trumpery brickaty brack to take care of and dust and make life a burden.  Kind hearted, reverent to equals and superiors—­trained to kindness and courtesy and reverence in childhood when American mothers are ruled and badgered by short skirted and roundabout clad tyrants.