In lookin’ back and thinkin’ on’t and tryin’ to git ’em in the right place in your mind it is as difficult as it would be in walking through a big clover meadow and tryin’ to sort out the clover blossoms and describe ’em one by one and tell in jest what corner of the lot you found ’em.  It can’t be done; in such an immense field of art your brain sort o’ fills up and turns round and round and you git mixed.  But as I say some of the pictures and statutes stayed in my memory so I couldn’t dislodge ’em and don’t want to, no indeed!

Now there are three noble figgers at the entrance that you can’t forgit.  Inspiration standin’ up above the main entrance is jest where she should be.  Inspiration, breath of the Most High breathed into some of His children below anon or oftener, and then on each side is Truth and Nature.  Nature, the kind All Mother, Truth, the divine one.  How sweet to find ’em all there together guardin’ and consecratin’ these walls.  You went in feelin’ safer with such gardeens at the portal.

I must say though that Truth didn’t have any clothes on, she wuz jest settin’ there on top of the world jest as naked as she could be, she could have wore one of my bib aprons as well as not, durin’ the Fair anyway, whilst there wuz so many folks round and she would have looked enough sight better to me and been jest as truthful.  But howsumever I knew she wuz likely, her face wuz innocent and beautiful.

As I said it is some of the pictures and statutes that stand out clearest in my memory, but there wuz everything else there admirable and choice in art, paintings in oil, wax; on canvas, wood, enamel, metal, fresco paintings on walls and ceilings.  Water colors, chalk, pastel, ivory, pyrography.  Engravings, etchings, figgers in marble, metal, plaster.  Carvings in ivory, stone, wood, etc.  Architectural designs of all kinds; mosaics; art work in glass, earthen ware, leather, metal; artistic book binding and etc., etc., etc., and I might spread these out into volumes.

And didn’t my soul jest spread her wings here in delight, to speak in flowery language.  What pictures of beauty dawned on my rapt eyesight, faces sweet as wuz ever dremp on, sad faces, tragic faces, old faces and young faces; children sweet and bonny as wuz ever seen.  Youth and love, age and manhood and gratified ambition, princes and paupers, life and death.

Landscapes full of the dewy freshness and joy of the morning, night seens dark and full of mystery and melancholy.  Mountain and valley, hill and dale, ocean and rivulet.  Every phase of human joy and sorrow wuz depictered there, and every phase of peaceful and warlike life.  It wuz a sight.  If I could stayed there a year right in them walls I might have got round mebby and seen what I wanted to and as long as I wanted to.

But of course this wuzn’t to be, for one thing the Fair would be closed before and then Josiah wouldn’t gin his consent anyway.  He got kinder worrisome as it wuz and didn’t want to stay so long as we did, and after a hour or so I compromised with him, gin him nut cakes occasionally and anon when we would enter a new gallery he would set down by the door till I had got through lookin’.