But you wouldn’t want to, I don’t believe.  You’d want to spend every minute a-feastin’ your eyes on the Best of the World.

All along the floors of the nave and transepts are displayed the most beautiful sculptures that wuz ever sculped in any part of the world, while the walls are covered with paintin’s and sculptured panels in relief.

That’s what they call ’em, because it’s such a relief for folks to set down and look at ’em.

Between the promenades and naves and transepts are the smaller rooms, where the private collections of picters are kep and the works of the different Art Schools, and the four corners are filled with smaller picter galleries.

Why, to go through jest one of them annexes, let alone the palace itself, would take a week if you examined ’em as you ort to.  Josiah told me that mornin’, with a encouraged look onto his face—­

“Samantha, after we’ve seen all the ile paintin’s we’ll go somewhere, and have a good time.”

“But good land! see all the ile paintin’s!”

Why, as I told him after we’d wandered through there for hours and hours, sez I, “If we spent every minute of the hull summer we couldn’t do justice to ’em all.”

And we couldn’t.  Why, it has been all calculated out by a good calculator, that spend one minute to a picter, and it would take twenty-six days to go through ’em.  And good land! what is one minute to some of the picters you see.  Why, half a day wuzn’t none too long to pour over some on ’em, and when I say pour, I mean pour, for I see dozens of folks weepin’ quite hard before some on ’em.

[Illustration:  I see dozens of folks weepin’ quite hard before some on ’em.]

For these picters wuzn’t picked out haphazard all over the country.  No, they had to, every one on ’em, run the gantlet of the most severe and close criticism.

The Jury of Admittance stood in front of that gallery, and over it, as you may say, like the very finest and strongest wire sieve, a-strainin’ out all but the finest and clearest merits.  No dregs could git through—­not a dreg.

I guess that hain’t a very good metafor, and if I wuzn’t in such a hurry I’d look round and try to find a better one, not knowin’, too, but what that Jury of Admittance will feel mad as hens at me to be compared to sieves; but I don’t mean the common wire ones, such as tin-peddlers sell.  No, I mean the searchin’ and elevatin’ process by which the very best of our country and the hull world wuz separated from the less meritorious ones, and spread out there for the inspiration and delight of the assembled nations.

And wuzn’t it a sight what wuz to be found there!

Landscapes from every land on the globe—­from Lapland to the Orient.  Tropical forests, with soft southern faces lookin’ out of the verdant shadows.  Frozen icebergs, with fur-clad figgers with stern aspects, and grizzly bears and ice-suckles.