Bits of the beauty of all climes under all skies, dark or sunny.  Mountains, trees, valleys, forests, plains and prairies, palaces and huts, ships, boats and balloons.  The beauty and the sadness of every season of the year, beautiful faces, inspired faces, humbly faces, strikin’ powerful means, and mean cowardly sly liniments looked out on every side of us.

Picters illustratin’ every phase of human life, in every corner of the globe, from birth to death, from kingly prosperity and luxurious ease to prisons and scaffolds, the throne, the hospital, the convent, the pulpit, the monastery, the home, the battle-field, the mid-ocean, and the sheltered way, and Heaven and Hell, and Life and Death.

Every seen and spot the human mind had ever conceived wuz here depictered.

Every emotion man or woman ever felt, every inspiration that ever possessed their soul, every joy and every grief that ever lifted or bowed down their heads wuz here depictered.

And seens from the literature of every land wuz illustrated, the world of matter, the world of mind, all their secrets laid bare to the eyes of the admirin’ nations.

It wuz a sight—­a sight!

Gallery after gallery, room after room did we wander through till the gorgeous colorin’ seemed to dye our very thoughts and emotions, and I looked at Josiah in a kinder mixed-up, lofty way, as if he wuz a ile paintin’ or a statute, and he looked at me almost as if he considered me a chromo.

It wuz a time not to be forgot as long as memory sets up high on her high throne.

Room after room, gallery after gallery, beauty dazzlin’ us on every side, and lameness and twinges of rumatiz a-harassin’ us in our four extremities.

Why, the sight seemed so endless and so immense, that some of the time we felt like two needles in a haymow, a haymow made up of a vision of loveliness, and the two little needles feelin’ fairly tuckered out, and blunted, and browbeat.

Why, we got so kinder bewildered and carried away, that some of the time I couldn’t tell whether the masterpiece I wuz a-devourin’ with my eyes come from Germany or Jonesville, from France or Shackville, from Holland or from Zoar, up in the upper part of Lyme.

Of course amongst that endless display there wuz some picters that struck such hard blows at the heart and fancy that you can’t forgit ’em if you wanted to, which most probable you don’t.

And now, in thinkin’ back on ’em, I can’t sort ’em out and lay ’em down where they belong and mark ’em 1, 2, 3, 4, and etcetry, as I’d ort to.

But I’m jest as likely to let my mind jump right from what I see at the entrance to sunthin’ that I see way to the latter end of the buildin’, and visa versa.

It kinder worries me.  I love to even meditate and allegore with some degree of order and system, but I can’t here.  I must allegore and meditate on ’em jest as they come, and truly a-thinkin’ on these picters, I feel as Hosey Bigelow ust to say: