“I can’t tell what’s comin’—­gall or honey.”

But some of them picters and statutes made perfect dents in my memory, and can’t be smoothed out agin nohow.

There wuz one little figger jest at the entrance where we went in, “The Young Acrobat,” that impressed me dretfully.

It wuz a man’s hand and arm that wuz a-risin’ up out of a pedestal, and on the hand wuz set the cutest little baby you ever see.  I guess it wuz the first time that he’d ever sot up anywhere out of the cradle or his ma’s arms.

He looked some skairt, and some proud, and too cunnin’ for anything, as I hearn remarked by a few hundred female wimmen that day.

And like as not it is jest like my incoherence in revery that from that little baby my mind would spring right on to the French exhibit to that noble statute of Jennie D. Ark, kneelin’ there with her clasped hands and her eyes lifted as if she wuz a-sayin’:  “I did hear the voices!”

And so she did hear the language of Heaven, and the dull souls around her wuz too earthly to comprehend the divine harmonies, and so they burnt her up for it.

Lots of folks are burnt up in different fires to-day, for the same thing.

Then mebby my mind will jest jump to the “Age of Iron” or to the “Secrets of the Tomb,” or “The Eagle and the Vulture,” or “Washington and Lafayette,” or “Charity”—­a good-lookin’ creeter she wuz—­she could think of other children besides her own; or mebby it will jump right over onto the “Indian Buffalo Hunt”—­a horse a-rarin’ right up to git rid of a buffalo that wuz a-pressin’ right in under its forelegs.

I don’t see how that hunter could stay on his back—­I couldn’t—­to say nothin’ to shootin’ the arrows into the critter as he’s a-doin’.

Or mebby my mind’ll jump right over to the “Soldier of Marathon,” or “Eve,” no knowin’ at all where my thoughts will take me amongst them noble marble figgers.

And as for picters, my revery on ’em now is a perfect sight; a show as good as a panorama is a-goin’ on in my fore-top now when I let my thoughts take their full swing on them picters.

Amongst them that struck the hardest blows on my fancy wuz them that told stories that touched the heart.

There wuz one in the Holland exhibit, called “Alone in the World,” a picter that rousted up my feelin’s to a almost alarmin’ extent.  It wuz a picter by Josef Israel.

It wuz a sight to see how this picter touched the hearts of the people.  No grandeur about it, but it held the soul of things—­pathos, heart-breakin’ sorrow.

A peasant had come home to his bare-lookin’ cottage, and found his wife dead in her bed.

He didn’t rave round and act, and strike an attitude.  No, he jest turned round and sot there on his hard stool, with his hands on his knees, a-facin’ the bare future.

The hull of the desolation of that long life of emptiness and grief that he sees stretch out before him without her, that he had loved and lost, wuz in the man’s grief-stricken face.