They didn’t break the puff ball of my vanity and pride, and let the wind out—­no, indeed!

But alas! alas! as I entered the Transportation Buildin’, and looked round me, there wuz no gentle prick to that overgrown puff ball to let the gas out drizzlin’ly and gradual—­no, there wuz a sudden smash, a wild collapse, a flat and total squshiness—­the puff ball wuz broke into a thousand pieces, and the wind it contained, where wuz it?  Ask the breezes that wafted away Caesar’s last groans, that blowed up the dust over buried Pompeii.

The buildin’ itself wuz a sight—­why, it is 960 feet long, and the cupola in the centre 166 feet high, with eight elevators to take you up to it; the great main entrance wuz all overlaid with gold—­looked full as good as Solomon’s temple, I do believe—­and broad enough and big enough for a hull army of giants to walk through abreast, and then room enough for Josiah and me besides.

But it wuz on the inside of it that my pride fell and broke all to pieces, as I looked round me and down the long distance behind and before me.

I knew—­for I had been told—­that one fourth of all the savin’s of civilized man is invested in railroads, and when I thought of how dretful rich some men and countries are, and kings and emperors, etc., I felt prepared to do homage to a undertakin’ that had swallowed up one fourth of all that accumulated wealth.

But sence the world begun, never had there been a exhibition before showin’ all the railroad systems of the world side by side, all the big American railroads, and great Britain, and France, and Germany.

The Baltimore and Ohio exhibit shows how the railroads of the world have been thought out gradual, and come up from nothin’ to what they are—­grew up from a little steam carriage that wuz shut up in Paris in 1760 as bein’ disordely.

“Disordely!” Good land! there never wuz a new idee worth anything in this world but has been called “disordely” by fools.

You can see that very little carriage here at the Fair; after bein’ shut up for two hundred years, it comes out triumphant, just as Columbus has.

Stevensonses first engine is here—­an exact reproduction—­and the hull caboodle of the first attempts leadin’ up to the engines of to-day.

Dretful interestin’ to look at these rough little inventions and to speculate on what prophetic strivin’s, and yearnin’s, and heartaches, and despairs, and triumphs went into every one on ’em.

For every one on ’em wuz follered, as a man is by his black shadder, by the cold, evil spirits of unbelief, malice, envy, and cheatin’.

The sun the inventors walked under—­the glowin’ sun of prophecy and foreknowledge—­always casts such shadders, some as our sun duz, only blacker.

And every one of them old engines by the help of machinery is moved and turned, just as if Old Time himself had laid his hour-glass offen his head, and wuz a-puttin’ his old shoulders under their iron shafts, and a-settin’ them to goin’ agin, after so long a time.