He acted like a good sensible American man, some as our son Thomas Jefferson would act if he should go over to his neighborhood on business.

He wanted to see for himself the life of the Americans, the way the common people lived—­he wanted to git information to help his own people.

And he wanted to see Edison the most of all.  That in itself would make him congenial to me.  I myself think of Edison side by side with Christopher Columbus, and I guess the high chair he sets on up in my mind, with his lap full of his marvellous discoveries, is a little higher than Columbuses high chair.

Oh, how congenial the Ragah of Kahurthalia would be!  How I wish we could have visited together!  But it wuzn’t to be, for Josiah said that he’d gone the night before, so we wended on.

Wall, we hadn’t more than got into the grounds this mornin’ when Josiah hearn a bystander a-standin’ near tell another one about the Ferris Wheel.

“Why,” sez he, “you jest git into one of them cars, and you are carried up so that it seems as if you can see the hull world at your feet.”

Josiah turned right round in his tracts, and sez he, “Where can I find that wheel?”

And the man sez, “On the Midway Plaisance.”

And Josiah sez, “Where is that?”

And the man pinted out the nearest way, and nothin’ to do but what we must set out to find that wheel, and go up in one.

I counselled caution and delay, but to no effect.  That wheel had got to be found to once, and both on us took up in it.

I dreaded the job.

Wall, the Plaisance begins not fur back of the Woman’s Buildin’.  It is a strip of land about six hundred feet wide and a mild in length, connecting Washington Park with Jackson Park, where Columbus has his doin’s, and it comes out at the Fair Ground right behind the Woman’s Buildin’.

Josiah jest wanted to rush along, clamorin’ for the wheel, and not lookin’ for nothin’ on either side till he found it.

But I wuz firm in this as a rock, that if I went at all I would go megum actin’ and quiet, and look at everything we come to.

And wuzn’t there enough to look at jest in the street?  Folks of all nations under the earth.  They seemed like the leaves of a forest, or the sands of the sea, if them sands and leaves wuz turned into men, wimmen, and children—­high hats, bunnets, umbrells, fans, canes, parasols, turbans, long robes, and short ones, gay ones, bright ones, feathers, sedan chairs, bijous, rollin’ chairs, Shacks—­or that is how Josiah pronounced it.  I told him that they wuz spelt S-h-e-i-k-s.

But he sez that you could tell that they wuz Shacks by the looks on ’em.

Truly it wuz a sight—­a sight what we see in that street.  Why, it wuz like payin’ out some thousand dollars, and with two trunks, and onmeasured fatigue, spend years and years travellin’ over the world.

Why, we seemed to be a-journeyin’ through foreign countries, a-carryin’ the thought with us that we took our breakfast in our own hum, and that we should sleep there that night, but for all that we wuz in Turkey, and Japan, and Dahomey, and Lapland, etc., etc., etc.