“I wonder what Columbus would say if he could stand there and see it go on.”

“He’d probable step in and take a drink,” sez Josiah.

“Never,” sez I.  “The eye that could discover without actual sight, the soul that could apprehend without comprehension—­that could look fur off into the mist of the onknown, and see a New World risin’ up before his rapt vision—­such a eye and such a soul didn’t depend on bad whiskey for its stimulent.  No, indeed!

“He didn’t lay round in bar-rooms with a red nose, and a stagger onto him.  He wuz up and about, with his senses all straight, and the star he follered wuzn’t the light of a corner saloon.

“No, indeed!  He see the invisible.  He wuz beloved of God, and hearn secrets that coarser minds round him never dremp of.  He didn’t try to cloy up them Heavenly senses with whiskey.  No, indeed!

“And Isabella now, if that likely creeter could be sot down in front of that long street of grog-shops, she would almost be sorry she ever sold her jewelry, she would be so sot back by seein’ that awful sight.”

“O shaw!” sez Josiah, “she didn’t sell her jewelry.”

“Wall, she wuz willin’ to,” sez I.

“Id’no as she wuz.  She jest talked about it; wimmen must talk or bust anyway, they are made so.”

“How are men made?” sez I dryly, as dry as ever a corncob wuz, after many years.

“Oh, men are made so’s they try to answer wimmen some—­they have to; they have to keep their hand in so’s to not lose their speech on that very account.  I presume Columbus knew all about such things.  He had two wives; he knew what trouble wuz.”

I see that man wuz a-tryin’ every way to draw my attention away offen them long streets of saloons built up in Chicago, and I wouldn’t suckumb to it.  So I branched right out, and back agin, and sez I—­

“The idee of a civilized city, after eighteen hundred years of Christianaty—­the idee of their doin’ sunthin’ that if savage Africans or Inguns wuz a-doin’ the World would ring with it, and missionaries would start for ’em on the run, or by the carload.

“There is a awful fuss made about a cannibal eatin’ a man now and then, makin’ a good plain stew of him, or a roast, and that is the end of it; they eat up his flesh, but they don’t make no pretensions to fry up his soul; they leave that free and pure, and it goes right up to Heaven.

“But here in our Christian land, in city and country, this great man-eatin’ trade costs the country over a billion dollars a year, and devours one hundred and twenty thousand men each year, and destroys the soul and mind first, before it tackles the body.

“They go as fur ahead of cannibals in this wickedness as eternity is longer than time.

“And the Goverment, this great beneficent Goverment, that looks down with pity on oncivilized races—­the Goverment of the United States sells and rents this man-eater and soul-destroyer at so much a year.