It is full of the products of California.  Sech fruit and flowers I never see, and don’t expect to agin.

The flowers wuz gorgeous, and perfectly beautiful, and I spoze, though I don’t really want to twit ’em of it, yet I do spoze they brought every mite of fruit out of California for this occasion.  I don’t spoze there wuz a orange left there, or a grape, nor anything else in the line of fruit.  Mebby there might a been one or two green oranges left, but I doubt it.

And as for canned and dried fruit, I don’t spoze there wuz a teacupful left in the hull State.

Why, jest think of the dried prunes it must have took to make that horse that wuz rared up there seven feet from the floor!

And wuzn’t that horse a sight to see?—­jest as nateral as though he wuz made of flesh instead of fruit.

I hearn, but mebby it come from some of their own folks—­but I hearn that California had the best exhibits of all kinds of any of the States.  But I wouldn’t want it told from me.  I don’t want to git thirty or forty States mad as a hen at me; the States are dretful touchy, anyway, in the matter of State Rights and pride.

But the show wuz impressive—­dretful.

This house wuz built, I spoze, in honor of Spain, like a old Spanish Mission Buildin’; and up in the towers which rise up on the four corners are belfrys, in which are some of the old Spanish bells, that still ring out and call to prayers, when the good old Fathers that used to hear ’em, and the Injun converts, generations and generations of ’em, have slept so sound that the bells can’t wake ’em.

And the bells still swing out over this restless and ambitious generation, and they will swing and echo jest the same when we too have gone to sleep, and sleep sound.

Queer, hain’t it, that a little dead lump of metal should outlive the beatin’ human heart—­the active, outreachin’ human life, with its world-wide activities and Heaven-high aspiration?

But so it is; generations and generations are born, live, and die, and the old bells, a-takin’ life easy, jest swing on, and ring out jest as sweet and calm and kinder careless at our death as at our birth.

The bells sounded dretful melancholy and heart achin’ to me; that day they seemed to be soundin’ a requiem clear from California to Jonesville for the good Man who had passed away.

Jest as we went down the steps we hearn a bystander a-tellin’ another one “that Leland Stanford wuz dead.”  And I wuz fearful rousted up about it; I felt like death to hear on’t; and to think that I never had a chance to tell him what I thought on him.  I was fearful agitated, and almost by the side of myself; but jest at that juncture—­jest as I sez to Josiah, “I shouldn’t felt so bad if I had had a chance to tell him what I thought on him, and encourage him in his noble doin’s, and warn him in one or two things”—­jest at that minit, sez Josiah, “I’ve lost my bandanny handkerchief;” and he told me, “To wait there for him, that he thought that he remembered where he had dropped it—­back in a antick room in the back part of the house.”