"Why Grandma, you are walking by me with your eyes shut. What's the matter?"
"Well you see, Fanny, it's too much to look at so many millions of things so I just shut my eyes and think. What's the difference if I do miss a few thousand sights."
"That's so, Fanny, we aint got used to looking yet. It looks like they had everything a working here but my old shaving horse. I wouldn't be surprised any minute to see that it had walked away from the woodshed and come over to show itself off in this here exposition. I believe I'll go over and offer them my old barlow knife. It's a score of years old but it'll bore a hole for a hame string all right yet."
They came to the place where they were making watches with the complex, automatic machinery that defies the eye to detect its movements, then there was the sewing machine with a man riding it like a bicycle and sewing carpet in strips a hundred feet long. There were knitting machines and clothing machines, and carving and molding machines, and type-setting machines, till the day was spent and they had seen only how much there was to see.
"It takes taste to paint pictures, and art to make sculpture, and mind to write books, and genius to carry on war, but I tell you, my girl," said Uncle, "that it takes brains to make machinery."
Passing through a south door they went on around Machinery hall. Some working men were passing by singly or in twos and threes. One had a wrench in one hand and a queer looking bottle in the other. The ludicrous side of the exposition now began to appear. Nothing can become so great that amusing things will not occur. They are the relaxations of mental life. One of the guards saw the man and his bottle.
"Hi, there," he shouted. The workman came to a stop, the bottle being ostensibly concealed behind his apron. "What are you bringing beer into machinery hall for?"
"I ain't got any beer," replied the workman.
"Don't tell me any such stuff. You've got a bottle under your apron."