“Well, I’ll tell you, Samantha, there is beauty in such a costoom that our sombry coats and pantaloons and vests can’t come nigh to.”
I spoze Ceylon is the most beautiful place in the world, such glow and richness of color, such aboundin’ life in the verdure, in the animal and vegetable kingdom. No wonder so many think it wuz the original Garden of Eden; no shovelin’ snow for Adam or bankin’ up fruits and vegetables for winter’s use. No, he could step out barefoot in the warm velvety grass in December, and pick oranges and gather sweet potatoes and cucumbers, and strawberries if Eve took it into her head she wanted a shortcake pie. And little Cain could cut up cane literally, and every way, in January, and Abel pile flowers and fruit on his altar all the year round. But I wonder which of their descendants built these immense magnificent cities layin’ fur below forests and billows of turf and flowers.
I wonder how they looked and what language they spoke and what their politics wuz. Arvilly thought they must have been temperance folks. Sez she, “Any city that has reservoirs twenty milds long believed in drinkin’ water.” We had took a tower to see one of them dug up cities, and sure enough the water reservoir wuz twenty milds long; jest think from that what the size of the hull city must have been, when their waterin’ trough, as you may say, wuz as 230 long as America’s biggest city. Stately stairways, up which twenty carriages big as our democrat could pass side by side if horses could climb stairs.
A row of tall pillers, ten milds in length, line the roads to some of them cities, and I sez:
“Oh, good land! How I wish I could be a mouse in the wall and see who and what passed over them roads, and why, and when, and where.”
And Josiah sez, “Why don’t you say you wish you wuz a elephant and could look on? your simely would seem sounder.”
And I sez, “Mebby so, for hull rows of carved marble elephants stand along them broad roads; I guess they worshipped ’em.”
And he sez, “I wuz alludin’ to size.”
Robert Strong looked ruther sad as we looked on them ruins buried so deep by the shovel of time. But I sez to him in a low voice:
“There is no danger of the city you’re a-rarin’ up ever bein’ engulfed and lost, for justice and mercy and love shine jest as bright to-day as when the earth was called out of chaos. Love is eternal, immortal, and though worlds reel and skies fall, what is immortal cannot perish.”