CHAPTER VI
The next mornin’ while Miss Meechim and Dorothy wuz to the lawyers, tendin’ to that bizness of hern and gittin’ ready for their long tower, Robert Strong took me through one of them palaces. It stood only a little distance from the city and wuz occupied by one old gentleman, the rest of the family havin’ died off and married, leavin’ him alone in his glory. Well said, for glory surrounded the hull spot.
There wuz three hundred acres, all gardens and lawns and a drivin’ park and a park full of magestick old live oaks, and acres and acres of the most beautiful flowers and all the choicest fruit you could think of.
The great stately mansion was a sight to go through––halls, libraries, gilded saloons, picture galleries, reception halls lined with mirrors, billiard rooms, bowling alleys, whatever that may be, dining rooms, with mirrors extending from the floor to the lofty ceilin’s.
I wondered if the lonely old occupant ever see reflected in them tall mirrors the faces of them who had gone from him as he sot there at that table, like some Solomon on his throne. But all he had to do wuz to press his old foot on a electric bell under the table, and forty servants would enter. But I’dno as he’d want ’em all––I shouldn’t––it would take away my appetite, I believe. Twenty carriages of all kinds and thirty blooded horses wuz in his stables, them stables bein’ enough sight nicer than any dwellin’ house in Jonesville.
But what did that feeble old man want of twenty carriages? To save his life he couldn’t be in more than one 70 to a time; and I am that afraid of horses, I felt that I wouldn’t swap the old mair for the hull on ’em.
At my strong request we made a tower one day to see Stanford University, that immense schoolhouse that is doin’ so much good in the world; why, good land! it is larger than you have any idee on; why, take all the schoolhouses in Jonesville and Loontown and Zoar and put ’em all together, and then add to them all the meetin’ houses in all them places and then it wouldn’t be half nor a quarter so big as this noble schoolhouse.
And the grounds about it are beautiful, beautiful! We wuz shown through the buildin’, seein’ all the helps to learning of all kinds and the best there is in the world. And how proud I felt to think what one of my own sect had done in that great werk. How the cross of agony laid on her shoulders had turned to light that will help guide over life’s tempestenus ten millions yet onborn. And I sez: “How happy young Leeland must be to know his death has done such grand work, and to see it go on.”
“Why,” sez Meechim, “how could he see it? He’s dead.”