So we sot off to see it; Josiah sayin’ he would meet us at noon, down by the Japan House.
My first thought on seein’ it was, “I don’t believe you was hung for your beauty, or would be, if you had lived another three thousand years,” but then my very next thought was, “folks may look sort o’ contemptuous at you, and, in the pride and glory of their butterfly existence, pass you by in a hauty way; but if your still lips could open once, they would shake the hull world with your knowledge of the mysterious past and the still more mysterious future, whose secrets you understand.” And then (unbeknown to me) I reveried a little: thinks’es I, what scenes did them eyes look upon the last time they was opened in this world? What was the last words she heerd,—the last face that bent over her? And what strange and beautiful landscape is it that is spread out before her now? What faces does she see? What voices does she hear? I had quite a number of emotions while I stood there a reverin’—probable as many as twenty or thirty.
But about this time Cousin Bean says she: “Did you see Queen Victoria’s pictures, that she has lent?”
I turned right round and faced her, and says I, in agitated tones,—“You don’t tell me, Miss Bean, that the Widder Albert has got some pictures of her own, here, that she has lent to the Sentinal?”
“Yes,” says she, “she has got three or four, in the English Department of the Art Gallery.”
I turned right round and started for the Artemus Gallery, for I see I had missed ’em the day before, and after I had got into the English Department, a good woman pinted ’em all out to me, at my request.
The first one I looked at, thinks’es I,—how curious that the Widder Albert should send a paintin’ here, picturin’ all out what I had thought about ever sense I had thought at all. Thinks’es I, I most know she has heerd how I always felt about it, and sent it over a purpose to accommodate me. It was the “Death of Wolfe.” Oh! how often I had heerd Josiah sing (or what he called singin’) about it; how
“Brave Wolfe drew up his men
In a line so pretty,
On the field of Abraham,