“Light complexion? Dark hair and eyes? Stylish dressed?”
“No, wrinkled complexion, bald, and what few hairs he’s got, gray.”
She smiled; she couldn’t see the beauty Love had gilded his image with.
Sez I, “If he’s incarcerated in some dungeon below, I too will mount the turn-table of torture, and share his fate or perish on the turn table.”
Sez she, “There is no dungeons below; the folks come out into a vast place as big as this. There is just as much to see down there as there is here, just as many people and just as much amusement.”
“Amusement!” sez I in a holler voice.
After I left her, I see a whisk broom hangin’ up in a handy place, and it had a printed liebill on it, “This whisk broom free.” And as my parmetty dress had got kinder dusty a slidin’ and wobblin’ as I had slode and wobbled, I went to brush off my skirt with it, when all 263 of a sudden somebody or sunthin’ gin me a stunnin’ blow right in my arm that held the brush. I dropped it without waitin’ to argy the matter, and I don’t know to this day who or what struck me and what it wuz for. But my conscience wuz clear; I hadn’t done nothin’.
I santered on and entered an enclosure seemin’ly made of innocent lookin’ fence rails. I wuz kinder attracted to it, for it looked some like the rail fence round our gooseberry bushes. But for the lands sake! it wuzn’t like any fence in Jonesville or Zoar, for though it looked innocent, it shet me in tight and I couldn’t git out.
I wandered round and round, and out and in, and it wuz a good half hour before I got out, and I d’no but I’d have been there to this day, if a man hadn’t come and opened a gate and let me out. Only one thought kep’ up my courage in my fruitless wanderings. It wuz all done in plain sight of everybody, and I could see for myself that Josiah wuzn’t kep’ there in captivity.
There wuz a tall pole in the middle of the Amaze, as they call it (well named, for it is truly amazin’), and the liebill on that pole read, 264 “Climb the pole and ring the bell on it, and we will give you a prize.”