Samantha at the World's Fair

by Marietta Holley

After we left the Horticultural Buildin' I proposed that we should branch out for once and git a fashionable dinner.

"Dinner!" sez Josiah. "Are you crazy, or what does ail you? Talk about gittin' dinner at this time of day—most bedtime!"

But I explained it out to him that fashion called for dinner at the hour that we usually partook of our evenin' meal at Jonesville.

Sez I, "Josiah, I would love for jest once to go to a big fashionable restaurant and mingle with the fashionable throng—jest for instruction and education, Josiah, not that I want to foller it up."

But sez he, "We'd better go to the same old place where we've got good, clean dinners and supperses, and enough on 'em, and at a livin' price."

But he argued warm at the foolishness of the enterprise.

But onlucky creeter that I wuz, I argued that, bein' a woman in search of instruction and wisdom, I wanted to see life on as many sides as I could; while I was at Columbuses doin's I wanted to look round and see all I could in a social and educational way.

Poor deceived human creeters, how they will blind their own eyes when they pursue their own desires!

I do spoze it wuz vanity and pride that wuz at the bottom of it.