“Wall,” sez he, a-lookin’ up kinder cross, “I’ve hearn lots of times of havin’ the bottom sash of a winder hung on hinges, and goin’ in and out by ’em.”
“Wall,” sez I, “after you’d clumb up through the buttery winder onct or twict with a pail of milk in both hands, I guess you’d git sick of doorstep waterfalls!”
He see by the light of my calm, practical reasonin’ that his idee wuz visionary and couldn’t be carried out, but he wouldn’t own up to it—not he.
He jest jammed the paper down into his vest pocket, and snapped me up real sharp the next words I said to him.
He acted awful growety; but I didn’t care, I knew I wuz in the right on’t.
Wall, after goin’ through the brightest and most lovely garden you can imagine, you come into a place with huge rocks and cliffs, romantic shrubbery, massive ledges, and a waterfall fallin’ into a deep, dark basin, caverns, etc., and as you go round a corner, you come face to face with a huge rock that you think must have fell there. You think you will have to go back; but no! Do you think you will have to turn back for anything in this enchanted place? The hired man touches the rock, and it turns right away and lets you pass, and then you see that not only is the enchantin’ beauty of the place made, but the rough wildness of this spot.
One of the curous things in this place wuz a tree with kinder queer-lookin’ branches, and the hired man touched it somewhere, and water flowed out of every leaf and twig, turnin’ it into a fountain.
The conservatory is from one end to the other two hundred and seventy-six feet long, and broad enough to drive through it with a carriage and four horses, so you can imagine the wealth of beauty in it—orange-trees full of their glossy fruit, lemon-trees, feathery palm-trees fifty feet high, bamboos, cactuses, bananas, queer, broad, velvety leaves of every shape and color, and all of the flowers that ever wuz hearn on, and never wuz hearn on, it seems to me.
There are thirty other greenhousen, all runnin’ over with beauty of various kinds. Graperies seven hundred feet long, with the rich white and purple clusters hangin’ down in every direction. Peach housen, strawberry housen, apricot, mushroom, vegetable housen, in which every kind of vegetable is raised. Why, the kitchen-garden and greenhousen covers twenty acres. But there is no use of talkin’ any more—like Niagara, and the World’s Fair, you have got to see it to understand its vastness and its perfect beauty.
I wuz glad I’d seen it. I believe that even Martin wuz kinder took down off from the Mount of Self Esteem he always sets on, as he wandered through it.