Probble that was the—“The next thing that arrived.”
But I am indeed a-eppisodin’, and to resoom—
Then there wuz Sir Walter Scott, and Tennyson, and Longfellow, and everybody else, as you may say, who have distinguished themselves in literature and art, and lots of Lords and Ladies, but them I didn’t mind so much, knowin’ that for the most part that they had been born into their lofty places onbeknown to ’em, but the others had made the high pinnacles for themselves, and then stood up on ’em.
In another room we see lots of relicks of the past. Josiah nudged me once or twict a-lookin’ at ’em, I spoze to call attention to his poetry and his doubts. But I declined to be nudged, and never looked up at him at all, but kep’ my eye on the relicks.
One is a seal ring of Shakespeare’s, with his initials, W. S., tied together with a true lover’s knot. It wuz found near Stratford meetin’-house, twenty years ago and over, and is spozed to be really his ring, as he said sunthin’ in his will that shows that he had lost his seal ring.
Then there is a letter writ to Shakespeare by Richard Quincy, askin’ the loan of some money.
I sez to Josiah, “Whether he got it or not, if he could come back now he could sell that letter of hisen for enough to make him comfortable.”
“Yes,” sez Josiah; “I would give fifty cents for it myself, or seventy-five, if he would take it in provisions.”
“Hush!” sez I, “you couldn’t git it for that, for this letter, I feel, is genuine. It seems so nateral, borrowin’ money of a writer. Why,” sez I, “truth is stomped onto it.”
Then there wuz the desk that Shakespeare sot at when a boy. A rough, battered desk it wuz, with the lid lifted by leather hinges.