Above Daniel, Isaiah, etc., is the whisperin’ gallery, where the lowest whisper, clost to the wall, goes all round the entire distance—a sight, hain’t it?
And way up in the dome we see paintin’s of the life of St. Paul and his deeds.
Wall, down on the floor to the south are immense statutes to Lord Nelson and Cornwallis. Good creeters, both on ’em, I believe, though mistook in jedgment. And a great monument to Major-General Dundas. There wuz lots of monuments to other eminent men. Most of the statutes, as is nateral, as is done in our own country, wuz mostly riz up to men who had been famous for fightin’—them who had been successful in killin’ off thousands and thousands of men, leavin’ trails of agony and blood behind ’em, clouds of black gloom, under which widders and orphans groped, seekin’ for bread, and fallin’ down hopeless in the quest.
Wall, it’s nateral; I couldn’t say a word—America duz it.
I also see, as in America, the skurcity of female statutes. We see the absolute dearth on ’em. Why, if a inhabitant of Mars should light down there some day and take a fancy to go through the cathedral, he wouldn’t have a idee that there wuz ever sech a thing as a woman in the world. He would go back to Jupiter and say: “One peculiarity of the planet Earth wuz, there wuz no wimmen there—only a race of men.”
And if they questioned him too clost how they wuz born, he would say that most probble they growed jest like trees.
And then the old Mars would gather round him and congratulate themselves on bein’ on a planet where equal jestice wuz awarded to men and wimmen both, and where there wuz no more war.
The red lights on the planet don’t mean war, I don’t believe; it means the rosy glow of the strange foliage that the Mars gather for their children, and the Pars, too, for all I know.
But I am indeed a-eppisodin’.
But a few centuries from now let that same visitor come down and look into our great cathedrals, on both sides of the Atlantic, and he will see statutes to wimmen risin’ up jest the same as to men. Under the benine faces of some on ’em he will read—