CHAPTER XXV.
A VISIT TO THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
Wall, we went to the British Museum.
To give any idee of what we see in that museum would take more time, and foolscap paper, and eyesight, or wind and ears than I spoze I will ever be able to command.
It is seven acres of land full of everything rich and rare and beautiful from our time back to the year one, and further, for all I know. The marbles, engravin’s, picters, coins, manuscripts, curosities—if I had the wealth of ’em in money—if I could have the worth of jest one article out of the innumerable multitude of ’em, I could jest buy out the hull town of Lyme, and live on the interest of my money.
The museum holds everything and more too. And the library, why, it is most too much to believe what we see there. Now, I’ve always had a Bible and a New Testament, and have never gin much thought whether there wuz any other different ones; but I see with my own eyes seventeen hundred different kinds of Bibles.
And good land! everything else accordin’—everything else a-swingin’ out jest as regardless of cost and space. The Egyptian Gallery wuz a sight to see, and statutes and slabs older than the hills. Who writ them words on ’em? Did the heads ache, and hearts, jest as they do now? I spoze so.
Roman, Grecian, Assyrian galleries, galleries of all sorts, birds and beasts and fishes enough to stock the world, it seemed to me.
But most of all the relicks; some on ’em filled my tired-out brain with or and wonder and admiration.
Milton’s contract with his publishers for “Paradise Lost” (he got five pounds down, and wuz goin’ to git five dollars more when the first edition wuz sold, and so on).