t
potatoes and cucumbers, and strawberries if Eve took it into her head
she wanted a shortcake pie. And little Cain could cut up cane
literally, and every way, in January, and Abel pile flowers and fruit
on his altar all the year round. But I wonder which of their
descendants built these immense magnificent cities layin' fur below
forests and billows of turf and flowers.

I wonder how they looked and what language they spoke and what their
politics wuz. Arvilly thought they must have been temperance folks.
Sez she, "Any city that has reservoirs twenty milds long believed in
drinkin' water." We had took a tower to see one of them dug up cities,
and sure enough the water reservoir wuz twenty milds long; jest think
from that what the size of the hull city must have been, when their
waterin' trough, as you may say, wuz as long as America's biggest
city. Stately stairways, up which twenty carriages big as our democrat
could pass side by side if horses could climb stairs.

A row of tall pillers, ten milds in length, line the roads to some of
them cities, and I sez:

"Oh, good land! How I wish I could be a mouse in the wall and see who
and what passed over them roads, and why, and when, and where."

And Josiah sez, "Why don't you say you wish you wuz a elephant and
could look on? your simely would seem sounder."

And I sez, "Mebby so, for hull rows of carved marble elephants stand
along them broad roads; I guess they worshipped 'em."

And he sez, "I wuz alludin' to size."

Robert Strong looked ruther sad as we looked on them ruins buried so
deep by the shovel of time. But I sez to him in a low voice:

"There is no danger of the city you're a-rarin' up ever bein' engulfed
and lost, for justice and mercy and love shine jest as bright to-day
as when the earth was called out of chaos. Love is eternal, immortal,
and though worlds reel and skies fall, what is immortal cannot
perish."

He looked real grateful at me; he sets store by me.

Everywhere, as you walk through the streets, you are importuned to buy
sunthin'; some of the finest jewels in the world are bought here. The
merchants are dretful polite, bowin' and smilin', their hair combed
back slick and fastened up with shell combs. They wear white, short
pantaloons and long frocks of colored silk, open in front over a red
waistcoat; sometimes they are bare-footed with rings on their toes;
they wear rings in their nose and sometimes two on each ear, at the
top and bo