entle prick to that overgrown puff ball to let
the gas out drizzlin'ly and gradual--no, there wuz a sudden smash, a
wild collapse, a flat and total squshiness--the puff ball wuz broke into
a thousand pieces, and the wind it contained, where wuz it? Ask the
breezes that wafted away Caesar's last groans, that blowed up the dust
over buried Pompeii.

The buildin' itself wuz a sight--why, it is 960 feet long, and the
cupola in the centre 166 feet high, with eight elevators to take you up
to it; the great main entrance wuz all overlaid with gold--looked full
as good as Solomon's temple, I do believe--and broad enough and big
enough for a hull army of giants to walk through abreast, and then room
enough for Josiah and me besides.

But it wuz on the inside of it that my pride fell and broke all to
pieces, as I looked round me and down the long distance behind and
before me.

I knew--for I had been told--that one fourth of all the savin's of
civilized man is invested in railroads, and when I thought of how
dretful rich some men and countries are, and kings and emperors, etc., I
felt prepared to do homage to a undertakin' that had swallowed up one
fourth of all that accumulated wealth.

But sence the world begun, never had there been a exhibition before
showin' all the railroad systems of the world side by side, all the big
American railroads, and great Britain, and France, and Germany.

The Baltimore and Ohio exhibit shows how the railroads of the world have
been thought out gradual, and come up from nothin' to what they
are--grew up from a little steam carriage that wuz shut up in Paris in
1760 as bein' disordely.

"Disordely!" Good land! there never wuz a new idee worth anything in
this world but has been called "disordely" by fools.

You can see that very little carriage here at the Fair; after bein' shut
up for two hundred years, it comes out triumphant, just as Columbus has.

Stevensonses first engine is here--an exact reproduction--and the hull
caboodle of the first attempts leadin' up to the engines of to-day.

Dretful interestin' to look at these rough little inventions and to
speculate on what prophetic strivin's, and yearnin's, and heartaches,
and despairs, and triumphs went into every one on 'em.

For every one on 'em wuz follered, as a man is by his black shadder, by
the cold, evil spirits of unbelief, malice, envy, and cheatin'.

The sun the inventors walked under--the glowin' sun of prophecy and
forek