Around the World with Josiah Allen's WifeHolley, Marietta
General
Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife
Holley, Marietta
Women travelers -- Fiction
I knew he was thinkin' of his City of Justice, where every man had the
opportunity to work and the just reward of his labor, where Charity (a
good creeter Charity is too) stayed in the background, not bein'
needed here, and Justice walked in her place. Where Justice and Labor
walked hand in hand into ways of pleasantness and paths of peace. He
didn't say nothin' about his own doin's, it wuzn't his way, but I
hearn him say to Dorothy:
"The Voice is speaking now to America as it did to Egypt, Let my
people go, out of their helpless bondage and poverty into better, more
just and humane ways, but America doesn't listen. The rich stand on
the piled up pyramid of the poor, Capital enslaves Labor and drives it
with the iron bit of remorseless power and the sharp spur of Necessity
where it will. But there must be a day of reckoning; the Voice will be
heard, if not in peace with the sword:
'For the few shall not forever sway
The many toil in sorrow,
We'll sow the golden grain to-day,
The harvest comes to-morrow.'"
But the greatest sight in Cairo and mebby the hull world is the
Pyramaids.
I d'no as I had so many emotions in the same length of time durin' my
hull tower as I did lookin' at them immense structures. It don't seem
as if they wuz made by man; they seem more like mountains placed there
by the same hand that made the everlastin' hills. They say that it
took three hundred thousand men twenty years to build the biggest one.
And I don't doubt it. If I had been asked to draw up specifications I
wouldn't have took the job for a day's work less. Why, they say it
took ten years to build the road over which them stuns wuz brought
from the Nile, and good land! how did they ever do it? No hands nor no
machinery that we know anything about at the present day could move
one of them stuns, let alone bringin' 'em from heaven knows where.
They couldn't have been got into any boat, and how did they do it? I
d'no nor Josiah don't. Mebby the sphynx knows, most probable she duz,
but she's a female that don't git herself into trouble talkin' and
gossipin'. Lots of wimmen would do well to foller her example.
From the first minute we got to Cairo and long enough before that we
had lotted on seein' the Pyramaids, Josiah had talked about 'em a
sight, and told me time and agin that he did want to see the spink, he
had got to see the spink.
Sez I, "You mean the Sphynx, Josiah."
"Yes," sez he, "the spink; I'm bound to see that. I want to tell
Deacon Henzy and Brother Bobbett about it; they crowed over me quite a
little after they went to Loontown to see them views of the spink and
the Pyramaid of Chops. You know I wuz bed-sick at the time with a
crick in my back. I guess they'll have to quirl down a little when I
tell 'em I've walked round the spink and seen old Chops with my own
eyes."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account