"Keep it up, will you--keep a preachin'!" sez he, and his tone wuz
bitter and voyalent in the extreme.
And here he turned his back on me and went to examine some of the
various games of all countries, such as cards, dice, dominoes, checkers,
etc., etc.
[Illustration: Josiah turned his back on me.]
Which shows that in that savage age, as well as in our too civilized
one, amusements wuz a part of their daily life.
Wall, it wuz all dretful interestin' to me, though Skairfulness wuz
present with us, and goose pimples wuz abroad.
And out-doors the exhibit wuz jest as fascinatin'.
Along the shores of the pond are grouped tribes of Indians from North
America. They live in their primitive huts and tents, and there we see
their rude boats and canoes. New York contributes a council house and a
bark lodge once used by the once powerful Iroquois confederation.
And, poor things! where be they now? Passed away. Their canoes have gone
down the stream of Time, and gone down the Falls out of sight.
But to resoom.
Wall, seein' they wuz right there, we went to see the ruins of
Yucatan--they wuz only a few steps away.
Now, I never had paid any attention to Yucatan. I had always seen it on
the map of Mexico, a little strip of land a-runnin' out into the water,
and washed by the waves on both sides. But, good land! I would have paid
more attention to it if I had known that down deep under its forests,
where they had lain for more than a thousand years, wuz the ruins of a
vast city, with its castles and monuments wrought in marble, and
fashioned with highest beauty and art.
Whose hands had wrought them marble columns, and carved facades?
The silence of a thousand years lays between my question and its true
answer.
I can't tell who they wuz, where they come from, or where they went to.
But the pieces of soulless stun remain for us to marvel over, when the
livin' hands that wrought these have vanished forever.
Curious, very.
But mebby some magnetizm still hangs about them hoary old walls that has
the power to draw their founders from their new home, wherever it is
now.
Mebby them old Yucatanners come down in a shadder sloop and lay off over
aginst them ruins, and enjoy themselves first-rate.
Here too is the city of the Cliff Dwellers--the most wonderful city I
ever see or ever expect to see. There towers up a mountain made to look
exactly like Battle Mountain, where these ruins are found--the homes and
abidin' place of a race so much older than the Mexican and Peru old ones
that they seem like folks of last week--almost like babies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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