"Yes; I know," said the farmer. "I've been there. I saw the
Hudson-Fulton celebration. I've seen about everything," he said, "I went
to the San Francisco Exposition."
I nodded, and he went on: "Chicago was the first stop, and then we went
through Kansas. Out of the window you could see wheat and corn all the
way along. It was beautiful. And then by and by we came to the Rocky
Mountains. They're mighty big mountains, and it took three engines to
pull the train up. Sometimes on the curves you could almost touch the
engine. Every now and then we'd go through a tunnel. Then we went down
south into the big desert. There was nothing there but sagebrush. And
they took us up to the Grand Canyon. Did you ever see it?" he asked.
I lied and said yes, but he went on: "The Grand Canyon's 123 miles long
and twenty-five miles wide and one mile deep. I grabbed hold of a tree
and looked over the edge, and down there at the bottom were all kinds of
rocks, red and green and yellow, and there were horses' heads and
horses' hoofs and barns and castles and haystacks and everything better
than an artist could have done."
"I don't suppose you've seen any of these submarines around here," I
interrupted, as a possible diversion.
"Oh, yes; I've seen them," he said; "not here, but out at the San
Francisco Exposition. They had submarines and floating mines. They're
big. They look like an old-fashioned white turnip, and they float under
the water, and when a ship strikes one it blows up. An' they had a big
buildin' out at the fair as big as that barn, and in the middle of it
was a butter-making machine, and it could turn out more butter in an
afternoon than I get off this place in a year. An' there was a Tower of
Jewels 425 feet high, and it had 15,635 jewels on it from Persia. And
they all shone in the sun. And they had flying machines, too. At night
they put lights on 'em, and they went up in the air and turned
somersaults over and over again. I wouldn't go up in one of 'em if you
was to give me all that meadow land over there.
"After we left the fair we went up north through the spruce forests, and
they tell me now that the government's sent 8,000 men up there to cut
that spruce and put it into the flying machines, an' I suppose some of
those trees I saw are up in the air now turning somersaults.
"We didn't stop agin till we got to Detroit. That's where they make the
Fords, Tin Lizzies, they call 'em around here. But I always say, What
difference does it make what they call 'em if they can do the work? I
always say one of 'em's as good as a horse--as good as two horses. An'
then we came back here and I've stuck around for a spell 'cause I think
I've seen most everything there is."
By that time the real estate agent had fixed the tire, and we drove
away. The man with the Sampson suspenders was looking rather
contemptuously at his flock of sheep. They would never get to San
Francisco.
I can't remember now just why we didn't buy Only Nine Hundred Dollars
Down but somehow or other the decision of the council went against it.
Our attention at present is fastened on a place over in New Jersey
called One Man Farm Equipped. This, like so many of the attractive
bargains in the advertisements, belongs to a widow. As the paragraph in
the newspapers has it "Widow left alone will sell farm for $1,000 spot
cash." E. thinks that delay in the matter may be fatal because of the
cheapness of the price. "How can we tell," is the burden of her plaint,
"that they will leave her alone?"