[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.

The hull of these buildin’s which is called Cliff Palace is over two hundred feet long, and the rooms look pretty much all alike.  They wuz round rooms mostly, with a hole in the floor for a fireplace, and stun seats a-runnin’ clear round the room, and I’d a gin a dollar bill if I could a seen a-settin’ in them seats the ones that used to set there—­if I could seen ’em sot down there in Jackson Park, and its marvels, and I could have hearn ’em tell what Old World wonders they had seen, and what they had felt and suffered—­the beliefs of that old time; the laws that governed ’em, or that didn’t govern ’em; their friends and their enemies; the strange animals that lurked round ’em; the wonderful flowers and vegetation—­in short, if I could a sot down and neighbored with ’em, I would a gin, I believe my soul, as much as a dollar and thirty-five cents.