[Sidenote: GOOD LAND! GOOD LAND! AND GOOD LAND!]
So we went back again; and oh the sufferin’s of that season; if our agony was great when we was bore along by the crowd, what was our sufferin’s when we was stemmin’ our way ag’inst it. Two or three times my companion would have sunk beneath his burdens, but boyed up by my principle I held him up (as it were) and at last almost completely exhausted and wore out, and our faces covered with prespiration we stood before him again. He looked mad and cross, but tried to turn it off in a laugh when Josiah told him our business, and handed him back the money. He said it was all right and told us to give the money to a man near the turn stile and go in. I see he was in earnest, so I told Josiah we would go back and try it, and we did, and found it was jest as he said, but there was a great mystery to it; we handed out fifty cents a piece to a man, and he dropped it down through a little slit in a counter; and a gate that looked some like my new fashioned clothes bars, sort o’ turned round with us and let us in one at a time; and the minute I was inside I see my gloomy forebodin’s had been in vain—they hadn’t put off the Sentinal for me! That was my first glad thought; but my very next thought was, Good land! and Good land! and Good land! Them was my very first words, and they didn’t express my feelin’s a half or even a quarter. Why, comin’ right out of that contracted and crushin’ crowd, it seemed as if the place we found ourselves in was as roomy and spacious as the desert of Sarah, s’posen she, the desert, was fixed off into a perfect garden of beauty, free for anybody to wander round and git lost in.
And the majestic Main Buildin’ that nearly loomed up in front of us! Why! if old Ocian herself, had turned into glass, and wood-work, and cast-iron, and shinin’ ruffs, and towers, and flags, and statutes, and everything, and made a glitterin’ palace of herself, it couldn’t, (as it were) have looked any more grand and imposin’ and roomy; and if every sand by the seashore had jumped up and put on a bunnet or hat as the case may be, there couldn’t have been a bigger crowd (seeminly) than there was a passin’ into it, and a passin’ by, and a paradin’ round Josiah and me.