Page:The gold brick (1910).djvu/113

 *ber husband. She had never been away from home before, and the boys had many a laugh over her wonder at the trolley-cars purring along under the maple trees, and her fear of the elevators in the state house—though, for my part, I could see nothing ludicrous in it all. She stayed three or four days and they went everywhere, out to Oak Ridge to see Lincoln's tomb, over to Eighth Street to visit his old homestead, up to the Geological Museum where the moth-eaten stuffed animals are, and out to Camp Lincoln. They took many trolley rides, and even climbed to the top of the state house dome, whence, they say, you can see Rochester and the prairies for thirty miles around. He brought her over to the house one or two mornings, but not on to the floor as other members did their over-dressed wives; he sent her up to the gallery, where she sat peering down over the railing at the gang—and her husband, who took no part in all that was going on.

"The old woman's interest in all these new things that had come into her starved life, her ill-concealed pride in her husband's membership in such a distinguished body of law-givers, were touching to me, and as I looked at him that last night of the session,