As for the Count, he merely asked me, in the way of reply, if
we moderns possessed any such microscopes as would enable us to cut
cameos in the style of the Egyptians. While I was thinking how I
should answer this question, little Doctor Ponnonner committed himself
in a very extraordinary way.
"Look at our architecture!" he exclaimed, greatly to the indignation
of both the travellers, who pinched him black and blue to no purpose.
"Look," he cried with enthusiasm, "at the Bowling-Green Fountain
in New York! or if this be too vast a contemplation, regard for a
moment the Capitol at Washington, D. C.!"- and the good little medical
man went on to detail very minutely, the proportions of the fabric
to which he referred. He explained that the portico alone was
adorned with no less than four and twenty columns, five feet in
diameter, and ten feet apart.
The Count said that he regretted not being able to remember, just at
that moment, the precise dimensions of any one of the principal
buildings of the city of Aznac, whose foundations were laid in the
night of Time, but the ruins of which were still standing, at the
epoch of his entombment, in a vast plain of sand to the westward of
Thebes. He recollected, however, (talking of the porticoes,) that
one affixed to an inferior palace in a kind of suburb called Carnac,
consisted of a hundred and forty-four columns, thirty-seven feet in
circumference, and twenty-five feet apart.
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