CANAL-BOAT JOURNEYS: BOUND FAR WEST.
1842.
Character in the Letters--The _Notes_ less
satisfactory--Personal Narrative in Letters--The
Copyright Differences--Social
Dissatisfactions--A Fact to be
remembered--Literary Merits of the
Letters--Personal Character portrayed--On Board
for Pittsburgh--Choicest Passages of
_Notes_--Queer Stage-coach--Something revealed
on the Top--At Harrisburg--Treaties with
Indians--Local Legislatures--A Levee--Morning
and Night in Canal-boat--At and after
Breakfast--Making the best of it--Hardy
Habits--By Rail across Mountain--Mountain
Scenery--New Settlements--Original of Eden in
_Chuzzlewit_--A Useful Word--Party in
America--Home News--Meets an Early
Acquaintance--"Smallness of the World"--Queer
Customers at Levees--Our Anniversary--The
Cincinnati Steamer--Frugality in Water and
Linen--Magnetic
Experiments--Life-preservers--Bores--Habits of
Neatness--Wearying for Home--Another Solitary
Prison--New Terror to Loneliness--Arrival at
Cincinnati--Two Judges in Attendance--The City
described--On the Pavement.
It would not be possible that a more vivid or exact impression than that
which is derivable from these letters could be given of either the
genius or the character of the writer. The whole man is here in the
supreme hour of his life, and in all the enjoyment of its highest
sensations. Inexpressibly sad to me has been the task of going over
them, but the surprise has equaled the sadness. I had forgotten what was
in them. That they contained, in their first vividness, all the most
prominent descriptions of his published book, I knew. But the
reproduction of any part of these was not permissible here; and,
believing that the substance of them had been thus almost wholly
embodied in the _American Notes_, when they were lent to assist in its
composition, I turned to them with very small expectation of finding
anything available for present use. Yet the difficulty has been, not to
find, but to reject; and the rejection when most unavoidable has not
been most easy. Even where the subjects recur that are in the printed
volume, there is a freshness of first impressions in the letters that
renders it no small trial to act strictly on the rule adhered to in
these extracts from them. In the _Notes_ there is of course very much,
masterly in observation and description, of which there is elsewhere no
trace; but the passages amplified from the letters have not been
improved, and the manly force and directness of some of their views and
reflections, conveyed by touches of a picturesque completeness that no
elaboration could give, have here and there not been strengthened by
rhetorical additions in the printed work. There is also a charm in the
letters which the plan adopted in the book necessarily excluded from it.
It will always, of course, have value as a deliberate expression of the
results gathered from the American experiences, but the _personal
narrative_ of this famous visit to America is in the letters alone. In
what way his experiences arose, the desire at the outset to see nothing
that was not favorable, the slowness with which adverse impressions were
formed, and the eager recognition of every truthful and noble quality
that arose and remained above the fault-finding, are discoverable only
in the letters.
Already it is manifest from them that the before-mentioned
disappointments, as well of the guest in his entertainers as of the
entertainers in their guest, had their beginning in the copyright
differences; but it is not less plain that the social dissatisfactions
on his side were of even earlier date, and with the country itself had
certainly nothing to do. It was objected to him, I well remember, that
in making such unfavorable remarks as his published book did on many
points, he was assailing the democratic institutions that had formed the
character of the nation; but the answer is obvious, that, democratic
institutions being universal in America, they were as fairly entitled to
share in the good as in the bad; and in what he praised, of which there
is here abundant testimony, he must be held to have exalted those
institutions as much, as in what he blamed he could be held to
depreciate them. He never sets himself up in judgment on the entire
people. As we see, from the way the letters show us that the opinions he
afterwards published were formed, he does not draw conclusions while his
observation is only half concluded; and he refrains throughout from the
example too strongly set him, even in the very terms of his welcome by
the writers of America,[56] of flinging one nation in the other's face.
He leaves each upon its own ground. His great business in his
publication, as in the first impressions recorded here, is to exhibit
social influences at work as he saw them himself; and it would surely
have been of all bad compliments the worst, when resolving, in the tone
and with the purpose of a friend, to make public what he had observed in
America, if he had supposed that such a country would take truth amiss.
There is, however, one thing to be especially remembered, as well in
reading the letters as in judging of the book which was founded on them.
It is a point to which I believe Mr. Emerson directed the attention of
his countrymen. Everything of an objectionable kind, whether the author
would have it so or not, stands out more prominently and distinctly than
matter of the opposite description. The social sin is a more tangible
thing than the social virtue. Pertinaciously to insist upon the
charities and graces of life, is to outrage their quiet and unobtrusive
character; but we incur the danger of extending the vulgarities and
indecencies if we seem to countenance by omitting to expose them. And if
this is only kept in view in reading what is here given, the proportion
of censure will be found not to overbalance the just admiration and
unexaggerated praise.
Apart from such considerations, it is to be also said, the letters, from
which I am now printing exactly as they were written, have claims, as
mere literature, of an unusual kind. Unrivaled quickness of observation,
the rare faculty of seizing out of a multitude of things the thing only
that is essential, the irresistible play of humor, such pathos as only
humorists of this high order possess, and the unwearied unforced
vivacity of ever fresh, buoyant, bounding animal spirits, never found
more natural, variously easy, or picturesque expression. Written amid
such distraction, fatigue, and weariness as they describe, amid the
jarring noises of hotels and streets, aboard steamers, on canal-boats,
and in log huts, there is not an erasure in them. Not external objects
only, but feelings, reflections, and thoughts, are photographed into
visible forms with the same unexampled ease. They borrow no help from
the matters of which they treat. They would have given, to the subjects
described, old acquaintance and engrossing interest if they had been
about a people in the moon. Of the personal character at the same time
self-portrayed, others, whose emotions it less vividly awakens, will
judge more calmly and clearly than myself. Yet to myself only can it be
known how small were the services of friendship that sufficed to rouse
all the sensibilities of this beautiful and noble nature. Throughout our
life-long intercourse it was the same. His keenness of discrimination
failed him never excepting here, when it was lost in the limitless
extent of his appreciation of all kindly things; and never did he
receive what was meant for a benefit that he was not eager to return it
a hundredfold. No man more truly generous ever lived.
His next letter was begun from "on board the canal-boat. Going to
Pittsburgh. Monday, March twenty-eighth, 1842;" and the difficulties of
rejection, to which reference has just been made, have been nowhere felt
by me so much. Several of the descriptive masterpieces of the book are
in it, with such touches of original freshness as might fairly have
justified a reproduction of them in their first form. Among these are
the Harrisburg coach on its way through the Susquehanna valley; the
railroad across the mountain; the brown-forester of the Mississippi, the
interrogative man in pepper-and-salt, and the affecting scene of the
emigrants put ashore as the steamer passes up the Ohio. But all that I
may here give, bearing any resemblance to what is given in the _Notes_,
are the opening sketch of the small creature on the top of the queer
stage-coach, to which the printed version fails to do adequate justice,
and an experience to which the interest belongs of having suggested the
settlement of Eden in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. . . . "We left Baltimore last
Thursday, the twenty-fourth, at half-past eight in the morning, by
railroad; and got to a place called York, about twelve. There we dined,
and took a stage-coach for Harrisburg; twenty-five miles further. This
stage-coach was like nothing so much as the body of one of the swings
you see at a fair set upon four wheels and roofed and covered at the
sides with painted canvas. There were twelve _inside_! I, thank my
stars, was on the box. The luggage was on the roof; among it, a
good-sized dining-table, and a big rocking-chair. We also took up an
intoxicated gentleman, who sat for ten miles between me and the
coachman; and another intoxicated gentleman who got up behind, but in
the course of a mile or two fell off without hurting himself, and was
seen in the distant perspective reeling back to the grog-shop where we
had found him. There were four horses to this land-ark, of course; but
we did not perform the journey until after half-past six o'clock that
night. . . . The first half of the journey was tame enough, but the second
lay through the valley of the Susquehanah (I think I spell it right, but
I haven't that American Geography at hand), which is very beautiful. . . .
"I think I formerly made a casual remark to you touching the precocity
of the youth of this country. When we changed horses on this journey I
got down to stretch my legs, refresh myself with a glass of
whiskey-and-water, and shake the wet off my great-coat,--for it was
raining very heavily, and continued to do so, all night. Mounting to my
seat again, I observed something lying on the roof of the coach, which I
took to be a rather large fiddle in a brown bag. In the course of ten
miles or so, however, I discovered that it had a pair of dirty shoes at
one end, and a glazed cap at the other; and further observation
demonstrated it to be a small boy, in a snuff-colored coat, with his
arms quite pinioned to his sides by deep forcing into his pockets. He
was, I presume, a relative or friend of the coachman's, as he lay atop
of the luggage, with his face towards the rain; and, except when a
change of position brought his shoes in contact with my hat, he appeared
to be asleep. Sir, when we stopped to water the horses, about two miles
from Harrisburg, this thing slowly upreared itself to the height of
three foot eight, and, fixing its eyes on me with a mingled expression
of complacency, patronage, national independence, and sympathy for all
outer barbarians and foreigners, said, in shrill piping accents, 'Well
now, stranger, I guess you find this a'most like an English
a'ternoon,--hey?' It is unnecessary to add that I thirsted for his
blood. . . .
"We had all next morning in Harrisburg, as the canal-boat was not to
start until three o'clock in the afternoon. The officials called upon
me before I had finished breakfast; and, as the town is the seat of the
Pennsylvanian legislature, I went up to the Capitol. I was very much
interested in looking over a number of treaties made with the poor
Indians, their signatures being rough drawings of the creatures or
weapons they are called after; and the extraordinary drawing of these
emblems, showing the queer, unused, shaky manner in which each man has
held the pen, struck me very much.
"You know my small respect for our House of Commons. These local
legislatures are too insufferably apish of mighty legislation, to be
seen without bile; for which reason, and because a great crowd of
senators and ladies had assembled in both houses to behold the
inimitable, and had already begun to pour in upon him even in the
secretary's private room, I went back to the hotel, with all speed. The
members of both branches of the legislature followed me there, however,
so we had to hold the usual levee before our half-past one o'clock
dinner. We received a great number of them. Pretty nearly every man spat
upon the carpet, as usual; and one blew his nose with his fingers,--also
on the carpet, which was a very neat one, the room given up to us being
the private parlor of the landlord's wife. This has become so common
since, however, that it scarcely seems worth mentioning. Please to
observe that the gentleman in question was a member of the senate, which
answers (as they very often tell me) to our House of Lords.
"The innkeeper was the most attentive, civil, and obliging person I ever
saw in my life. On being asked for his bill, he said there was no bill:
the honor and pleasure, etc. being more than sufficient.[57] I did not
permit this, of course, and begged Mr. Q. to explain to him that,
traveling four strong, I could not hear of it on any account.
"And now I come to the Canal-Boat. Bless your heart and soul, my dear
fellow,--if you could only see us on board the canal-boat! Let me think,
for a moment, at what time of the day or night I should best like you to
see us. In the morning? Between five and six in the morning, shall I
say? Well! you _would_ like to see me, standing on the deck, fishing the
dirty water out of the canal with a tin ladle chained to the boat by a
long chain; pouring the same into a tin basin (also chained up in like
manner); and scrubbing my face with the jack towel. At night, shall I
say? I don't know that you _would_ like to look into the cabin at night,
only to see me lying on a temporary shelf exactly the width of this
sheet of paper when it's open (_I measured it this morning_),[58] with
one man above me, and another below; and, in all, eight-and-twenty in a
low cabin, which you can't stand upright in with your hat on. I don't
think you would like to look in at breakfast-time either, for then these
shelves have only just been taken down and put away, and the atmosphere
of the place is, as you may suppose, by no means fresh; though there
_are_ upon the table tea and coffee, and bread and butter, and salmon,
and shad, and liver, and steak, and potatoes, and pickles, and ham, and
pudding, and sausages; and three-and-thirty people sitting round it,
eating and drinking; and savory bottles of gin, and whiskey, and brandy,
and rum, in the bar hard by; and seven-and-twenty out of the
eight-and-twenty men, in foul linen, with yellow streams from
half-chewed tobacco trickling down their chins. Perhaps the best time
for you to take a peep would be the present: eleven o'clock in the
forenoon: when the barber is at his shaving, and the gentlemen are
lounging about the stove waiting for their turns, and not more than
seventeen are spitting in concert, and two or three are walking overhead
(lying down on the luggage every time the man at the helm calls
'Bridge!'), and I am writing this in the ladies' cabin, which is a part
of the gentlemen's, and only screened off by a red curtain. Indeed, it
exactly resembles the dwarf's private apartment in a caravan at a fair;
and the gentlemen, generally, represent the spectators at a penny a
head. The place is just as clean and just as large as that caravan you
and I were in at Greenwich Fair last past. Outside, it is exactly like
any canal-boat you have seen near the Regent's Park, or elsewhere.
"You never can conceive what the hawking and spitting is, the whole
night through. Last night was the worst. _Upon my honor and word_ I was
obliged, this morning, to lay my fur coat on the deck, and wipe the
half-dried flakes of spittle from it with my handkerchief; and the only
surprise seemed to be that I should consider it necessary to do so. When
I turned in last night, I put it on a stool beside me, and there it lay,
under a cross-fire from five men,--three opposite, one above, and one
below. I make no complaints, and show no disgust. I am looked upon as
highly facetious at night, for I crack jokes with everybody near me
until we fall asleep. I am considered very hardy in the morning, for I
run up, bare-necked, and plunge my head into the half-frozen water, by
half-past five o'clock. I am respected for my activity, inasmuch as I
jump from the boat to the towing-path, and walk five or six miles before
breakfast; keeping up with the horses all the time. In a word, they are
quite astonished to find a sedentary Englishman roughing it so well, and
taking so much exercise; and question me very much on that head. The
greater part of the men will sit and shiver round the stove all day,
rather than put one foot before the other. As to having a window open,
that's not to be thought of.
"We expect to reach Pittsburgh to-night, between eight and nine o'clock;
and there we ardently hope to find your March letters awaiting us. We
have had, with the exception of Friday afternoon, exquisite weather, but
cold. Clear starlight and moonlight nights. The canal has run, for the
most part, by the side of the Susquehanah and Iwanata rivers; and has
been carried through tremendous obstacles. Yesterday we crossed the
mountain. This is done _by railroad_. . . . You dine at an inn upon the
mountain; and, including the half-hour allowed for the meal, are rather
more than five hours performing this strange part of the journey. The
people north and 'down east' have terrible legends of its danger; but
they appear to be exceedingly careful, and don't go to work at all
wildly. There are some queer precipices close to the rails, certainly;
but every precaution is taken, I am inclined to think, that such
difficulties, and such a vast work, will admit of.
"The scenery, before you reach the mountains, and when you are on them,
and after you have left them, is very grand and fine; and the canal
winds its way through some deep, sullen gorges, which, seen by
moonlight, are very impressive: though immeasurably inferior to Glencoe,
to whose terrors I have not seen the smallest _approach_. We have
passed, both in the mountains and elsewhere, a great number of new
settlements and detached log houses. Their utterly forlorn and miserable
appearance baffles all description. I have not seen six cabins out of
six hundred, where the windows have been whole. Old hats, old clothes,
old boards, old fragments of blanket and paper, are stuffed into the
broken glass; and their air is misery and desolation. It pains the eye
to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat;
and never to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of
rotten trunks, of elm and pine and sycamore and logwood, steeped in its
unwholesome water; where the frogs so croak at night that after dark
there is an incessant sound as if millions of phantom teams, with bells,
were traveling through the upper air, at an enormous distance off. It is
quite an oppressive circumstance, too, to _come_ upon great tracks,
where settlers have been burning down the trees; and where their wounded
bodies lie about, like those of murdered creatures; while here and there
some charred and blackened giant rears two bare arms aloft, and seems to
curse his enemies. The prettiest sight I have seen was yesterday, when
we--on the heights of the mountain, and in a keen wind--looked down into
a valley full of light and softness; catching glimpses of scattered
cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark; pigs
scampering home, like so many prodigal sons; families sitting out in
their gardens; cows gazing upward, with a stupid indifference; men in
their shirt-sleeves, looking on at their unfinished houses, and planning
work for to-morrow;--and the train riding on, high above them, like a
storm. But I know this is beautiful--very--very beautiful!
"I wonder whether you and Mac mean to go to Greenwich Fair! Perhaps you
dine at the Crown and Sceptre to-day, for it's Easter-Monday--who knows!
I wish you drank punch, dear Forster. It's a shabby thing, not to be
able to picture you with that cool green glass. . . .
"I told you of the many uses of the word 'fix.' I ask Mr. Q. on board a
steamboat if breakfast be nearly ready, and he tells me yes he should
think so, for when he was last below the steward was 'fixing the
tables'--in other words, laying the cloth. When we have been writing,
and I beg him (do you remember anything of my love of order, at this
distance of time?) to collect our papers, he answers that he'll 'fix 'em
presently.' So when a man's dressing he's 'fixing' himself, and when you
put yourself under a doctor he 'fixes' you in no time. T'other night,
before we came on board here, when I had ordered a bottle of mulled
claret and waited some time for it, it was put on table with an apology
from the landlord (a lieutenant-colonel) that 'he feared it wasn't fixed
properly.' And here, on Saturday morning, a Western man, handing the
potatoes to Mr. Q. at breakfast, inquired if he wouldn't take some of
'these fixings' with his meat. I remained as grave as a judge. I catch
them looking at me sometimes, and feel that they think I don't take any
notice. Politics are very high here; dreadfully strong; handbills,
denunciations, invectives, threats, and quarrels. The question is, who
shall be the next President. The election comes off in _three years and
a half_ from this time."
He resumed his letter, "on board the steamboat from Pittsburgh to
Cincinnati, April the 1st, 1842. A very tremulous steamboat, which makes
my hand shake. This morning, my dear friend, this very morning, which,
passing by without bringing news from England, would have seen us on our
way to St. Louis (via Cincinnati and Louisville) with sad hearts and
dejected countenances, and the prospect of remaining for at least three
weeks longer without any intelligence of those so inexpressibly dear to
us--this very morning, bright and lucky morning that it was, a great
packet was brought to our bedroom door, from HOME. How I have read and
re-read your affectionate, hearty, interesting, funny, serious,
delightful, and thoroughly Forsterian Columbia letter, I will not
attempt to tell you; or how glad I am that you liked my first; or how
afraid I am that my second was not written in such good spirits as it
should have been; or how glad I am again to think that my third _was_;
or how I hope you will find some amusement from my fourth: this present
missive. All this, and more affectionate and earnest words than the
post-office would convey at any price, though they have no sharp edges
to hurt the stamping-clerk--you will understand, I know, without
expression, or attempt at expression. So, having got over the first
agitation of so much pleasure; and having walked the deck; and being now
in the cabin, where one party are playing at chess, and another party
are asleep, and another are talking round the stove, and all are
spitting; and a persevering bore of a horrible New Englander with a
droning voice like a gigantic bee _will_ sit down beside me, though I am
writing, and talk incessantly, in my very ear, to Kate; here goes again.
"Let me see. I should tell you, first, that we got to Pittsburgh between
eight and nine o'clock of the evening of the day on which I left off at
the top of this sheet; and were there received by a little man (a very
little man) whom I knew years ago in London. He rejoiceth in the name of
D. G.; and, when I knew him, was in partnership with his father on the
Stock-Exchange, and lived handsomely at Dalston. They failed in business
soon afterwards, and then this little man began to turn to account what
had previously been his amusement and accomplishment, by painting little
subjects for the fancy shops. So I lost sight of him, nearly ten years
ago; and here he turned up t'other day, as a portrait-painter in
Pittsburgh! He had previously written me a letter which moved me a good
deal, by a kind of quiet independence and contentment it breathed, and
still a painful sense of being alone, so very far from home. I received
it in Philadelphia, and answered it. He dined with us every day of our
stay in Pittsburgh (they were only three), and was truly gratified and
delighted to find me unchanged,--more so than I can tell you. I am very
glad to-night to think how much happiness we have fortunately been able
to give him.
"Pittsburgh is like Birmingham--at least its townsfolks say so; and I
didn't contradict them. It is, in one respect. There is a great deal of
smoke in it. I quite offended a man at our yesterday's levee, who
supposed I was 'now quite at home,' by telling him that the notion of
London being so dark a place was a popular mistake. We had very queer
customers at our receptions, I do assure you. Not least among them, a
gentleman with his inexpressibles imperfectly buttoned and his waistband
resting on his thighs, who stood behind the half-opened door, and could
by no temptation or inducement be prevailed upon to come out. There was
also another gentleman, with one eye and one fixed gooseberry, who stood
in a corner, motionless like an eight-day clock, and glared upon me, as
I courteously received the Pittsburgians. There were also two red-headed
brothers--boys--young dragons rather--who hovered about Kate, and
wouldn't go. A great crowd they were, for three days; and a very queer
one."
"STILL IN THE SAME BOAT. _April the Second, 1842._
"Many, many happy returns of the day. It's only eight o'clock in the
morning now, but we mean to drink your health after dinner, in a bumper;
and scores of Richmond dinners to us! We have some wine (a present sent
on board by our Pittsburgh landlord) in our own cabin; and we shall tap
it to good purpose, I assure you; wishing you all manner and kinds of
happiness, and a long life to ourselves that we may be partakers of it.
We have wondered a hundred times already, whether you and Mac will dine
anywhere together, in honor of the day. I say yes, but Kate says no. She
predicts that you'll ask Mac, and he won't go. I have not yet heard from
him.
"We have a better cabin here than we had on board the Britannia; the
berths being much wider, and the den having two doors: one opening on
the ladies' cabin, and one upon a little gallery in the stern of the
boat. We expect to be at Cincinnati some time on Monday morning, and we
carry about fifty passengers. The cabin for meals goes right through the
boat, from the prow to the stern, and is very long; only a small portion
of it being divided off, by a partition of wood and ground glass, for
the ladies. We breakfast at half-after seven, dine at one, and sup at
six. Nobody will sit down to any one of these meals, though the dishes
are smoking on the board, until the ladies have appeared and taken their
chairs. It was the same in the canal-boat.
"The washing department is a little more civilized than it was on the
canal, but bad is the best. Indeed, the Americans when they are
traveling, as Miss Martineau seems disposed to admit, are exceedingly
negligent; not to say dirty. To the best of my making out, the ladies,
under most circumstances, are content with smearing their hands and
faces in a very small quantity of water. So are the men; who superadd to
that mode of ablution a hasty use of the common brush and comb. It is
quite a practice, too, to wear but one cotton shirt a week, and three or
four fine linen _fronts_. Anne reports that this is Mr. Q.'s course of
proceeding; and my portrait-painting friend told me that it was the
case with pretty nearly all his sitters; so that when he bought a piece
of cloth not long ago, and instructed the sempstress to make it _all_
into shirts, not fronts, she thought him deranged.
"My friend the New Englander, of whom I wrote last night, is perhaps the
most intolerable bore on this vast continent. He drones, and snuffles,
and writes poems, and talks small philosophy and metaphysics, and never
_will_ be quiet, under any circumstances. He is going to a great
temperance convention at Cincinnati; along with a doctor of whom I saw
something at Pittsburgh. The doctor, in addition to being everything
that the New Englander is, is a phrenologist besides. I dodge them about
the boat. Whenever I appear on deck, I see them bearing down upon
me--and fly. The New Englander was very anxious last night that he and I
should 'form a magnetic chain,' and magnetize the doctor, for the
benefit of all incredulous passengers; but I declined on the plea of
tremendous occupation in the way of letter-writing.
"And, speaking of magnetism, let me tell you that the other night at
Pittsburgh, there being present only Mr. Q. and the portrait-painter,
Kate sat down, laughing, for me to try my hand upon her. I had been
holding forth upon the subject rather luminously, and asserting that I
thought I could exercise the influence, but had never tried. In six
minutes, I magnetized her into hysterics, and then into the magnetic
sleep. I tried again next night, and she fell into the slumber in little
more than two minutes. . . . I can wake her with perfect ease; but I
confess (not being prepared for anything so sudden and complete) I was
on the first occasion rather alarmed. . . . The Western parts being
sometimes hazardous, I have fitted out the whole of my little company
with LIFE-PRESERVERS, which I inflate with great solemnity when we get
aboard any boat, and keep, as Mrs. Cluppins did her umbrella in the
court of common pleas, ready for use upon a moment's notice.". . .
He resumed his letter, on "Sunday, April the third," with allusion to a
general who had called upon him in Washington with two literary ladies,
and had written to him next day for an immediate interview, as "the two
LL's" were ambitious of the honor of a personal introduction. "Besides
the doctor and the dread New Englander, we have on board that valiant
general who wrote to me about the 'two LL's.' He is an old, old man with
a weazen face, and the remains of a pigeon-breast in his military
surtout. He is acutely gentlemanly and officer-like. The breast has so
subsided, and the face has become so strongly marked, that he seems,
like a pigeon-pie, to show only the feet of the bird outside, and to
keep the rest to himself. He is perhaps _the_ most horrible bore in this
country. And I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there
are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these
United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of
the word, without coming here. There are no particular characters on
board, with these three exceptions. Indeed, I seldom see the passengers
but at meal-times, as I read and write in our own little state-room. . . .
I have smuggled two chairs into our crib, and write this on a book upon
my knee. Everything is in the neatest order, of course; and my
shaving-tackle, dressing-case, brushes, books, and papers, are arranged
with as much precision as if we were going to remain here a month. Thank
God we are not.
"The average width of the river rather exceeds that of the Thames at
Greenwich. In parts it is much broader; and then there is usually a
green island, covered with trees, dividing it into two streams.
Occasionally we stop for a few minutes at a small town, or village (I
ought to say city, everything is a city here); but the banks are for the
most part deep solitudes, overgrown with trees, which, in these western
latitudes, are already in leaf, and very green. . . .
"All this I see, as I write, from the little door into the stern-gallery
which I mentioned just now. It don't happen six times in a day that any
other passenger comes near it; and, as the weather is amply warm enough
to admit of our sitting with it open, here we remain from morning until
night: reading, writing, talking. What our theme of conversation is, I
need not tell you. No beauty or variety makes us weary less for home. We
count the days, and say, 'When May comes, and we can say--_next
month_--the time will seem almost gone.' We are never tired of imagining
what you are all about. I allow of no calculation for the difference of
clocks, but insist on a corresponding minute in London. It is much the
shortest way, and best. . . . Yesterday, we drank your health and many
happy returns--in wine, after dinner; in a small milk-pot jug of
gin-punch, at night. And when I made a temporary table, to hold the
little candlestick, of one of my dressing-case trays; cunningly inserted
under the mattress of my berth with a weight atop of it to keep it in
its place, so that it made a perfectly exquisite bracket; we agreed,
that, please God, this should be a joke at the Star and Garter on the
second of April eighteen hundred and forty-three. If your blank _can_ be
surpassed, . . . believe me ours transcends it. My heart gets, sometimes,
SORE for home.
"At Pittsburgh I saw another solitary confinement prison: Pittsburgh
being also in Pennsylvania. A horrible thought occurred to me when I was
recalling all I had seen, that night. _What if ghosts be one of the
terrors of these jails?_ I have pondered on it often, since then. The
utter solitude by day and night; the many hours of darkness; the silence
of death; the mind forever brooding on melancholy themes, and having no
relief; sometimes an evil conscience very busy; imagine a prisoner
covering up his head in the bedclothes and looking out from time to
time, with a ghastly dread of some inexplicable silent figure that
always sits upon his bed, or stands (if a thing can be said to stand,
that never walks as men do) in the same corner of his cell. The more I
think of it, the more certain I feel that not a few of these men (during
a portion of their imprisonment at least) are nightly visited by
spectres. I did ask one man in this last jail, if he dreamed much. He
gave me a most extraordinary look, and said--under his breath--in a
whisper, 'No.'"
"CINCINNATI. _Fourth April, 1842._
"We arrived here this morning: about three o'clock, I believe, but I was
fast asleep in my berth. I turned out soon after six, dressed, and
breakfasted on board. About half-after eight, we came ashore and drove
to the hotel, to which we had written on from Pittsburgh ordering
rooms; and which is within a stone's throw of the boat-wharf. Before I
had issued an official notification that we were 'not at home,' two
Judges called, on the part of the inhabitants, to know when we would
receive the townspeople. We appointed to-morrow morning, from half-past
eleven to one; arranged to go out, with these two gentlemen, to see the
town, _at_ one; and were fixed for an evening party to-morrow night at
the house of one of them. On Wednesday morning we go on by the mail-boat
to Louisville, a trip of fourteen hours; and from that place proceed in
the next good boat to St. Louis, which is a voyage of four days. Finding
from my judicial friends (well-informed and most agreeable gentlemen)
this morning that the prairie travel to Chicago is a very fatiguing one,
and that the lakes are stormy, sea-sicky, and not over safe at this
season, I wrote by our captain to St. Louis (for the boat that brought
us here goes on there) to the effect, that I should not take the lake
route, but should come back here; and should visit the prairies, which
are within thirty miles of St. Louis, immediately on my arrival
there. . . .
"I have walked to the window, since I turned this page, to see what
aspect the town wears. We are in a wide street: paved in the
carriage-way with small white stones, and in the footway with small red
tiles. The houses are for the most part one story high; some are of
wood; others of a clean white brick. Nearly all have green blinds
outside every window. The principal shops over the way are, according to
the inscriptions over them, a Large Bread Bakery; a Book Bindery; a Dry
Goods Store; and a Carriage Repository; the last-named establishment
looking very like an exceedingly small retail coal-shed. On the pavement
under our window, a black man is chopping wood; and another black man is
talking (confidentially) to a pig. The public table, at this hotel and
at the hotel opposite, has just now finished dinner. The diners are
collected on the pavement, on both sides of the way, picking their
teeth, and talking. The day being warm, some of them have brought chairs
into the street. Some are on three chairs; some on two; and some, in
defiance of all known laws of gravity, are sitting quite comfortably on
one: with three of the chair's legs, and their own two, high up in the
air. The loungers, underneath our window, are talking of a great
Temperance convention which comes off here to-morrow. Others, about me.
Others, about England. Sir Robert Peel is popular here, with
everybody. . . ."
FOOTNOTES:
[56] See _ante_, pp. 307, 308.
[57] Miss Martineau was perhaps partly right, then? _Ante_, p. 344.
[58] Sixteen inches exactly.