THE “HUB.”
WE arrived in Boston Harbor Monday afternoon about four o’clock, and
entered a very dense fog about the same time. The fog was so thick for
several minutes that objects could not be seen from one end of the
vessel to the other. The engine was quickly stopped, and we narrowly
escaped a collision with a steamer. But in the course of ten minutes,
the heavy mist swept down the harbor in a body, and left all clear
around us; when we were somewhat surprised to find ourselves within one
hundred yards of the shore. We floated up to the pier at the foot of
State street; the propeller was soon made fast, and I immediately went
ashore, in the midst of a soaking rain that seemed to be sent just then
for my express benefit. I got into a carriage—one that had
sleigh-runners substituted for wheels—and rode to a good comfortable
hotel which the Captain had recommended.
It rained till after dark; and, in fact, I retired to my room, went
asleep and left it raining. I remember that I heard some one remark,
just before I retired, that if it kept on raining,—he didn’t say how
long—it would spoil the sleighing, and wheels would come into
requisition again: for in the New England States, especially
Massachusetts, and those lying north of it, a vehicle with wheels is
seldom seen in the depth of winter. The sleighing usually continues good
till spring, and the wheels are removed for a time from all vehicles,
and runners are adjusted in their stead. Not even the street-cars or
omnibuses are any exceptions: they, too, cease to rattle, roll and
rumble over the streets, and go gliding about with so little noise that
one gets the queer idea into his head that they are barefooted.
Next morning I discovered that it had cleared off, and that the
thermometer had gracefully descended to zero. [Well, that was
_nothing_.] In fact, during the ensuing six weeks which I spent in the
New England States, the sleighing continued excellent, and the
thermometer ranged pretty generally from about five degrees above zero
to five below. To be sure, we had a cool night or two, now and then,
when it went down to ten or fifteen below; but no one thought much of
that. Such is the character of the winter in New England—the good
old-fashioned kind that a fellow likes to see.
I glanced over toward Charlestown early on the morning after my arrival,
beheld Bunker Hill Monument towering far above the smoke-stacks and
steeples in the perspective; and I determined to visit it at once. I
accordingly climbed to the top of an omnibus, cold as it was—for I
wanted to see all I could—and rode over.
It is not universally known that the battle of Bunker Hill is so called
because it was fought on Breed’s Hill. The latter is near Bunker’s Hill,
and it is on Breed’s Hill that the monument now stands—and always has
stood since it was built, (for they never moved it.) The reason the
battle was called the battle of Bunker Hill, and, consequently, that the
monument is styled the “Bunker Hill Monument,” is, that the engagement
_should have been_ fought there. Colonel Prescott was sent with a
thousand men to throw up earthworks on Mr. Bunker’s Hill, which
overlooked Charlestown Neck; but either mistaking his instructions, or
not being acquainted with the vicinity, he took possession of Breed’s
Hill instead, and threw up an earthwork there in rather unpleasant
proximity to the British fleet in the harbor.
The monument is built of granite, is about twenty-five feet square at
the base, and about twelve or fifteen at the top; which top is
accessible by means of an interior winding stone stairway, dimly lighted
with rather small jets of gas that are too few and too far between. At
intervals of about twenty feet there are narrow apertures to let in air;
and that cold morning they let in too much. During the previous night,
too, the rain had blown in and frozen on the stone steps, so that fully
one half of them were perfectly enameled with ice.
To ascend these with a crutch under such circumstances was no less than
a dangerous undertaking. The superintendent advised me not to try it,
but I could not act upon his advice, from the fact that I had “made up
my mind” to go up. (It’s a wonder I didn’t “go up,” in another way.) If
there had not been a small iron railing to cling to, I could never have
reached the head of that almost interminable staircase. As it was, I
came near falling backward, and only saved myself by clutching this
railing.
Should one start to fall down these steps, nothing would save him. They
wind around and around, with here and there only a narrow landing, not
more than twice the width of a stair, and too narrow to arrest the
progress of a descending form. One might as well leap down from the top,
either outside or within the circular shaft around which the stairs
wind, as to go tumbling around and around, down, down, down, the solid
spiral stairway, thumped and beaten by the edges of two or three hundred
stone steps; for in either case I suppose that brandy and water wouldn’t
save him.
I reached the top pretty tired, after having ascended two hundred and
ninety-five icy steps; and from this height of two hundred feet, had a
good view of Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, and the harbor.
Finding it rather cold up there—for there were several good sized
windows open for the wind to blow in at, and visitors to look out of—I
soon made up my mind to descend; in fact the cold was so severe that it
had a rather benumbing effect on me; and as my thigh and the calf of my
leg fairly ached from my recent exertions, I fully realized the danger
of descending, and fancied I would have made a considerable pecuniary
sacrifice to be safely at the base of the tall structure. There was no
way to get there, however, but to _walk_ down, if it might be so called,
and I began the perilous descent. I was not half way down when my crutch
and cane both slipped from an icy step, and I fell. O, what a fall there
would have been, my countrymen, if I hadn’t caught the iron railing! I
gripped the cold iron with my right hand, and arrested my crutch with my
left; but my cane escaped me, and away it went, tumbling knocking,
cracking rattling and clattering, till it reached the bottom. I fancied
it took it something like a minute to make the descent, but the
probability is that the time it occupied in the journey was not more
than ten seconds. Its last echo had just died away, when I heard the
voice of the superintendent calling to me from below; and his voice had
a kind of twisty sound by the time it wound its way up to me.
“Did you fall?” he asked.
“No,” I replied, telling a white one, “I merely threw my cane down
because I can get down better without it.”
I did, however, get along better without it, for I could now grasp the
railing all the time with one hand while the other held the crutch.
* * * * *
Well, it is not my intention to write an ordinary book of travels. That
has been done too often. All the places I have visited have been
described time and again; and I will only entertain the reader with my
(John Smith’s) odd adventures therein.
While in Boston I had the pleasure of an introduction to Mrs.
Partington. That amiable old lady is a jovial, round-faced old
_gentleman_ of fifty-five or sixty. His name is B. P. Shillaber, and he
is connected with the Boston _Gazette_. He is a noble-hearted, excellent
gentleman; and the people of this country owe him their thanks for the
many happy smiles his eccentric and inimitable pen has called out upon
their faces. Long life and many happy years to Mrs. Partington!
I remained in New England during the rest of the winter, and had a
pleasant time and many sleigh-rides. I visited Lexington, Lowell,
Lawrence and most of the large towns of Massachusetts; Manchester,
Concord and Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Bellows Falls, Rutland and
Burlington, Vermont; and Portland and some smaller towns and cities in
Maine.
In the city of Portland I hired a horse and sleigh one morning, and
resolved to drive a few miles into the country. It was snowing
vigorously, but was not very cold; I had a spirited horse before me; a
good light sleigh under me; and away I went, bounding over the road,
neither knowing nor caring whither I went. By and by, when I had
traveled five or six miles, and distanced a number of other travelers,
in similar vehicles, on the way, I saw a town just ahead of me. The snow
was still falling so briskly that I was almost in the town before I saw
it. As I drove along, I asked a boy what place it was, and he said,
“Westbrook.” I entered the village, and found it to be one of
considerable extent. In fact, I drove half-a-mile, and still there was
no end of houses. On the contrary, they became thicker and thicker; and
I began to conclude that “Westbrook” must be quite a city. By and by I
found myself on a street that reminded me forcibly of one I had seen in
Portland; and, what made it more remarkable, I observed that it rejoiced
in the same name. What a coincidence! But I marveled more still, as I
followed this street a little way and passed an hotel that was the very
image of the one I stayed at in Portland—and lo! there stood at the door
a porter who was dark-skinned and cross-eyed, exactly like the porter of
my hotel in that city! Was I dreaming? No, not exactly; but I must have
been during my drive, for I had wandered around among the country roads
in the snow-storm, lost my reckoning, and actually entered Portland
again. I had come in through a little suburban village, north of the
city, called “Westbrook;” and hence my delusion.
In Rutland, a beautiful little city nestling in a kind of basin high up
among the Green Mountains of Vermont, I arrived one night at a late
hour. I went to a good comfortable hotel—for they have such there—and
asked for a “single room.” The host regretted that he had no single
rooms unoccupied. Passengers from the earlier trains had taken them all.
He could put me in a double-bedded room where another guest had just
retired—one who appeared to be a “perfect gentleman:” that was the best
he could do. It was the best _I_ could do, too; so, I was shown to the
room.
I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket, and, not being perfectly sure
that the man in the other bed was a perfect angel, I thought there would
be no harm in placing it in the watch-fob of my unimpeachables, and
placing the same rolled up in a ball, under my neck. I did so. When
morning came, the “other fellow” got up first, and I felt somewhat
amused when I chanced to observe—for I was awake, and dreading to “turn
out” on account of the sharp morning air—that he had done so too. We had
both taken each other for rogues.
Well, that is the right way to view every stranger when you are
traveling. Look on every man you meet, and especially if he speaks to
you, as a deep-dyed villain, till you have had the most incontrovertible
proof that he is not.
I made Boston my head-quarters, while visiting different portions of
Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts; and about the last of
February, I departed for Philadelphia. I didn’t try the “dark-blue sea”
again; but took the “Shore Line” railroad, stopping a short time in
Providence, New Haven and New York.
I arrived in New York one March evening, and, allowing my baggage to go
on to Philadelphia, resolved to remain in the city that night and go to
the “Quaker City” next day. I wanted to go _via_ the Camden and Amboy
Railroad, and was told that the boat—for passengers on this road take
the boat from New York to South Amboy, a distance of twenty-eight
miles—would leave at six in the morning. That evening, while in the
sitting-room of my old hotel, I observed two suspicious-looking fellows
eyeing me rather sharply, and I felt that they were entitled to a little
watching from me. So, I watched them. When I retired, I locked and
bolted my door and even braced it with my crutch. [A handy thing to have
in a house, sometimes.] I slept soundly till five o’clock, at which time
the porter, according to instructions, knocked at my door and awoke me.
There was no one in the hotel below, when I went down but a sleepy
porter, and I was wondering where my suspicious-looking friends (?)
were, and where they stayed, and congratulating myself that I was
escaping them nicely by going away at that early hour in the morning,
when the street-door opened and the two identical gentlemen stepped in,
and took a seat by the stove. Pretending not to notice them, _I_ stepped
_out_.
It was still far from daylight, and the snow was flying merrily. The
wind was howling, and each blaze of gas in the street-lamps was
fluttering and struggling as though it might go out at any moment. I
wanted to go to Pier No. 1, North River, from which the boat was to
start, and I walked as fast as I could—and that was not slow—toward
Broadway, glancing back over my shoulder at intervals of two seconds, to
see if my villains were coming. It was the quietest hour I ever saw in
New York. Not a stage, carriage, cart or car was astir in that part of
the city; and neither policeman nor “any other man” was to be seen. The
snow and wind combined were fairly blinding, and it was very far from
being a “fine morning.”
I had nearly reached Broadway, when I looked back and saw the two dears
coming, a square distant. They were passing a lamp-post, and the glimpse
I caught of their figures convinced me of their identity. Without
exhibiting any haste or trepidation, I walked on to the corner of
Broadway and Park Row and turned to the left; but instead of walking
down Broadway, suddenly stepped aside and stood in the door-way of
Barnum’s old Museum—which was still standing at that time, but over
whose ashes Bennett’s majestic marble palace now stands—leaned my cane
up in a corner, drew my revolver, cocked it, and awaited the attack.
I had just completed my preparations for a defence of my position, when
the happy pair came. The light of a street-lamp at the corner shone full
upon them, and I must have been blind indeed if I had not recognized
them. Their hats were drawn down over their eyes, to shield those organs
from the driving snow, and as I was in the shade, they failed to see me,
and rushed by. They were running, their footsteps soon died away, and
their “forms” faded down Broadway, which was then as quiet as a country
lane. I was very well satisfied to escape an encounter with them,
because I preferred not to shoot them, as I would certainly have found
it necessary to do had they seen me.
I knew they would soon discover that I had dodged them, and return; so,
replacing my revolver, taking my cane, and keeping an eye down Broadway,
I glided across the silent thoroughfare, went down Vesey Street to North
River, and thence down West Street to Pier No. 1, which was not really
much out of my way.
I reached the boat in good time, and arrived in Philadelphia that day by
twelve o’clock.