The descent from Patmore and poetry to New York is somewhat abrupt, not
to say precipitous, but we made it in safety; and so shall you, if you
will be agile.
New York is a pleasant little Dutch city, on a dot of island a few
miles southwest of Massachusetts. For a city entirely unobtrusive and
unpretending, it has really great attractions and solid merit; but the
superior importance of other places will not permit me to tarry long
within its hospitable walls. In fact, we only arrived late at night,
and departed early the next morning; but even a six-hours sojourn gave
me a solemn and "realizing sense" of its marked worth,--for, when,
tired and listless, I asked for a servant to assist me, the waiter said
he would send the housekeeper. Accordingly, when, a few moments after,
it knocked at the door with light, light finger, (see De la Motte
Fouque,) I drawled, "Come in," and the Queen of Sheba stood before me,
clad in purple and fine linen, with rings on her fingers and bells on
her toes. I stared in dismay, and perceived myself rapidly
transmigrating into a ridiculus mus. My gray and dingy
travelling-dress grew abject, and burned into my soul like tunic of
Nessus. I should as soon have thought of asking Queen Victoria to
brush out my hair as that fine lady in brocade silk and Mechlin lace.
But she was good and gracious, and did not annihilate me on the spot,
as she easily have done, for which I shall thank her as long as I live.
"You sent for me?" she inquired, with the blandest accents imaginable.
I can't tell a lie, pa,--you know I can't tell a lie; besides, I had
not time to make up one, and I said, "Yes," and then, of all stupid
devices that could filter into my brain, I must needs stammer out that
I should like a few matches! A pretty thing to bring a dowager duchess
up nine pairs of stairs for!
"I will ring the bell," she said, with a tender, reproachful sweetness
and dignity, which conveyed without unkindness the severest rebuke
tempered by womanly pity, and proceeded to instruct me in the nature
and uses of the bell-rope, as she would any little dairy-maid who had
heard only the chime of cow-bells all the days of her life. Then she
sailed out of the room, serene and majestic, like a seventy-four
man-of-war, while I, a squalid, salt-hay gunlow, (Venetian blind-ed
into gondola,) first sank down in confusion, and then rose up in fury
and brushed all the hair out of my head.
"I declare," I said to Halicarnassus, when we were fairly beyond
ear-shot of the city next morning, "I don't approve of sumptuary laws,
and I like America to be the El Dorado of the poor man, and I go for
the largest liberty of the individual; but I do think there ought to be
a clause in the Constitution providing that servants shall not be
dressed and educated and accomplished up to the point of making people
uncomfortable."
"No," said Halicarnassus, sleepily; "perhaps it wasn't a servant."
"Well," I said, having looked at it in that light silently for half an
hour, and coming to the surface in another place, "if I could dress and
carry myself like that, I would not keep tavern."
"Oh! eh?" yawning; "who does?"
"Mrs. Astor. Of course nobody less rich than Mrs. Astor could go
up-stairs and down-stairs and in my lady's chamber in Shiraz silk and
gold of Ophir. Why, Cleopatra was nothing to her. I make no doubt she
uses gold-dust for sugar in her coffee every morning; and as for the
three miserable little wherries that Isabella furnished Columbus, and
historians have towed through their tomes ever since, if you know of
anybody that has a continent he wishes to discover, send him to this
housekeeper, and she can fit out a fleet of transports and Monitors for
convoy with one of her bracelets."
"I don't," said Halicarnassus, rubbing his eyes.
"I only wish," I added, "that she would turn Rebel so that government
might confiscate her. Paper currency would go up at once from the
sudden influx of gold, and the credit of the country receive a new
lease of life. She must be a lineal descendant of Sir Roger de
Coverley, for sure her finger sparkles with a hundred of his richest
acres."
Before bidding a final farewell to New York, I venture to make a single
remark. I regret to be forced to confess that I greatly fear even this
virtuous little city has not escaped quite free, the general
deterioration of morals and manners. The New York hackmen, for
instance, are very obliging and attentive; but if it would not seem
ungrateful, I would hazard the statement that their attentions are
unremitting to the degree being almost embarrassing, and proffered to
the verge of obtrusiveness. I think, in short, that they are hardly
quite delicate in their politeness. They press their hospitality on
you till you sigh for a little marked neglect. They are not content
with simple statement. They offer you their hack, for instance. You
decline with thanks. They say that they will carry you to any part of
the city. Where is the pertinence of that, if you do not wish to go?
But they not only say it, they repeat it, they dwell upon it as if it
were a cardinal virtue. Now you have never expressed or entertained
the remotest suspicion that they would not carry you to any part of the
city. You have not the slightest intention or desire to discredit
their assertion. The only trouble is, as I said before, you do not
wish to go to any part of the city. Very few people have time to drive
about in that general way; and surely, when you have once distinctly
informed them that you do not design to inspect New York, they ought to
see plainly that you cannot change your whole plan of operations out of
gratitude to them, and that the part of true politeness is to withdraw.
But they even go beyond a censurable urgency; for an old gentleman and
lady, evidently unaccustomed to travelling, had given themselves in
charge of a driver, who placed them in his coach, leaving the door open
while he went back seeking whom he might devour. Presently a rival
coachman came up and said to the aged and respectable couple,--
"Here's a carriage all ready to start."
"But," replied the lady, "we have already told the gentleman who drives
this coach that we would go with him."
"Catch me to go in that coach, if I was you!" responded the wicked
coachman. "Why, that coach has had the small-pox in it."
The lady started up in horror. At that moment the first driver
appeared again; and Satan entered into me, and I felt in my heart that
I should like to see a fight; and then conscience stepped up and drove
him away, but consoled me by the assurance that I should see the fight
all the same, for such duplicity deserved the severest punishment, and
it was my duty to make an expose and vindicate helpless innocence
imposed upon in the persons of that worthy pair. Accordingly I said to
the driver, as he passed me,--
"Driver, that man in the gray coat is trying to frighten the old lady
and gentleman away from your coach, by telling them it has had the
small-pox."
Oh! but did not the fire flash into his honest eyes, and leap into his
swarthy cheek, and nerve his brawny arm, and clinch his horny fist, as
he marched straightway up to the doomed offender, fiercely denounced
his dishonesty, and violently demanded redress? Ah! then and there was
hurrying to and fro, and eagerness and delight on every countenance,
and a ring formed, and the prospect of a lovely "row,"--and I did it;
but a police-officer sprang up, full-armed, from somewhere underground,
and undid it all, and enforced a reluctant peace.
And so we are at Saratoga. Now, of all places to stay at in the
summer-time, Saratoga is the very last one to choose. It may have
attractions in winter; but, if one wishes to rest and change and root
down and shoot up and branch out, he might as well take lodgings in the
water-wheel of a saw-mill. The uniformity and variety will be much the
same. It is all a noiseless kind of din, narrow and intense. There is
nothing in Saratoga nor of Saratoga to see or to hear or to feel. They
tell you of a lake. You jam into an omnibus and ride four miles. Then
you step into a cockle-shell and circumnavigate a pond, so small that
it almost makes you dizzy to sail around it. This is the lake,--a very
nice thing as far as it goes; but when it has to be constantly on duty
as the natural scenery of the whole surrounding country, it is putting
altogether too fine a point on it. The picturesque people will inform
you of an Indian encampment. You go to see it, thinking of the forest
primeval, and expecting to be transported back to tomahawks, scalps,
and forefathers but you return without them, and that is all. I never
heard of anybody's going anywhere. In fact there did not seem to be
anywhere to go. Any suggestion of mine to strike out into the
champaign was frowned down in the severest manner. As far as I could
see, nobody ever did anything. There never was any plan on foot.
Nothing was ever stirring. People sat on the piazza and sewed. They
went to the springs, and the springs are dreadful. They bubble up
salts and senna. I never knew anything that pretended to be water that
was half as bad. It has no one redeeming quality. It is bitter. It is
greasy. Every spring is worse than the last, whichever end you begin
at. They told apocryphal stories of people's drinking sixteen glasses
before breakfast; and yet it may have been true; for, if one could
bring himself to the point of drinking one glass of it, I should
suppose it would have taken such a force to enable him to do it that he
might go on drinking indefinitely, from the mere action of the original
impulse. I should think one dose of it would render a person
permanently indifferent to savors, and make him, like Mithridates,
poison-proof. Nevertheless, people go to the springs and drink. Then
they go to the bowling-alleys and bowl. In the evening, if you are
hilariously inclined, you can make the tour of the hotels. In one you
see a large and brilliantly lighted parlor, along the four sides of
which are women sitting, solemn and stately, in rows three deep, a man
dropped in here and there, about as thick as periods on a page, very
young or very old or in white cravats. A piano or a band or something
that can make a noise makes it at intervals at one end of the room.
They all look as if they waiting for something, but nothing in
particular happens. Sometimes, after the mountain has labored awhile,
some little mouse of a boy and girl will get up, execute an antic or
two and sit down again, when everything relapses into its original
solemnity. At very long intervals somebody walks across the floor.
There is a moderate fluttering of fans and an occasional whisper.
Expectation interspersed with gimcracks seems to be the programme. The
greater part of the dancing that I saw was done by boys and girls. It
was pretty and painful. Nobody dances so well as children; no grace is
equal to their grace; but to go into a hotel at ten o'clock at night,
and see little things, eight, ten, twelve years old, who ought to be in
bed and asleep, tricked out in flounces and ribbons and all the
paraphernalia of ballet-girls, and dancing in the centre of a hollow
square of strangers,--I call it murder in the first degree. What can
mothers be thinking of to abuse their children so? Children are
naturally healthy and simple; why should they be spoiled? They will
have to plunge into the world full soon enough; why should the world be
plunged into them? Physically, mentally, and morally, the innocents
are massacred. Night after night I saw the same children led out to
the slaughter, and as I looked I saw their round, red cheeks grow thin
and white, their delicate nerves lose tone and tension, their brains
become feeble and flabby, their minds flutter out weakly in muslin and
ribbons, their vanity kindled by injudicious admiration, the sweet
child-unconsciousness withering away in the glare of indiscriminate
gazing, the innocence and simplicity and naturalness and childlikeness
swallowed up in a seething whirlpool of artificialness, all the fine,
golden butterfly-dust of modesty and delicacy and retiring girlhood
ruthlessly rubbed off forever before girlhood had even reddened from
the dim dawn of infancy. Oh! it is cruel to sacrifice children so.
What can atone for a lost childhood? What can be given in recompense
for the ethereal, spontaneous, sharply defined, new, delicious
sensations of a sheltered, untainted, opening life?
Thoroughly worked into a white heat of indignation, we leave the babes
in the wood to be despatched by their ruffian relatives, and go to
other hotel. A larger parlor, larger rows, but still three deep and
solemn. A tall man, with a face in which melancholy seems to be giving
way to despair, a man most proper for an undertaker, but palpably out
of place in a drawing-room, walks up and down incessantly, but
noiselessly, in a persistent endeavor to bring out a dance. Now he
fastens upon a newly arrived man. Now he plants himself before a bench
of misses. You can hear the low rumble of his exhortation and the
tittering replies. After a persevering course of entreaty and
persuasion, a set is drafted, the music galvanizes, and the dance
begins.
I like to see people do with their might whatsoever their hands or
their tongues or their feet find to do. A half-and-half performance of
the right is just about as mischievous as the perpetration of the
wrong. It is vacillation, hesitation, lack of will, feebleness of
purpose, imperfect execution, that works ill in all life. Be monarch
of all you survey. If a woman decides to do her own housework, let her
go in royally among her pots and kettles, and set everything a-stewing
and baking and broiling and boiling, as a queen might. If she decides
not to do housework, but to superintend its doing, let her say to her
servant, "Go," and he goeth, to another, "Come," and he cometh, to a
third, "Do this," and he doeth it, and not potter about. So, when
girls get themselves up and go to Saratoga for a regular campaign, let
their bearing be soldierly. Let them be gay with abandonment. Let
them take hold of it as if they liked it. I do not affect the word
flirtation, but the thing itself is not half so criminal as one would
think from the animadversions visited upon it. Of course, a deliberate
setting yourself to work to make some one fall in love with you, for
the mere purpose of showing your power, is abominable,--or would be, if
anybody ever did it; but I do not suppose it ever was done, except in
fifth-rate novels. What I mean is, that it is entertaining, harmless,
and beneficial for young people to amuse themselves with each other to
the top of their bent, if their bent is a natural and right one. A few
hearts may suffer accidental, transient injury; but hearts are like
limbs, all the stronger for being broken. Besides, where one man or
woman is injured by loving too much, nine hundred and ninety-nine die
the death from not loving enough. But these Saratoga girls did neither
one thing nor another. They dressed themselves in their best, making a
point of it, and failed. They assembled themselves together of set
purpose to be lively, and they were infectiously dismal. They did not
dress well: one looked rustic; another was dowdyish; a third was
over-fine; a fourth was insignificant. Their bearing was not good, in
the main. They danced, and whispered, and laughed, and looked like
milkmaids. They had no style, no figure. Their shoulders were high,
and their chests were flat, and they were one-sided, and they
stooped,--all of which would have been no account, if they had only
been unconsciously enjoying themselves: but they consciously were not.
It is possible that they thought they were happy, but I knew better.
You are never happy, unless you are master of the situation; and they
were not. They endeavored to appear at ease,--a thing which people who
are at ease never do. They looked as if they had all their lives been
meaning to go to Saratoga, and now they had got there and were
determined not to betray any unwontedness. It was not the timid, eager,
delighted, fascinating, graceful awkwardness of a new young girl; it
was not the careless, hearty, whole-souled enjoyment of an experienced
girl; it was not the natural, indifferent, imperial queening it of an
acknowledged monarch: but something that caught hold of the hem of the
garment of them all. It was they with the sheen damped off. So it was
not imposing. I could pick you up a dozen girls straight along, right
out of the pantries and the butteries, right up from the washing-tubs
and the sewing-machines, who should be abundantly able to "hoe their
row" with them anywhere. In short, I was extremely disappointed. I
expected to see the high fashion, the very birth and breeding, the
cream cheese of the country, and it was skim-milk. If that is birth,
one can do quite as well without being born at all. Occasionally you
would see a girl with gentle blood in her veins, whether it were
butcher-blood or banker-blood, but she only made the prevailing
plebsiness more striking. Now I maintain that a woman ought to be very
handsome or very clever, or else she ought to go to work and do
something. Beauty is of itself a divine gift and adequate. "Beauty is
its own excuse for being" anywhere. It ought not to be fenced in or
monopolized, any more than a statue or a mountain. It ought to be free
and common, a benediction to all weary wayfarers. It can never be
profaned; for it veils itself from the unappreciative eye, and shines
only upon its worshippers. So a clever woman, whether she be a painter
or a teacher or a dress-maker,--if she really has an object in life, a
career, she is safe. She is a power. She commands a realm. She owns
a world. She is bringing things to bear. Let her alone. But it is a
very dangerous and a very melancholy thing common women to be "lying on
their oars" long at a time. Some of these were, I suppose, what
Winthrop calls "business-women, fighting their way out of vulgarity
into style." The process is rather uninteresting, but the result may
be glorious. Yet a good many of them were good honest, kind, common
girls, only demoralized by long lying around in a waiting posture. It
had taken the fire and sparkle out of them. They were not in a healthy
state. They were degraded, contracted, flaccid. They did not hold
themselves high. They knew that in a market-point of view there was a
frightful glut of women. The usually small ratio of men was unusually
diminished by the absence of those who gone to the war, and of those
who, as was currently reported, were ashamed that they had not gone. A
few available men had it all their own way; the women were on the
lookout for them, instead of being themselves looked out for. They
talked about "gentlemen," and being "companionable to GEN-tlemen," and
who was "fascinating to GEN-tlemen," till the "grand old name became a
nuisance. There was an under-current of unsated coquetry. I don't
suppose they were any sillier than the rest of us; but when our
silliness is mixed in with housekeeping and sewing and teaching and
returning visits, it passes off harmless. When it is stripped of all
these modifiers, however, and goes off exposed to Saratoga, and melts
in with a hundred other sillinesses, it makes a great show.
No, I don't like Saratoga. I don't think it is wholesome. No place
can be healthy that keeps up such an unmitigated dressing.
"Where do you walk?" I asked an artless little lady.
"O, almost always on the long piazza. It is so clean there, and we
don't like to soil our dresses."
Now I ask if girls could ever get into that state in the natural course
of things! It is the result of bad habits. They cease to care for
things which they ought to like to do, and they devote themselves to
what ought to be only an incident. People dress in their best without
break. They go to the springs before breakfast in shining raiment, and
they go into the parlor after supper in shining raiment, and it is
shine, shine, shine, all the way between, and a different shine each
time. You may well suppose that I was like an owl among birds of
Paradise, for what little finery I had was in my (eminently)
travelling-trunk: yet, though it was but a dory, compared with the
Noah's arks that drove up every day, I felt that, if I could only once
get inside of it, I could make things fly to some purpose. Like poor
Rabette, I would show the city that the country too could wear clothes!
I never walked down Broadway without seeing a dozen white trunks, and
every white trunk that I saw I was fully convinced was mine, if I could
only get at it. By and by mine came, and I blossomed. I arrayed
myself for morning, noon, and night, and everything else that came up,
and was, as the poet says,--
"Prodigious in change,
And endless in range,"--
for I would have scorned not to be as good as the best. The result
was, that in three days I touched bottom. But then we went away, and
my reputation was saved. I don't believe anybody ever did a larger
business on a smaller capital; but I put a bold face on it. I cherish
the hope that nobody suspected I could not go on in that ruinous way
all summer,--I, who in three days had mustered into service every dress
and sash and ribbon and that I had had in three years or expected to
have in three more. But I never will, if I can help it, hold my head
down where other people are holding their heads up.
I would not be understood as decrying or depreciating dress. It is a
duty as well as a delight. Mrs. Madison is reported to have said that
she would never forgive a young lady who did not dress to please, or
one who seemed pleased with her dress. And not only young ladies, but
old ladies and old gentlemen, and everybody, ought to make their dress
a concord and not a discord. But Saratoga is pitched on a perpetual
falsetto, and stuns you. One becomes sated with an interminable piece
de resistance of full dress. At the seaside you bathe; at the
mountains you put on stout boots and coarse frocks and go a-fishing;
but Saratoga never "lets up,"--if I may be pardoned the phrase.
Consequently, you see much of crinoline and little of character. You
have to get at the human nature just as Thoreau used to get at
bird-nature and fish-nature and turtle-nature, by sitting perfectly
still in one place and waiting patiently till it comes out. You see
more of the reality of people in a single day's tramp than in twenty
days of guarded monotone. Now I cannot conceive of any reason why
people should go to Saratoga, except to see people. True, as a general
thing, they are the last objects you desire to see, when you are
summering. But if one has been cooped up in the house or blocked up in
the country during the nine months of our Northern winter, he may have
a mighty hunger and thirst, when he is thawed out, to see human faces
and hear human voices; but even then Saratoga is not the place to go
to, on account of this very artificialness. By artificial I do not
mean deceitful. I saw nobody but nice people there, smooth, kind, and
polite. By artificial I mean wrought up. You don't get at the heart
of things. Artificialness spreads and spans all with a crystal
barrier,--invisible, but palpable. Nothing was left to grow and go at
its own sweet will. The very springs were paved and pavilioned. For
green fields and welling fountains and a possibility of brooks, which
one expects from the name, you found a Greek temple, and a
pleasure-ground, graded and grassed and pathed like a cemetery, wherein
nymphs trod daintily in elaborate morning-costume. Everything took
pattern and was elaborate. Nothing was left to the imagination, the
taste, the curiosity. A bland, smooth, smiling surface baffled and
blinded you, and threatened profanity. Now profanity is wicked and
vulgar; but if you listen to the reeds next summer, I am not sure that
you will not hear them whispering, under, "Thunder!"
For the restorative qualities of Saratoga I have nothing to say. I was
well when I went there; nor did my experience ever furnish me with any
disease that I should consider worse than an intermittent attack of her
spring waters. But whatever it may do for the body, I do not believe
it is for the soul. I do not believe that such places, such scenes,
such a fashion of life ever nourishes a vigorous womanhood or manhood.
Taken homeopathically, it may be harmless; but become a habit, a
necessity, it must vitiate, enervate, destroy. Men can stand it, for
the sea-breezes and the mountain-breezes may have full sweep through
their life; but women cannot, for they just go home and live air-tight.
If the railroad-men at Saratoga tell you that you can go straight from
there to the foot of Lake George, don't you believe a word of it.
Perhaps you can, and perhaps you cannot; but you are not any more
likely to "can" for their saying so. We left Saratoga for
Fort-William-Henry Hotel in full faith of an afternoon ride and a
sunset arrival, based on repeated and unhesitating assurances to that
effect. Instead of which, we went a few miles, and were then dumped
into a blackberry-patch, where we were informed that we must wait seven
hours. So much for the afternoon ride through summer fields and
"Sunset on Lake George," from the top of a coach. But I made no
unmanly laments, for we were out of Saratoga, and that was happiness.
We were among cows and barns and homely rail-fences, and that was
comfort; so we strolled contentedly through the pasture, found a
river,--I believe it was the Hudson; at any rate, Halicarnassus said
so, though I don't imagine he knew; but he would take oath it was
Acheron rather than own up to ignorance on any point whatever,--watched
the canal-boats and boatmen go down, marvelled at the arbor-vitae trees
growing wild along the river-banks, green, hale, stately, and
symmetrical, against the dismal mental background of two little
consumptive shoots bolstered up in our front yard at home, and dying
daily, notwithstanding persistent and affectionate nursing with
"flannels and rum," and then we went back to the blackberry-station and
inquired whether there was nothing celebrated in the vicinity to which
visitors of received Orthodox creed should dutifully pay their
respects, and were gratified to learn that we were but a few miles from
Jane McCrea and her Indian murderers. Was a carriage procurable?
Well, yes, if the ladies would be willing to go in that. It wasn't
very smart, but it would take 'em safe,--as if "the ladies" would have
raised any objections to going in a wheelbarrow, had it been necessary,
and so we bundled in. The hills were steep, and our horse, the
property of an adventitious by-stander, was of the Rosinante breed; we
were in no hurry, seeing that the only thing awaiting us this side the
sunset was a blackberry-patch without any blackberries, and we walked
up hill and scraped down, till we got into a lane which somebody told
us led to the Fort, from which the village, Fort Edward, takes its
name. But, instead of a fort, the lane ran full tilt against a pair of
bars.
"Now we are lost," I said, sententiously.
"A gem of countless price," pursued Halicarnassus, who never quotes
poetry except to destroy my equilibrium.
"How long will it be profitable to remain here?" asked Grande, when we
had sat immovable and speechless for the space of five minutes.
"There seems to be nowhere else to go. We have got to the end," said
Halicarnassus, roaming as to his eyes over into the wheat-field beyond.
"We might turn," suggested the Anakim, looking bright.
"How can you turn a horse in this knitting-needle of a lane?" I
demanded.
"I don't know," replied Halicarnassus, dubiously, "unless I take him up
in my arms, and set him down with his head the other way,"--and
immediately turned him deftly in a corner about half as large as the
wagon.
The next lane we came to was the right one, and being narrow, rocky,
and rough, we left our carriage and walked.
A whole volume of the peaceful and prosperous history of our beloved
country could be read in the fact that the once belligerent,
life-saving, death-dealing fort was represented by a hen-coop; yet I
was disappointed. I was hungry for a ruin,--some visible hint of the
past. Such is human nature,--ever prone to be more impressed by a
disappointment of its own momentary gratification than by the most
obvious well-being of a nation but, glad or sorry, of Fort Edward was
not left one stone upon another. Several single stones lay about,
promiscuous rather than belligerent. Flag-staff and palisades lived
only in a few straggling bean-poles. For the heavy booming of cannon
rose the "quauk!" of ducks and the cackling of hens. We went to the
spot which tradition points out as the place where Jane McCrea met her
death. River flowed, and raftsmen sang below; women stood at their
washing-tubs, and white-headed children stared at us from above; nor
from the unheeding river or the forgetful weeds came or cry or faintest
wail of pain.
When we were little, and geography and history were but printed words
on white paper, not places and events, Jane McCrea was to us no
suffering woman, but a picture of a low-necked, long-skirted, scanty
dress, long hair grasped by a naked Indian, and two unnatural-looking
hands raised in entreaty. It was interesting as a picture, but it
excited no pity, no horror, because it was only a picture. We never
saw women dressed in that style. We knew that women did not take
journeys through woods without bonnet or shawl, and we spread a veil of
ignorant, indifferent incredulity over the whole. But as we grow up,
printed words take on new life. The latent fire in them lights up and
glows. The mystic words throb with vital heat, and burn down into our
souls to an answering fire. As we stand, on this soft summer day, by
the old tree which tradition declares to have witnessed that fateful
scene, we go back into a summer long ago, but fair, and just like this.
Jane McCrea is no longer a myth, but a young girl, blooming and
beautiful with the roses of her seventeen years. Farther back still,
we see an old man's darling, little Jenny of the Manse, a light-hearted
child, with sturdy Scotch blood leaping in her young veins,--then a
tender orphan, sheltered by a brother's care,--then a gentle maiden,
light-hearted no longer, heavy-freighted, rather, but with a priceless
burden,--a happy girl, to whom love calls with stronger voice than
brother's blood, stronger even than life. Yonder in the woods lurk
wily and wary foes. Death with unspeakable horrors lies in ambush
there; but yonder also stands the soldier lover, and possible greeting,
after long, weary absence, is there. What fear can master that
overpowering hope? Estrangement of families, political disagreement, a
separated loyalty, all melt away, are fused together in the warmth of
girlish love. Taxes, representation, what things are these to come
between two hearts? No Tory, no traitor is her lover, but her own
brave hero and true knight. Woe! woe! the eager dream is broken by mad
war-whoops! alas! to those fierce wild men, what is love, or
loveliness? Pride, and passion, and the old accursed hunger for gold
flame up in their savage breasts. Wrathful, loathsome fingers clutch
the long, fair hair that even the fingers of love have caressed but
with reverent half-touch,--and love and hope and life go out in one
dread moment of horror and despair. Now, through the reverberations of
more than fourscore years, through all the tempest-rage of a war more
awful than that, and fraught, we hope, with a grander joy, a clear,
young voice, made sharp with agony, rings through the shuddering woods,
cleaves up through the summer sky, and wakens in every heart a thrill
of speechless pain. Along these peaceful banks I see a bowed form
walking, youth in his years, but deeper furrows in his face than can
plough, stricken down from the heights of ambition and desire, all the
vigor and fire of manhood crushed and quenched beneath the horror of
one fearful memory.
Sweet summer sky, bending above us soft and saintly, beyond your blue
depths is there not Heaven?
"We may as well give Dobbin his oats here," said Halicarnassus.
We had brought a few in a bag for luncheon, thinking it might help him
over the hills. So the wagon was rummaged, the bag brought to light,
and I was sent to one of the nearest houses to get something for him to
eat out of. I did not think to ask what particular vessel to inquire
for; but after I had knocked, I decided upon a meat-platter or a
pudding-dish, and with the good woman's permission finally took both,
that Halicarnassus might have his choice.
"Which is the best?" I asked, holding them up.
He surveyed them carefully, and then said,--
"Now run right back and get a tumbler for him to drink out of, and a
teaspoon to feed him with."
I started in good faith, from a mere habit of unquestioning obedience,
but with the fourth step my reason returned to me, and I returned to
Halicarnassus and--kicked him. That sounds very dreadful and horrible,
and it is, if you are thinking of a great, brutal, brogan kick, such as
a stupid farmer gives to his patient oxen; but not, if you mean only a
delicate, compact, penetrative nudge with the toe of a tight-fitting
gaiter,--addressed rather to the conscience than the sole, to the
sensibilities rather than the senses. The kick masculine is coarse,
boorish, unmitigated, predicable only of Calibans. The kick feminine is
expressive, suggestive, terse, electric,--an indispensable instrument
in domestic discipline, as women will bear me witness, and not at all
incompatible with beauty, grace, and amiability. But, right or wrong,
after all this interval of rest and reflection, in full view of all the
circumstances, my only regret is that I did not kick him harder.
"Now go and fetch your own tools!" I cried, shaking off the yoke of
servitude. "I won't be your stable-boy any longer!"
Then, perforce, he gathered up the crockery, marched off in disgrace,
and came back with a molasses-hogshead, or a wash-tub, or some such
overgrown mastodon, to turn his sixpenny-worth of oats into.
Having fed our mettlesome steed, the next thing was to water him. The
Anakim remembered to have seen a pump with a trough somewhere, and they
proposed to reconnoitre while we should "wait BY the wagon" their
return. No, I said we would drive on to the pump, while they walked.
"You drive!" ejaculated Halicarnassus, contemptuously.
Now I do not, as a general thing, have an overweening respect for
female teamsters. There is but one woman in the world to whose hands I
confide the reins and my bones with entire equanimity; and she says,
that, when she is driving, she dreads of all things to meet a driving
woman. If a man said this, it might be set down to prejudice. I don't
make any account of Halicarnassus's assertion, that, if two women
walking in the road on a muddy day meet a carriage, they never keep
together, but invariably one runs to the right and one to the left, so
that the driver cannot favor them at all, but has to crowd between
them, and drive both into the mud. That is palpably interested false
witness. He thinks it is fine fun to push women into the mud, and
frames such flimsy excuses. But as a woman's thoughts about women,
this woman's utterances are deserving of attention; and she says that
women are not to be depended upon. She is never sure that they will
not turn out on the wrong side. They are nervous; they are timid; they
are unreasoning; they are reckless. They will give a horse a
disconnected, an utterly inconsequent "cut," making him spring, to the
jeopardy of their own and others' safety. They are not concentrative,
and they are not infallibly courteous, as men are. I remember I was
driving with her once between Newburyport and Boston. It was getting
late, and we were very desirous to reach our destination before
nightfall. Ahead of us a woman and a girl were jogging along in a
country wagon. As we wished to go much faster than they, we turned
aside to pass them; but just as we were well abreast, the woman started
up her horse, and he skimmed over the ground like a bird. We laughed,
and followed, well content. But after he had gone perhaps an eighth of
a mile, his speed slackened down to the former jog-trot. Three times
we attempted to pass before we really comprehended the fact that that
infamous woman was deliberately detaining and annoying us. The third
time, when we had so nearly passed them that our horse was turning into
the road again, she struck hers up so suddenly and unexpectedly that
her wheels almost grazed ours. Of course, understanding her game, we
ceased the attempt, having no taste for horse-racing; and nearly all
the way from Newburyport to Rowley, she kept up that brigandry, jogging
on, and forcing us to jog on, neither going ahead herself nor suffering
us to do so,--a perfect and most provoking dog in a manger. Her
girl-associate would look behind every now and then to take
observations, and I mentally hoped that the frisky Bucephalus would
frisk his mistress out of the cart and break her ne--arm, or at least
put her shoulder out of joint. If he did, I had fully determined in my
own mind to hasten to her assistance, and shame her to death with
delicate and assiduous kindness. But fate lingered like all the rest
of us. She reached Rowley in safety, and there our roads separated.
Whether she stopped there, or drove into Ethiopian wastes beyond, I
cannot say; but have no doubt that the milk which she carried into
Newburyport to market was blue, the butter frowy, and the potatoes
exceedingly small.
Now do you mean to tell me that any man would have been guilty of such
a thing? I don't mean, would have committed such discourtesy to a
woman? Of course not; but would a man ever do it to a man? Never. He
might try it once or twice, just for fun, just to show off his horse,
but he never would have persisted in it till a joke became an insult,
not to say a possible injury.
Still, as I was about to say, when that Rowley jade interrupted me,
though I have small faith in Di-Vernonism generally, and no large faith
in my own personal prowess, I did feel myself equal to the task of
holding the reins while our Rosinante walked along an open road to a
pump. I therefore resented Halicarnassus's contemptuous tones, mounted
the wagon with as much dignity as wagons allow, sat straight as an
arrow on the driver's seat, took the reins in both hands,--as they used
to tell me I must not, when I was a little girl, because that was
women's way, but I find now that men have adopted it, so I suppose it
is all right,--and proceeded to show, like Sam Patch, that some things
can be done as well as others. Halicarnassus and the Anakim took up
their position in line on the other side of the road, hat in hand,
watching.
"Go fast, and shame them," whispered Grande, from the back-seat, and
the suggestion jumped with my own mood. It was a moment of intense
excitement. To be or not to be. I jerked the lines. Pegasus did not
start.
"C-l-k-l-k!" No forward movement.
"Huddup!" Still waiting for reinforcements.
"H-w-e." (Attempt at a whistle. Dead failure.)
(Sotto voce.) "O you beast!" (Pianiassimo.) "Gee! Haw! haw! haw!"
with a terrible jerking of the reins.
A voice over the way, distinctly audible, utters the cabalistic words,
"Two forty." Another voice, as audible, asks, "Which'll you bet on?"
It was not soothing. It did seem as if the imp of the perverse had
taken possession of that terrible nag to go and make such a display at
such a moment. But as his will rose, so did mine, and my will went up,
my whip went with it; but before it came down, Halicarnassus made shift
to drone out, "Wouldn't Flora go faster, if she was untied?"
To be sure, I had forgotten to unfasten him, and there those two men
had stood and known it all the time! I was in the wagon, so they were
secure from personal violence, but I have a vague impression of some
"pet names" flying wildly about in the air in that vicinity. Then we
trundled safely down the lane. We were to go in the direction leading
away from home,--the horse's. I don't think he perceived it at first,
but as soon he did snuff the fact, which happened when he had gone
perhaps three rods, he quietly turned around and headed the other way,
paying no more attention to my reins or my terrific "whoas!" than if I
were a sleeping babe. A horse is none of your woman's-rights men. He
is Pauline. He suffers not the woman to usurp authority over him. He
never says anything nor votes anything, but declares himself
unequivocally by taking things into his own hands, whenever he knows
there is nobody but a woman behind him,--and somehow he always does
know. After Halicarnassus had turned him back and set him going the
right way, I took on a gruff, manny voice, to deceive. Nonsense! I
could almost see him snap his fingers at me. He minded my whip no more
than he did a fly,--not so much as he did some flies. Grande said she
supposed his back was all callous. I acted upon the suggestion, knelt
down in the bottom of the wagon, and leaned over the dasher to whip him
on his belly, then climbed out on the shafts and snapped about his
ears; but he stood it much better than I. Finally I found that by
taking the small end of the wooden whip-handle, and sticking it into
him, I could elicit a faint flash of light; so I did it with assiduity,
but the moderate trot which even that produced was not enough to
accomplish my design, which was to outstrip the two men and make them
run or beg. The opposing forces arrived at the pump about the same
time.
Halicarnassus took the handle, and gave about five jerks. Then the
Anakim took it and gave five more. Then they both stopped and wiped
their faces.
"What do you suppose this pump was put here for?" asked Halicarnassus.
"A milestone, probably," replied the Anakim.
Then they resumed their Herculean efforts till the water came, and then
they got into the wagon, and we drove into the blackberries once more,
where we arrived just in season to escape a thunder-shower, and pile
merrily into one of several coaches waiting to convey passengers in
various directions as soon as the train should come.
It is very selfish, but fine fun, to have secured your own chosen seat
and bestowed your own luggage, and have nothing to do but witness the
anxieties and efforts of other people. The exquisite pleasure we
enjoyed for fifteen minutes, edified at the last by hearing one of our
coachmen call out, "Here, Rosey, this way!"--whereupon a manly voice,
in the darkness, near us, soliloquized, "Respectful way of addressing a
judge of the Supreme Court!" and, being interrogated, the voice
informed us that "Rosey" was the vulgate for Judge Rosecranz; whereupon
Halicarnassus over the rampant democracy by remarking that the
diminutive was probably a term of endearment rather than familiarity;
whereupon the manly voice--if I might say it--snickered audibly in the
darkness, and we all relapsed into silence. But could anything be more
characteristic of a certain phase of the manners of our great and
glorious country? Where are the Trollopes? Where is Dickens? Where is
Basil Hall?
It is but a dreary ride to Lake George on a dark and rainy evening,
unless people like riding for its own sake, as I do. If there are suns
and stars and skies, very well. If there are not, very well too: I
like to ride all the same. I like everything in this world but
Saratoga. Once or twice our monotony was broken up by short halts
before country inns. At one an excitement was going on. "Had a
casualty here this afternoon," remarked a fresh passenger, as soon as
he was fairly seated. A casualty is a windfall to a country village.
It is really worth while to have a head broken occasionally, for the
wholesome stirring-up it gives to the heads that are not broken. On
the whole, I question whether collisions and collusions do not cause as
much good as harm. Certainly, people seem to take the most lively
satisfaction in receiving and imparting all the details concerning
them. Our passenger-friend opened his budget with as much complacence
as ever did Mr. Gladstone or Disraeli, and with a confident air of
knowing that he was going not only to enjoy a piece of good-fortune
himself, but to administer a great gratification to us. Our "casualty"
turned out to be the affair of a Catholic priest, of which our informer
spoke only in dark hints and with significant shoulder-shrugs and
eyebrow-elevations, because it was "not exactly the thing to get out,
you know"; but if it wasn't to get out, why did he let it out? and so
from my dark corner I watched him as a cat does a mouse, and the
lamp-light shone full upon him, and I understood every word and shrug,
and I am going to tell it all to the world. I translated that the holy
father had been "skylarking" in a boat, and in gay society had
forgotten his vows of frugality and abstinence and general
mortification of the flesh, and had become, not very drunk, but drunk
enough to be dangerous, when he came ashore and took a horse in his
hands, and so upset his carriage, and gashed his temporal artery, and
came to grief, which is such a casualty as does not happen every day,
and I don't blame people for making the most of it. Then the moral was
pointed, the tale adorned, and the impression deepened, solemnized, and
struck home by the fact that the very horse concerned in the "casualty"
was to be fastened behind our coach, and the whole population came out
with interns and umbrellas to tie him on,--all but one man, who was
deaf, and stood on the piazza, anxious and eager to know everything
that had been and was still occurring, and yet sorry to give trouble,
and so compromising the matter and making it worse, as compromisers
generally do, by questioning everybody with a deprecating, fawning air.
Item. We shall all, if we live long enough, be deaf, but we need not
be meek about it. I for one am determined to walk up to people and
demand what they are saying at the point of the bayonet. Deafness, if
it must be so, but independence at any rate.
And when the fulness of time is come, we alight at Fort-William-Henry
Hotel, and all night long through the sentient woods I hear the booming
of Johnson's cannon, the rattle of Dieskan's guns, and that wild
war-whoop, more terrible than all. Again old Monro watches from his
fortress-walls the steadily approaching foe, and looks in vain for
help, save to his own brave heart. I see the light of conquest shining
in his foeman's eye, darkened by the shadow of the fate that waits his
coming on a bleak Northern hill but, generous in the hour of victory,
he shall not be less noble in defeat,--for to generous hearts all
generous hearts are friendly, whether they stand face to face or side
by side.
Over the woods and the waves, when the morning breaks, like a
bridegroom coming forth from his chamber, rejoicing as a strong man to
run a race, comes up the sun in his might and crowns himself king. All
the summer day, from morn to dewy eve, we sail over the lakes of
Paradise. Blue waters, and blue sky, soft clouds and green islands,
and fair, fruitful shores, sharp-pointed hills, long, gentle slopes and
swells, and the lights and shadows of far-stretching woods; and over
all the potence of the unseen past, the grand, historic past,--soft
over all the invisible mantle which our fathers flung at their
departing,--the mystic effluence of the spirits that trod these wilds
and sailed these waters,--the courage and the fortitude, the hope that
battled against hope, the comprehensive outlook, the sagacious purpose,
the resolute will, the unhesitating self-sacrifice, the undaunted
devotion which has made this heroic ground; cast these into your own
glowing crucible, O gracious friend, and crystallize for yourself such
a gem of days as shall worthily be set forever in your crown of the
beatitudes.