IV

Realf's stay in Columbus must have been in that time of abeyance between

Brown's capture and his death; but it must have been after the hanging

at Charlestown that one night I was a particle of the crowd which seemed

to fill the State House yard on its western front, dimly listening to

the man whose figure was a blur against the pale stone. I knew that this

man was that Abraham Lincoln who had met Stephen A. Douglas in the

famous Illinois debates, and who was now on his way home to Illinois

from his recognition in the East as a man of national importance. I

could not well hear what he said, and I did not stay long; if I had

heard perfectly, I might not, with my small pleasure in public speaking,

have stayed long; and of that incident, and of the man whom history had

already taken into her keeping, and tragedy was waiting to devote to

eternal remembrance, I have only the vision of his figure against the

pale stone, and the black crowd spread vaguely before him. Later I had a

fuller sense of his historic quality, but still so slight, when he stood

on the great stairway within the State House and received the

never-ending crowd which pushed upward, man and woman after man and

woman, and took his hand, and tried to say something as fit as it was

fond. That would have been when he was on the journey, which became a

flight, to his inauguration as President at Washington. He had been

elected President, and the North felt safe in his keeping, though the

dangers that threatened the nation had only gathered denser upon it, and

the strange anomaly which called itself the government had been

constantly betraying itself to the hostility within it and without.

The people who pushed upward to seize the great hand held out to every

one looked mostly like the country folk such as he had been of, and the

best of him always was, and I could hear their hoarse or cracked voices

as they hailed him, oftenest in affectionate joking, sometimes in

fervent blessing; but for anything I could make out he answered nothing.

He stood passive, submissive, with the harsh lines of his lower face set

immovably, and his thick-lashed eyes sad above them, while he took the

hands held up to him one after another, and shook them wearily, wearily.

It was a warm day such as in late February, or earliest March, brings

the summer up to southern Ohio before its time, and brings the birds

with it for the delusion of a week or a fortnight; and as we walked out,

my companion and I, we left a sweltering crowd within the State House,

and, straying slowly homeward, suffered under a sun as hot as June's.

V

I do not say July's sun or August's, because I wish my reader to believe

me, and any one who has known the July or August, or the September even,

of southern Ohio has known something worse than tropical heat, if

travelers tell the truth of the tropics; and no one could believe me if

I said such heat ever came in February or March. There were whole

fortnights of unbroken summer heat in Columbus, when the night scarcely

brought relief from the day, and the swarming fly ceded, as Dante says,

only to the swarming mosquito. Few people, even of those who might have

gone, went away; none went away for the season, as the use is now,

though it is still much more the use in the East than in the West. There

were excursions to the northern lakes or to Niagara and down the St.

Lawrence; there were even brief intervals of resort to Cape May; but the

custom was for people to stay at home, to wear the thinnest clothes, and

drink cooling drinks, and use fans, and try to sleep under

mosquito-bars, after sitting out on the front steps. That was where

calls were oftenest paid and received, and as long as one was young the

talk did not languish, though how one did when one was old, that is,

thirty or forty, or along there, we who were young could not have

imagined. There was no sea or any great water to send its cooling breath

over the land which stretched from the Ohio River to Lake Erie with

scarcely a heave of its vast level. We had not even the satisfaction of

knowing that we were suffering from a heat-wave; the notion had not been

invented by quarter of a century yet; we suffered ignorantly on and on,

and did not intermit our occupations or our pleasures; some of us did

not even carry umbrellas against the sun; these we reserved for the rain

which could alone save us, for a few hours in a sudden dash, or for a

day in the storm that washed the air clean of its heat.

The deluging which our streets got from these tempests was the only

cleaning which I can recollect seeing them given. There was indeed a

chain-gang which intermittently hoed about in the gutters, but could not

be said to clean them, while it remained the opprobrium of our

civilization. It was made up mostly of negroes, but there were some

drink-sodden whites who dragged a lengthening chain over the dust or

hung the heavy ball which each wore over the hollows of their arms when

urged to more rapid movement. Once I saw, with a peculiar sense of our

common infamy in the sight, a quite well-dressed young man, shackled

with the rest and hiding his face as best he could with eyes fastened on

the ground as he scraped it. Somehow it was told me that he had been

unjustly sentenced to this penalty, and the vision of his tragedy

remains with me yet, as if I had acted his part in it. I dare say it was

not an uncommon experience by which when I used to see some dreadful

thing, or something disgracefully foolish, I became the chief actor in

the spectacle; at least I am certain that I suffered with that hapless

wretch as cruelly as if I had been in his place. Perhaps we are always

meant to put ourselves in the place of those who are put, or who put

themselves, to shame.

Municipal hygiene was then in its infantile, if not in its embryonic

stage, and if there was any system of drainage in Columbus it must have

been surface drainage, such as I saw in Baltimore twenty-five years

later. After the rain the sun would begin again its daily round from

east to west in a cloudless sky where by night the moon seemed to

reflect its heat as well as its light. They must still have such summers

in Columbus, and no doubt the greatest part of the people fight or faint

through them as they do in our cities everywhere, but in those summers

even the good people, people good in the social sense, remained, and not

merely the bad people who justly endured hardship because of their

poverty. I had become accustomed to the more temperate climate of the

Lake Shore, and I felt the heat as something like a personal grievance,

but not the less I kept at work and kept at play like the rest. Once

only I was offered the chance of escape for a few days (it was in the

John Brown year of 1859) when I was commissioned to celebrate the

attractions of a summer resort which had been opened a few hours away

from the capital. I had heard much talk of the coolness of White

Sulphur, as it was called, and I expected much more than I had heard,

but I now got much more than I had expected.

There must have been a break in the heat when at some unearthly hour of

the July morning I had taken the train which would leave me at White

Sulphur, but in the sleep which youth can almost always fall into I was

not sensible of it. I say fell into, but I slept upright as one did on

the trains in those times, and when my train stopped at the station

which as yet made no sign of being a station I stumbled down the car

steps to a world white with frost in the July morning. My foot slid over

the new planking of the platform as on ice, and on the way up to the new

hotel the fences bristled with the glacial particles which bearded the

limbs of the wayside trees, and the stubble of the wheat and fields, and

the blades of the corn, and sparkled in the red of the early sun which

was rising to complete the devastation. I was in those thinnest summer

linens, with no provision of change against such an incredible caprice

of the weather, and when I reached the hotel there was no fire I could

go to from the fresh, clean, thrillingly cold chamber, with its white

walls and green lattice door, which I was shown into. No detail of the

time remains with me except what now seems to have been my day-long

effort to keep warm by playing nine-pins with a Cincinnati journalist,

much my senior, but as helpless as myself against the cold. There must

have been breakfast and dinner and supper, with their momentary heat,

but when I went to bed I found only the lightest summer provision of

sheet and coverlet, and I was too meek to ask for blankets.