NOTHING in America is so unlike England as the desolate appearance
of the meadows in the fall and early winter months. From New York
to Boston, a journey of six hours, in the second week of December,
not a blade of green grass was to be seen. The train ran through a
wilderness of brown, burnt-up meadows. With a tinge of yellow in the
color of them, they would have resembled the late corn-stubbles of an
English landscape. But all were a dead, sombre brown, except once in
a way, where a clump of oaks still waved their russet leaves. Another
noticeable contrast to England is the wooden houses, that look so
temporary as compared with the brick and stone of the old country. The
absence of the trim gardens of English rural districts also strikes a
stranger, as do the curious and ragged fences that take the place of
the English hedge-rows. The New England homesteads are, however, more
like those of old England than are the farms of other States in the
Union.
The habit of letting out walls and buildings, roofs of barns, and sides
of houses, for the black and white advertisements of quack-medicine
venders and others, is a disfigurement of the land which every English
visitor notices with regret; and lovers of the picturesque, Americans
and English, grow positively angry over the disfigurement of the Hudson
by these money-making Goths and vandals.
A change of scene was promised for the Irving travellers on their
return to New York, over the same line. A cold wave from the West was
predicted. “We shall have snow before long,” said an American friend,
“and not unlikely a hard winter. I judge so from the fact that all the
great weather prophets say it will be a mild one. Your Canadian seer,
for instance, is dead on an exceptionally calm and warm winter. So let
us look out.”
Boston delighted the members of Irving’s company; all of them, except
Loveday, who contracted, on the way thither, an attack of malarial
fever. With true British pluck he fought his assailant until his first
spell of important work was over, and then he retreated. Medical
assistance, rest, and plenty of quinine, pulled him through. But the
company were destined later to sustain other climatic shocks; and they
all, more or less, had a dread of the threatened winter. Until Loveday
broke down everybody had stood the change of climate well. Reports
came from England that Miss Ellen Terry was ill in New York. On the
contrary, she had never been better than during these first weeks of
the tour. She suffered, as all English women do, from heated rooms.
“That is my only fear,” she said to me. “The climate!—I don’t object
to it. If they would only be content with it, I would. Some of the days
are gorgeous. The snap of cold, as they call it, was delightful to
me. But when I would be driving out in open carriages New York ladies
would be muffled up in close broughams. And, oh, the getting home
again!—to the hotel, I mean. An English hot-house, where they grow
pine-apples,—that is the only comparison I can think of. And their
private houses! How the dear people can stand the overwhelming heat of
them, I don’t know!”
The railway journey from Philadelphia to Boston was Irving’s first
experience of American travel.
“It is splendid,” he said, when I met him at his hotel, on the night of
his arrival. “Am I not tired? Not a bit. It has been a delightful rest.
I slept nearly the whole way, except once when going to the platform
and looking out. At a station a man asked me which was Irving, and I
pointed to Mead, who had been walking along the track, and was just
then getting into his car. No; I enjoyed the ride all the way; never
slept better; feel quite refreshed.”
Said Miss Terry, the next morning, when I saw her at the Tremont House,
“Oh, yes, I like the travelling! It did not tire me. Then we had such
lovely cars! But how different the stations are compared with ours!
No platforms!—you get down really upon the line. And how unfinished
it all looks,—except the cars, and they are perfect. Oh, yes! the
parlor-car beats our first-class carriage. I shall like Boston very
much,—though I never expect to like any place as well as New York.”