THERE was a little crowd of friends at the railway station, to see us
take our leave of Chicago, at noon on Sunday, January 20, 1884. The
weather was cold, but there was a bright, sunny sky. Everybody was
in good spirits. The “Edwin Forrest” car, in which we travelled, had
now quite a familiar appearance. George, a colored attendant who had
charge of it, was there, with a merry grin upon his broad, intelligent
features. “A right good fellow, George,” said Irving. “Yes, that’s so,”
was George’s response, as he relieved him of his coat and stick, and
led the way to the pretty little suite of rooms on wheels allotted to
Irving and his friends. The other cars were also admirably appointed.
“This is something like a day for travelling,” said one member of
the company to another. The sun blazed down upon them as they walked
about, awaiting the signal for departure, but there appeared to be very
little warmth in it. The sunbeams were bright, but they seemed to have
contracted a chill as they fell. Every now and then a gust of icy wind
would come along, as if to put truth into this conclusion. Terriss and
Tyars, braving the weather without overcoats, as Englishmen delight to
do, soon discovered that, after all, the winter was still with us. As
the cry “All aboard,” followed by the clanging of the engine-bell, set
the train in motion, we entered once more upon severely wintry scenes
of ice and snow.
Within a very short time we found ourselves in the midst of
snow-drifts, out of which preceding trains had had to cut their way.
Gangs of men were clearing the track, flinging up the snow on both
sides of the road in solid shovelfuls. The white _débris_ was piled
up six and eight feet high, where the snow had settled down in great
drifts upon the line. “One train was stuck here five hours yesterday,”
said the guard. “It is the heaviest snow in my experience.”
Moving onwards once more, we travelled through a world of snow: through
prairie-lands, where the wind came tearing after us, waited upon by
scudding clouds of snow, that rose like spray, to fall in its wake as
if the prairie were a snow-sea; past forests of oak, with the brown
leaves clinging to the tough branches, that moved with a sturdy kind
of protest against the boisterous wind; across great rivers, that were
closed to navigation. Now and then skating-parties flitted by us in
sheltered bends of the great silent water-ways, and at intervals the
sun would burst out upon the white world and fill it with icy diamonds.
We met a train with five engines. It came plunging along,—a veritable
procession of locomotives. The foremost of them were mighty ploughs,
to charge the growing snow-drifts we had left behind us. By and by the
sun went down, and when our lamps were lighted, and it was night, as
we thought, we looked out to see one of the magnificent sunsets which
had been puzzling for many weeks the wise men of both worlds,—a wide
red glare in the sky, stretching away as far as the eye could see,
with a white foreground, the line of the horizon dotted with the dark
configuration of farm buildings and forest trees.
At three o’clock in the morning we arrived at St. Louis, and on the
next day I walked across the ice-locked Mississippi. In a street
adjacent to the wharves, where steamers and boats of all kinds were
frozen up, were the remains of an old hotel, that had been burnt out a
short time previously. The thermometer stood at twenty degrees below
zero. A first glance at the place, from a short distance, showed a
house with what looked like packs of wool thrust out at the windows,
and great bundles and entanglements of wool hanging down to the ground
from eaves and window-sills. On examination these strange appearances
turned out to be excrescences of ice,—part of the water that had
been poured upon the flames by the fire-brigades, whose engines had
literally been frozen up in the street. Inside the devastated buildings
the ruins were hung with icicles many feet in length, with others
rising to meet them, mimicking the stalactites and stalagmites of the
Cheddar caverns, in England, not to mention the more famous caves of
Kentucky.
A picturesque city, St. Louis, smoky and not overclean, but seated
grandly upon the broad river which local enterprise has spanned with
a roadway that is worthy of the engineering skill of the people whose
locomotives climb the Rocky Mountains, and whose bridges are the
admiration of the world. One of the picturesque memories of the tour,
that will reappear at odd times in “the magic lantern of the mental
vision,” will be the procession of carts and wagons drawn by teams of
mules, driven by colored drivers, that is continually passing over the
bridge, across the Mississippi, at St. Louis. The English government
have obtained a great many mules from this part of the United States.
There could be no finer breed of this useful animal than the examples
one saw at St. Louis. The drivers, almost to a man, appeared to be
wearing old army cloaks. The greyish-blue of the cloth and the red
linings, toned down to rare “symphonies” of worn color, were in perfect
harmony with the atmospheric and material surroundings. Smoke hanging
like a pall over the city; a wintry mist creeping along the icy river;
the approaches to the bridge lost in the local haze of smoke and snowy
clouds; the great mercantile procession of mules, and carelessly
laden wagons, bursting with cotton, corn, and hides, made a fine busy
foreground to a very novel scene.
St. Louis accepted the plays, the acting, the scenery, and the
stage management of the Lyceum with much of the earnest admiration
that had characterized the Chicago audiences. The “Republican,” the
“Globe-Democrat,” the “Post-Dispatch,” and the “Chronicle” had lengthy
and appreciative notices of “The Lyons Mail,” “The Bells,” and “The
Merchant of Venice.” The spirit of the criticism is crystallized
in the following remarks, which appeared as an editorial in the
“Post-Dispatch” of Jan. 22:—
To the delighted audience which hung with rapt attention last night
on each word and look, each tone and motion, of Henry Irving, there
was only one element of disappointment. This was that they had not
been prepared at all for any such magnificent revelation of dramatic
genius.... As far as the people of St. Louis are concerned we have
only to say that those who miss seeing him will sustain a loss that
can never be made good.