the line of Bunker Hill Monument, soaring preëminent among the
emulous foundry-chimneys of the sister city, is fine enough to need
no comparison with other fine sights. Thanks to the mansard curves and
dormer-windows of the newer houses, there is a singularly picturesque
variety among the roofs that stretch along the bay, and rise one above
another on the city's three hills, grouping themselves about the State
House, and surmounted by its India-rubber dome. But, after all, does
human weakness crave some legendary charm, some grace of uncertain
antiquity, in the picturesqueness it sees? I own that the future, to
which we are often referred for the “stuff that dreams are made of,” is
more difficult for the fancy than the past, that the airy amplitude of
its possibilities is somewhat chilly, and that we naturally long for the
snug quarters of old, made warm by many generations of life. Besides,
Europe spoils us ingenuous Americans, and flatters our sentimentality
into ruinous extravagances. Looking at her many-storied former times,
we forget our own past, neat, compact, and convenient for the poorest
memory to dwell in. Yet an American not infected with the discontent of
travel could hardly approach this superb city without feeling something
of the coveted pleasure in her, without a reverie of her Puritan and
Revolutionary times, and the great names and deeds of her heroic annals.
I think, however, we were well to be rid of this yearning for a native
American antiquity; for in its indulgence one cannot but regard
himself and his contemporaries as cumberers of the ground, delaying
the consummation of that hoary past which will be so fascinating to
a semi-Chinese posterity, and will be, ages hence, the inspiration of
Pigeon-English poetry and romance. Let us make much of our two
hundred and fifty years, and cherish the present as our golden age. We
healthy-minded people in the horse-cars are loath to lose a moment
of it, and are aggrieved that the draw of the bridge should be up,
naturally looking on what is constantly liable to happen as an especial
malice of the fates. All the drivers of the vehicles that clog the draw
on either side have a like sense of personal injury; and apparently it
would go hard with the captain of that leisurely vessel below if he were
delivered into our hands. But this impatience and anger are entirely
illusive.
We are really the most patient people in the world, especially as
regards any incorporated, non-political oppressions. A lively Gaul, who
travelled among us some thirty years ago, found that, in the absence
of political control, we gratified the human instinct of obedience by
submitting to small tyrannies unknown abroad, and were subject to the
steamboat-captain, the hotel-clerk, the stage-driver, and the waiter,
who all bullied us fearlessly; but though some vestiges of this bondage
remain, it is probably passing away. The abusive Frenchman's assertion
would not at least hold good concerning the horse-car conductors, who,
in spite of a lingering preference for touching or punching passengers
for their fare instead of asking for it, are commonly mild-mannered and
good-tempered, and disposed to molest us as little as possible. I have
even received from one of them a mark of such kindly familiarity as the
offer of a check which he held between his lips, and thrust out his face
to give me, both his hands being otherwise occupied; and their lives are
in nowise such luxurious careers as we should expect in public despots.
The oppression of the horse-car passenger is not from them, and the
passenger himself is finally to blame for it. When the draw closes at
last, and we rumble forward into the city street, a certain stir of
expectation is felt among us. The long and eventful journey is nearly
ended, and now we who are to get out of the cars can philosophically
amuse ourselves with the passions and sufferings of those who are to
return in our places. You must choose the time between five and six
o'clock in the afternoon, if you would make this grand study of the
national character in its perfection. Then the spectacle offered in any
arriving horse-car will serve your purpose. At nearly every corner of
the street up which it climbs stands an experienced suburban, who darts
out upon the car, and seizes a vacant place in it. Presently all the
places are taken, and before we reach Temple Street, where helpless
groups of women are gathered to avail themselves of the first seats
vacated, an alert citizen is stationed before each passenger who is to
retire at the summons, “Please pass out forrad.” When this is heard in
Bowdoin Square, we rise and push forward, knuckling one another's backs
in our eagerness, and perhaps glancing behind us at the tumult within.
Not only are all our places occupied, but the aisle is left full of
passengers precariously supporting themselves by the straps in the roof.
The rear platform is stormed and carried by a party with bundles; the
driver is instantly surrounded by another detachment; and as the car
moves away from the office, the platform steps are filled.
“Is it possible,” I asked myself, when I had written as far as this in
the present noble history, “that I am not exaggerating? It can't be
that this and the other enormities I have been describing are of daily
occurrence in Boston. Let me go verify, at least, my picture of the
evening horse-car.” So I take my way to Bowdoin Square, and in the
conscientious spirit of modern inquiry, I get aboard the first car that
comes up. Like every other car, it is meant to seat twenty passengers.
It does this, and besides it carries in the aisle and on the platform
forty passengers standing. The air is what you may imagine, if you know
that not only is the place so indecently crowded, but that in the centre
of the car are two adopted citizens, far gone in drink, who have the
aspect and the smell of having passed the day in an ash-heap. These
citizens being quite helpless themselves, are supported by the public,
and repose in singular comfort upon all the passengers near them; I,
myself, contribute an aching back to the common charity, and a genteelly
dressed young lady takes one of them from time to time on her knee. But
they are comparatively an ornament to society till the conductor objects
to the amount they offer him for fare; for after that they wish to fight
him during the journey, and invite him at short intervals to step out
and be shown what manner of men they are. The conductor passes it off
for a joke, and so it is, and a very good one.
In that unhappy mass it would be an audacious spirit who should say
of any particular arm or leg, “It is mine,” and all the breath is in
common. Nothing, it would seem, could add to our misery; but we discover
our error when the conductor squeezes a tortuous path through us, and
collects the money for our transportation. I never can tell, during the
performance of this feat, whether he or the passengers are more to be
pitied.
The people who are thus indecorously huddled and jammed together,
without regard to age or sex, otherwise lead lives of at least comfort,
and a good half of them cherish themselves in every physical way with
unparalleled zeal. They are handsomely clothed; they are delicately neat
in linen; they eat well, or, if not well, as well as their cooks
will let them, and at all events expensively; they house in dwellings
appointed in a manner undreamt of elsewhere in the world,--dwellings
wherein furnaces make a summer-heat, where fountains of hot and cold
water flow at a touch, where light is created or quenched by the turning
of a key, where all is luxurious upholstery, and magical ministry to
real or fancied needs. They carry the same tastes with them to their
places of business; and when they “attend divine service,” it is with
the understanding that God is to receive them in a richly carpeted
house, deliciously warmed and perfectly ventilated, where they may
adore Him at their ease upon cushioned seats,--secured seats. Yet these
spoiled children of comfort, when they ride to or from business or
church, fail to assert rights that the benighted Cockney, who never
heard of our plumbing and registers, or even the oppressed Parisian,
who is believed not to change his linen from one revolution to another,
having paid for, enjoys. When they enter the “full” horse-car, they find
themselves in a place inexorable as the grave to their greenbacks, where
not only is their adventitious consequence stripped from them, but the
courtesies of life are impossible, the inherent dignity of the person is
denied, and they are reduced below the level of the most uncomfortable
nations of the Old World. The philosopher accustomed to draw consolation
from the sufferings of his richer fellow-men, and to infer an overruling
Providence from their disgraces, might well bless Heaven for the
spectacle of such degradation, if his thanksgiving were not prevented
by his knowledge that this is quite voluntary. And now consider that
on every car leaving the city at this time the scene is much the same;
reflect that the horror is enacting, not only in Boston, but in New
York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati,--wherever
the horse-car, that tinkles well-nigh round the Continent, is known;
remember that the same victims are thus daily sacrificed, without an
effort to right themselves: and then you will begin to realize--dimly
and imperfectly, of course--the unfathomable meekness of the American
character. The “full” horse-car is a prodigy whose likeness is
absolutely unknown elsewhere, since the Neapolitan gig went out; and I
suppose it will be incredible to the future in our own country. When I
see such a horse-car as I have sketched move away from its station, I
feel that it is something not only emblematic and interpretative,
but monumental; and I know that when art becomes truly national, the
overloaded horse-car will be celebrated in painting and sculpture. And
in after ages, when the oblique-eyed, swarthy American of that time,
pausing before some commemorative bronze or historical picture of our
epoch, contemplates this stupendous spectacle of human endurance, I hope
he will be able to philosophize more satisfactorily than we can now,
concerning the mystery of our strength as a nation and our weakness as a
public.
A DAY'S PLEASURE
I.--THE MORNING.
They were not a large family, and their pursuits and habits were very
simple; yet the summer was lapsing toward the first pathos of autumn
before they found themselves all in such case as to be able to take the
day's pleasure they had planned so long. They had agreed often and often
that nothing could be more charming than an excursion down the Harbor,
either to Gloucester, or to Nahant, or to Nantasket Beach, or to Hull
and Hingham, or to any point within the fatal bound beyond which is
seasickness. They had studied the steamboat advertisements, day after
day, for a long time, without making up their minds which of these
charming excursions would be the most delightful; and when they had at
last fixed upon one and chosen some day for it, that day was sure to be
heralded by a long train of obstacles, or it dawned upon weather that
was simply impossible. Besides, in the suburbs, you are apt to sleep
late, unless the solitary ice-wagon of the neighborhood makes a very
uncommon rumbling in going by; and I believe that the excursion was
several times postponed by the tardy return of the pleasurers from
dreamland, which, after all, is not the worst resort, or the least
interesting--or profitable, for the matter of that. But at last the
great day came,--a blameless Thursday alike removed from the cares of
washing and ironing days, and from the fatigues with which every week
closes. One of the family chose deliberately to stay at home; but
the severest scrutiny could not detect a hindrance in the health
or circumstances of any of the rest, and the weather was delicious.
Everything, in fact, was so fair and so full of promise, that they could
almost fancy a calamity of some sort hanging over its perfection, and
possibly bred of it; for I suppose that we never have anything made
perfectly easy for us without a certain reluctance and foreboding.
That morning they all got up so early that they had time to waste over
breakfast before taking the 7.30 train for Boston; and they naturally
wasted so much of it that they reached the station only in season for
the 8.00. But there is a difference between reaching the station and
quietly taking the cars, especially if one of your company has been left
at home, hoping to cut across and take the cars at a station which they
reach some minutes later, and you, the head of the party, are obliged,
at a loss of breath and personal comfort and dignity, to run down to
that station and see that the belated member has arrived there, and then
hurry back to your own, and embody the rest, with their accompanying
hand-bags and wraps and sun-umbrellas, into some compact shape for
removal into the cars, during the very scant minute that the train stops
at Charlesbridge. Then when you are all aboard, and the tardy member has
been duly taken up at the next station, and you would be glad to spend
the time in looking about on the familiar variety of life which every
car presents in every train on every road in this vast American world,
you are oppressed and distracted by the cares which must attend the
pleasure-seeker, and which the more thickly beset him the more deeply he
plunges into enjoyment.
I can learn very little from the note-book of the friend whose
adventures I am relating in regard to the scenery of Somerville, and the
region generally through which the railroad passes between Charlesbridge
and Boston; but so much knowledge of it may be safely assumed on the
part of the reader as to relieve me of the grave responsibility of
describing it. Still, I may say that it is not unpicturesque, and that
I have a pleasure, which I hope the reader shares, in anything like salt
meadows and all spaces subject to the tide, whether flooded by it or
left bare with their saturated grasses by its going down. I think, also,
there is something fine in the many-roofed, many-chimneyed highlands of
Chelsea (if it is Chelsea), as you draw near the railroad bridge, and
there is a pretty stone church on a hill-side there which has the good
fortune, so rare with modern architecture and so common with the old, of
seeming a natural outgrowth of the spot where it stands, and which is
as purely an object of aesthetic interest to me, who know nothing of
its sect or doctrine, as any church in a picture could be; and there is,
also, the Marine Hospital on the heights (if it is the Marine Hospital),
from which I hope the inmates can behold the ocean, and exult in
whatever misery keeps them ashore.
But let me not so hasten over this part of my friend's journey as to
omit all mention of the amphibious Irish houses which stand about on
the low lands along the railroad-sides, and which you half expect to see
plunge into the tidal mud of the neighborhood, with a series of hoarse
croaks, as the train approaches. Perhaps twenty-four trains pass those
houses every twenty-four hours, and it is a wonder that the inhabitants
keep their interest in them, or have leisure to bestow upon any of
them. Yet, as you dash along so bravely, you can see that you arrest
the occupations of all these villagers as by a kind of enchantment; the
children pause and turn their heads toward you from their mud-pies (to
the production of which there is literally no limit in that region);
the matron rests one parboiled hand on her hip, letting the other still
linger listlessly upon the wash-board, while she lifts her eyes from
the suds to look at you; the boys, who all summer long are forever just
going into the water or just coming out of it, cease their buttoning or
unbuttoning; the baby, which has been run after and caught and suitably
posed, turns its anguished eyes upon you, where also falls the mother's
gaze, while her descending palm is arrested in mid air. I forbear to
comment upon the surprising populousness of these villages, where, in
obedience to all the laws of health, the inhabitants ought to be wasting
miserably away, but where they flourish in spite of them. Even Accident
here seems to be robbed of half her malevolence; and that baby (who
will presently be chastised with terrific uproar) passes an infancy of
intrepid enjoyment amidst the local perils, and is no more affected
by the engines and the cars than by so many fretful hens with their
attendant broods of chickens.
[Illustration: “That sweet young blonde, who arrives by most trains.”]
When sometimes I long for the excitement and variety of travel, which,
for no merit of mine, I knew in other days, I reproach myself, and
silence all my repinings with some such question as, Where could you
find more variety or greater excitement than abounds in and near the
Fitchburg Depot when a train arrives? And to tell the truth, there
is something very inspiring in the fine eagerness with which all the
passengers rise as soon as the locomotive begins to slow, and huddle
forward to the door, in their impatience to get out; while the
suppressed vehemence of the hackmen is also thrilling in its way, not
to mention the instant clamor of the baggage-men as they read and
repeat the numbers of the checks in strident tones. It would be ever so
interesting to depict all these people, but it would require volumes for
the work, and I reluctantly let them all pass out without a word,--all
but that sweet young blonde who arrives by most trains, and who, putting
up her eye-glass with a ravishing air, bewitchingly peers round among
the bearded faces, with little tender looks of hope and trepidation, for
the face which she wants, and which presently bursts through the circle
of strange visages. The owner of the face then hurries forward to meet
that sweet blonde, who gives him a little drooping hand as if it were a
delicate flower she laid in his; there is a brief mutual hesitation
long enough merely for an electrical thrill to run from heart to
heart through the clasping hands, and then he stoops toward her, and
distractingly kisses her. And I say that there is no law of conscience
or propriety worthy the name of law--barbarity, absurdity, call it
rather--to prevent any one from availing himself of that providential
near-sightedness, and beatifying himself upon those lips,--nothing to
prevent it but that young fellow, whom one might not, of course, care to
provoke.
Among the people who now rush forward and heap themselves into the
two horse-cars and one omnibus, placed before the depot by a wise
forethought for the public comfort to accommodate the train-load of
two hundred passengers, I always note a type that is both pleasing
and interesting to me. It is a lady just passing middle life; from her
kindly eyes the envious crow, whose footprints are just traceable at
their corners, has not yet drunk the brightness, but she looks just a
thought sadly, if very serenely, from them. I know nothing in the world
of her; I may have seen her twice or a hundred times, but I must always
be making bits of romances about her. That is she in faultless gray,
with the neat leather bag in her lap, and a bouquet of the first
autumnal blooms perched in her shapely hands which are prettily yet
substantially gloved in some sort of gauntlets. She can be easy and
dignified, my dear middle-aged heroine, even in one of our horse-cars,
where people are for the most part packed like cattle in a pen. She
shows no trace of dust or fatigue from the thirty or forty miles which I
choose to fancy she has ridden from the handsome elm-shaded New England
town of five or ten thousand people, where I choose to think she lives.
From a vague horticultural association with those gauntlets, as well
as from the autumnal blooms, I take it she loves flowers, and gardens a
good deal with her own hands, and keeps house-plants in the winter, and
of course a canary. Her dress, neither rich nor vulgar, makes me believe
her fortunes modest and not recent; her gentle face has just so much
intellectual character as it is good to see in a woman's face; I suspect
that she reads pretty regularly the new poems and histories, and I know
that she is the life and soul of the local book-club. Is she married, or
widowed, or one of the superfluous forty thousand? That is what I never
can tell. But I think that most probably she is married, and that her
husband is very much in business, and does not share so much as he
respects her tastes. I have no particular reason for thinking that she
has no children now, and that the sorrow for the one she lost so long
ago has become only a pensive silence, which, however, a long summer
twilight can yet deepen to tears.... Upon my word! Am I then one to give
way to this sort of thing? Madam, I ask pardon. I have no right to be
sentimentalizing you. Yet your face is one to make people dream kind
things of you, and I cannot keep my reveries away from it.
But in the mean time I neglect the momentous history which I have
proposed to write, and leave my day's pleasurers to fade into the
background of a fantastic portrait. The truth is, I cannot look without
pain upon the discomforts which they suffer at this stage of their
joyous enterprise. At the best, the portables of such a party are apt
to be grievous embarrassments: a package of shawls and parasols and
umbrellas and India-rubbers, however neatly made up at first, quickly
degenerates into a shapeless mass, which has finally to be carried with
as great tenderness as an ailing child; and the lunch is pretty sure to
overflow the hand-bags and to eddy about you in paper parcels; while the
bottle of claret, that bulges the side of one of the bags, and
“That will show itself without,”
defying your attempts to look as it were cold tea, gives a crushing
touch of disreputability to the whole affair. Add to this the fact that
but half the party have seats, and that the others have to sway and
totter about the car in that sudden contact with all varieties of
fellow-men, to which we are accustomed in the cars, and you must allow
that these poor merrymakers have reasons enough to rejoice when this
part of their day's pleasure is over. They are so plainly bent upon a
sail down the Harbor, that before they leave the car they become
objects of public interest, and are at last made to give some account of
themselves.
“Going for a sail, I presume?” says a person hitherto in conversation
with the conductor. “Well, I wouldn't mind a sail myself to-day.”
“Yes,” answers the head of the party, “going to Gloucester.”
“Guess not,” says, very coldly and decidedly, one of the passengers,
who is reading that morning's “Advertiser;” and when the subject of this
surmise looks at him for explanations, he adds, “The City Council has
chartered the boat for to-day.”
Upon this the excursionists fall into great dismay and bitterness, and
upbraid the City Council, and wonder why last night's “Transcript” said
nothing about its oppressive action, and generally bewail their fate.
But at last they resolve to go somewhere, and, being set down, they make
up their warring minds upon Nahant, for the Nahant boat leaves the wharf
nearest them; and so they hurry away to India Wharf, amidst barrels and
bales and boxes and hacks and trucks, with interminable string-teams
passing before them at every crossing.
“At any rate,” says the leader of the expedition, “we shall see the
Gardens of Maolis,--those enchanted gardens which have fairly been
advertised into my dreams, and where I've been told,” he continues,
with an effort to make the prospect an attractive one, yet not without
a sense of the meagreness of the materials, “they have a grotto and a
wooden bull.”