Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
[Illustration: A CINGHALESE GENTLEMAN.]
[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE BULLER, NEW ZEALAND.]
GREATER BRITAIN.
_A RECORD OF TRAVEL_
IN
ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES
DURING 1866-7.
BY
CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE.
_TWO VOLUMES IN ONE._
WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
[Illustration]
PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO.
1869.
TO
MY FATHER
I Dedicate
THIS BOOK.
C. W. D.
PREFACE.
IN 1866 and 1867, I followed England round the world: everywhere I was
in English-speaking, or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that
climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples had
modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always
one.
The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my
fellow and my guide--a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of
strange new lands--is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur
of our race, already girding the earth, which it is destined, perhaps,
eventually to overspread.
In America, the peoples of the world are being fused together, but they
are run into an English mould: Alfred‘s laws and Chaucer‘s tongue are
theirs whether they would or no. There are men who say that Britain in
her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across
the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done more than found
plantations of her own--that she has imposed her institutions upon the
offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through
America, England is speaking to the world.
Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humbler grounds: the
development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the
Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small
islands are by courtesy styled “Great,” America, Australia, India, must
form a Greater Britain.
C. W. D.
76 SLOANE STREET, S. W.
1_st November_, 1868.
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.
PART I.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. VIRGINIA 3
II. THE NEGRO 16
III. THE SOUTH 27
IV. THE EMPIRE STATE 33
V. CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT 43
VI. CANADA 55
VII. UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 69
VIII. THE PACIFIC RAILROAD 78
IX. OMPHALISM 86
X. LETTER FROM DENVER 91
XI. RED INDIA 102
XII. COLORADO 110
XIII. ROCKY MOUNTAINS 115
XIV. BRIGHAM YOUNG 122
XV. MORMONDOM 127
XVI. WESTERN EDITORS 131
XVII. UTAH 144
XVIII. NAMELESS ALPS 152
XIX. VIRGINIA CITY 166
XX. EL DORADO 179
XXI. LYNCH LAW 190
XXII. GOLDEN CITY 207
XXIII. LITTLE CHINA 218
XXIV. CALIFORNIA 227
XXV. MEXICO 233
XXVI. REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT 239
XXVII. BROTHERS 249
XXVIII. AMERICA 258
PART II.
I. PITCAIRN ISLAND 271
II. HOKITIKA 278
III. POLYNESIANS 293
IV. PAREWANUI PAH 299
V. THE MAORIES 319
VI. THE TWO FLIES 328
VII. THE PACIFIC 334
APPENDIX.
A MAORI DINNER 339
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME.
PART III.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SYDNEY 7
II. RIVAL COLONIES 15
III. VICTORIA 22
IV. SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY 38
V. COLONIAL DEMOCRACY 44
VI. PROTECTION 55
VII. LABOR 65
VIII. WOMAN 75
IX. VICTORIAN PORTS 79
X. TASMANIA 83
XI. CONFEDERATION 94
XII. ADELAIDE 98
XIII. TRANSPORTATION 109
XIV. AUSTRALIA 123
XV. COLONIES 130
PART IV.
I. MARITIME CEYLON 141
II. KANDY 154
III. MADRAS TO CALCUTTA 161
IV. BENARES 171
V. CASTE 178
VI. MOHAMMEDAN CITIES 191
VII. SIMLA 202
VIII. COLONIZATION 217
IX. THE “GAZETTE” 224
X. UMRITSUR 233
XI. LAHORE 245
XII. OUR INDIAN ARMY 249
XIII. RUSSIA 255
XIV. NATIVE STATES 267
XV. SCINDE 280
XVI. OVERLAND ROUTES 289
XVII. BOMBAY 298
XVIII. THE MOHURRUM 305
XIX. ENGLISH LEARNING 312
XX. INDIA 320
XXI. DEPENDENCIES 333
XXII. FRANCE IN THE EAST 339
XXIII. THE ENGLISH 346
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
VOLUME I.
PAGE
VIEW FROM THE BULLER Frontispiece.
A CINGHALESE GENTLEMAN Frontispiece.
PROFILE OF “JOE SMITH” } 150
FULL FACE OF “JOE SMITH” }
PORTER ROCKWELL 154
FRIDAY‘S STATION--VALLEY OF LAKE TAHOE 176
TEAMING UP THE GRADE AT SLIPPERY FORD, IN THE
SIERRA 178
VIEW ON THE AMERICAN RIVER--THE PLACE WHERE
GOLD WAS FIRST FOUND 180
THE BRIDAL VEIL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY } 228
EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY }
MAPS.
ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC RAILROAD 78
LEAVENWORTH TO SALT LAKE CITY 92
SALT LAKE CITY TO SAN FRANCISCO 158
NEW ZEALAND 278
VOLUME II.
THE OLD AND THE NEW: BUSH SCENERY--COLLINS
STREET EAST, MELBOURNE 24
GOVERNOR DAVEY‘S PROCLAMATION 86
MAPS.
AUSTRALIA AND TASMANIA 16
OVERLAND ROUTES 290
PART I.
AMERICA.
GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER I.
VIRGINIA.
From the bows of the steamer _Saratoga_, on the 20th June, 1866, I
caught sight of the low works of Fort Monroe, as, threading her way
between the sand-banks of Capes Charles and Henry, the ship pressed on,
under sail and steam, to enter Chesapeake Bay.
Our sudden arrival amid shoals of sharks and kingfish, the keeping watch
for flocks of canvas-back ducks, gave us enough and to spare of idle
work till we fully sighted the Yorktown peninsula, overgrown with
ancient memories--ancient for America. Three towns of lost grandeur, or
their ruins, stand there still. Williamsburg, the former capital, graced
even to our time by the palaces where once the royal governors held more
than regal state; Yorktown, where Cornwallis surrendered to the
continental troops; Jamestown, the earliest settlement, founded in 1607,
thirteen years before old Governor Winthrop fixed the site of Plymouth,
Massachusetts.
A bump against the pier of Fort Monroe soon roused us from our musings,
and we found ourselves invaded by a swarm of stalwart negro troopers,
clothed in the cavalry uniform of the United States, who boarded us for
the mails. Not a white man save those we brought was to be seen upon the
pier, and the blazing sun made me thankful that I had declined an
offered letter to Jeff. Davis.
Pushing off again into the stream, we ran the gantlet of the Rip-Raps
passage, and made for Norfolk, having on our left the many exits of the
Dismal Swamp Canal. Crossing Hampton Roads--a grand bay with pleasant
grassy shores, destined one day to become the best known, as by nature
it is the noblest, of Atlantic ports--we nearly ran upon the wrecks of
the Federal frigates _Cumberland_ and _Congress_, sunk by the rebel ram
_Merrimac_ in the first great naval action of the war; but soon after,
by a sort of poetic justice, we almost drifted into the black hull of
the _Merrimac_ herself. Great gangs of negroes were laboring laughingly
at the removal, by blasting, of the sunken ships.
When we were securely moored at Norfolk pier, I set off upon an
inspection of the second city of Virginia. Again not a white man was to
be seen, but hundreds of negroes were working in the heat, building,
repairing, road-making, and happily chattering the while. At last,
turning a corner, I came on a hotel, and, as a consequence, on a bar and
its crowd of swaggering whites--“Johnny Rebs” all, you might see by the
breadth of their brims, for across the Atlantic a broad brim denotes
less the man of peace than the ex-member of a Southern guerrilla band,
Morgan‘s, Mosby‘s, or Stuart‘s. No Southerner will wear the Yankee
“stove-pipe” hat; a Panama or Palmetto for him, he says, though he keeps
to the long black coat that rules from Maine to the Rio Grande.
These Southerners were all alike--all were upright, tall, and heavily
moustached; all had long black hair and glittering eyes, and I looked
instinctively for the baldric and rapier. It needed no second glance to
assure me that as far as the men of Norfolk were concerned, the saying
of our Yankee skipper was not far from the truth: “The last idea that
enters the mind of a Southerner is that of doing work.”
Strangers are scarce in Norfolk, and it was not long before I found an
excuse for entering into conversation with the “citizens.” My first
question was not received with much cordiality by my new acquaintances.
“How do the _negroes_ work? Wall, we spells nigger with two ‘g‘s,’ I
reckon.” (Virginians, I must explain, are used to “reckon” as much as
are New Englanders to “guess,” while Western men “calculate” as often as
they cease to swear.) “How does the niggers work? Wall, niggers is
darned fools, certain, but they ain‘t quite sich fools as to work while
the Yanks will feed ’em. No, sir, not quite sich fools as that.” Hardly
deeming it wise to point to the negroes working in the sun-blaze within
a hundred yards, while we sat rocking ourselves in the veranda of the
inn, I changed my tack, and asked whether things were settling down in
Norfolk. This query soon led my friends upon the line I wanted them to
take, and in five minutes we were well through politics, and plunging
into the very war. “You‘re a Britisher. Now, all that they tell you‘s
darned lies. We‘re just as secesh as we ever was, only so many‘s killed
that we can‘t fight--that‘s all, I reckon.” “We ain‘t going to fight the
North and West again,” said an ex-colonel of rebel infantry; “next time
we fight, ’twill be us and the West against the Yanks. We‘ll keep the
old flag then, and be darned to them.” “If it hadn‘t been for the
politicians, we shouldn‘t have seceded at all, I reckon: we should just
have kept the old flag and the constitution, and the Yanks would have
seceded from us. Reckon we‘d have let ’em go.” “Wall, boys, s‘pose we
liquor?” closed in the colonel, shooting out his old quid, and filling
in with another. “We‘d have fought for a lifetime if the cussed
Southerners hadn‘t deserted like they did.” I asked who these
“Southerners” were to whom such disrespect was being shown. “You didn‘t
think Virginia was a Southern State over in Britain, did you? ’cause
Virginia is a border State, sir. We didn‘t go to secede at all; it was
them blasted Southerners that brought it on us. First they wouldn‘t give
a command to General Robert E. Lee, then they made us do all the
fighting for ’em, and then, when the pinch came, they left us in the
lurch. Why, sir, I saw three Mississippi regiments surrender without a
blow--yes, sir: that‘s right down good whisky; jess you sample it.” Here
the steam-whistle of the _Saratoga_ sounded with its deep bray. “Reckon
you‘ll have to hurry up to make connections,” said one of my new
friends, and I hurried off, not without a fear lest some of the group
should shoot after me, to avenge the affront of my quitting them before
the mixing of the drinks. They were but a pack of “mean whites,” “North
Carolina crackers,” but their views were those which I found dominant in
all ranks at Richmond, and up the country in Virginia.
After all, the Southern planters are not “The South,” which for
political purposes is composed of the “mean whites,” of the Irish of the
towns, and of the Southwestern men--Missourians, Kentuckians, and
Texans--fiercely anti-Northern, without being in sentiment what we
should call Southern, certainly not representatives of the “Southern
Chivalry.” The “mean whites,” or “poor trash,” are the whites who are
not planters--members of the slaveholding race who never held a
slave--white men looked down upon by the negroes. It is a necessary
result of the despotic government of one race by another that the poor
members of the dominant people are universally despised: the “destitute
Europeans” of Bombay, the “white loafers” of the Punjaub, are familiar
cases. Where slavery exists, the “poor trash” class must inevitably be
both large and wretched: primogeniture is necessary to keep the
plantations sufficiently great to allow for the payment of overseers and
the supporting in luxury of the planter family, and younger sons and
their descendants are not only left destitute, but debarred from earning
their bread by honest industry, for in a slave country labor is
degrading.
The Southern planters were gentlemen, possessed of many aristocratic
virtues, along with every aristocratic vice; but to each planter there
were nine “mean whites,” who, though grossly ignorant, full of
insolence, given to the use of the knife and pistol upon the slightest
provocation, were, until the election of Lincoln to the presidency, as
completely the rulers of America as they were afterward the leaders of
the rebellion.
At sunset we started up the James on our way to City Point and Richmond,
sailing almost between the very masts of the famous rebel privateer the
_Florida_, and seeing her as she lay under the still, gray waters. She
was cut out from a Brizilian port, and when claimed by the imperial
government, was to have been at once surrendered. While the dispatches
were on their way to Norfolk, she was run into at her moorings by a
Federal gunboat, and filled and sank directly. Friends of the
Confederacy have hinted that the collision was strangely opportune;
nevertheless, the fact remains that the commander of the gunboat was
dismissed the navy for his carelessness.
The twilight was beyond description lovely. The change from the auks and
ice-birds of the Atlantic to the blue-birds and robins of Virginia was
not more sudden than that from winter to tropical warmth and sensuous
indolence; but the scenery, too, of the river is beautiful in its very
changelessness. Those who can see no beauty but in boldness might call
the James as monotonous as the lower Loire.
After weeks of bitter cold, warm evenings favor meditation. The soft
air, the antiquity of the forest, the languor of the sunset breeze, all
dispose to dream and sleep. That oak has seen Powhatan; the founders of
Jamestown may have pointed at that grand old sycamore. In this drowsy
humor, we sighted the far-famed batteries of Newport News, and
turning-in to berth or hammock, lay all night at City Point, near
Petersburg.
A little before sunrise we weighed again, and sought a passage through
the tremendous Confederate “obstructions.” Rows of iron skeletons, the
frame-works of the wheels of sunken steamers, showed above the stream,
casting gaunt shadows westward, and varied only by here and there a
battered smoke-stack or a spar. The whole of the steamers that had plied
upon the James and the canals before the war were lying here in rows,
sunk lengthwise along the stream. Two in the middle of each row had been
raised to let the government vessels pass, but in the heat-mist and
faint light the navigation was most difficult. For five and twenty miles
the rebel forts were as thick as the hills and points allowed; yet, in
spite of booms and bars, of sunken ships, of batteries and torpedoes,
the Federal monitors once forced their way to Fort Darling in the outer
works of Richmond. I remembered these things a few weeks later, when
General Grant‘s first words to me at Washington were: “Glad to meet
you. What have you seen?” “The Capitol.” “Go at once and see the
Monitors.” He afterward said to me, in words that photograph not only
the Monitors, but Grant: “You can batter away at those things for a
month, and do no good.”
At Dutch Gap we came suddenly upon a curious scene. The river flowed
toward us down a long, straight reach, bounded by a lofty hill crowned
with tremendous earthworks; but through a deep trench or cleft, hardly
fifty yards in length, upon our right, we could see the stream running
with violence in a direction parallel with our course. The hills about
the gully were hollowed out into caves and bomb-proofs, evidently meant
as shelters from vertical fire, but the rough graves of a vast cemetery
showed that the protection was sought in vain. Forests of crosses of
unpainted wood rose upon every acre of flat ground. On the peninsula,
all but made an island by the cleft, was a grove of giant trees,
leafless, barkless, dead, and blanched by a double change in the level
of the stream. There is no sight so sad as that of a drowned forest,
with a turkey-buzzard on each bough. On the bank upon our left was an
iron scaffold, eight or ten stories high,--“Butler‘s Lookout,” as the
cleft was “Butler‘s Dutch Gap Canal.” The canal, unfinished in war, is
now to be completed at State expense for purposes of trade.
As we rounded the extremity of the peninsula an eagle was seen to light
upon a tree. From every portion of the ship--main deck, hurricane deck,
lower deck ports--revolvers, ready capped and loaded, were brought to
bear upon the bird, which sheered off unharmed amid a storm of bullets.
After this incident, I was careful in my political discussions with my
shipmates; disarmament in the Confederacy had clearly not been extended
to private weapons.
The outer and inner lines of fortifications passed, we came in view of a
many-steepled town, with domes and spires recalling Oxford, hanging on a
bank above a crimson-colored foaming stream. In ten minutes we were
alongside the wharf at Richmond, and in half an hour safely housed in
the “Exchange Hotel,” kept by the Messrs. Carrington, of whom the father
was a private, the son a colonel, in the rebel volunteers.
The next day, while the works and obstructions on the James were still
fresh in my mind, I took train to Petersburg, the city the capture of
which by Grant was the last blow struck by the North at the melting
forces of the Confederacy.
The line showed the war: here and there the track, torn up in Northern
raids, had barely been repaired; the bridges were burnt and broken; the
rails worn down to an iron thread. The joke “on board,” as they say here
for “in the train,” was that the engine-drivers down the line are
tolerably cute men, who, when the rails are altogether worn away,
understand how to “go it on the bare wood,” and who at all times “know
where to jump.”
From the window of the car we could see that in the country there were
left no mules, no horses, no roads, no men. The solitude is not all
owing to the war: in the whole five and twenty miles from Richmond to
Petersburg there was before the war but a single station; in New England
your passage-card often gives a station in every two miles. A careful
look at the underwood on either side the line showed that this forest is
not primeval, that all this country had once been plowed.
Virginia stands first among the States for natural advantages: in
climate she is unequaled; her soil is fertile; her mineral wealth in
coal, copper, gold, and iron enormous, and well placed; her rivers good,
and her great harbor one of the best in the world. Virginia has been
planted more than two hundred and fifty years, and is as large as
England, yet has a free population of only a million. In every kind of
production she is miserably inferior to Missouri or Ohio, in most,
inferior also to the infant States of Michigan and Illinois. Only a
quarter of her soil is under cultivation, to half that of poor, starved
New England, and the mines are deserted which were worked by the very
Indians who were driven from the land as savages a hundred years ago.
There is no surer test of the condition of a country than the state of
its highways. In driving on the main roads round Richmond, in visiting
the scene of McClellan‘s great defeat on the Chickahominy at
Mechanicsville and Malvern Hill, I myself, and an American gentleman who
was with me, had to get out and lay the planks upon the bridges, and
then sit upon them, to keep them down while the black coachman drove
across. The best roads in Virginia are but ill kept “corduroys;” but,
bad as are these, “plank roads” over which artillery have passed,
knocking out every other plank, are worse by far; yet such is the main
road from Richmond toward the west.
There is not only a scarcity of roads, but of railroads. A comparison of
the railway system of Illinois and Indiana with the two lines of
Kentucky or the one of Western Virginia or Louisiana, is a comparison of
the South with the North, of slavery with freedom. Virginia shows
already the decay of age, but is blasted by slavery rather than by war.
Passing through Petersburg, the streets of which were gay with the
feathery-brown blooms of the Venetian sumach, but almost deserted by
human beings, who have not returned to the city since they were driven
out by the shot and shell of which their houses show the scars, we were
soon in the rebel works. There are sixty miles of these works in all,
line within line, three deep: alternations of sand-pits and sand-heaps,
with here and there a tree-trunk pierced for riflemen, and everywhere a
double row of _chevaux de frise_. The forts nearest this point were
named by their rebel occupants Fort Hell and Fort Damnation. Tremendous
works, but it needed no long interview with Grant to understand their
capture. I had not been ten minutes in his office at Washington before I
saw that the secret of his unvarying success lay in his unflinching
determination: there is pith in the American conceit which reads in his
initials, “U. S. G.,” “unconditional-surrender Grant.”
The works defending Richmond, hardly so strong as those of Petersburg,
were attacked in a novel manner in the third year of the war. A strong
body of Federal cavalry on a raid, unsupported by infantry or guns, came
suddenly by night upon the outer lines of Richmond on the west.
Something had led them to believe that the rebels were not in force, and
with the strange aimless daring that animated both parties during the
rebellion, they rode straight in along the winding road, unchallenged,
and came up to the inner lines. There they were met by a volley which
emptied a few saddles, and they retired, without even stopping to spike
the guns in the outer works. Had they known enough of the troops opposed
to them to have continued to advance, they might have taken Richmond,
and held it long enough to have captured the rebel president and senate,
and burned the great iron-works and ships. The whole of the rebel army
had gone north, and even the home guard was camped out on the
Chickahominy. The troops who fired the volley were a company of the
“iron-works battalion,” boys employed at the founderies, not one of whom
had ever fired a rifle before this night. They confessed themselves that
“one minute more, and they‘d have run;” but the volley just stopped the
enemy in time.
The spot where we first struck the rebel lines was that known as the
Crater--the funnel-shaped cavity formed when Grant sprang his famous
mine: 1500 men are buried in the hollow itself, and the bones of those
smothered by the falling earth are working through the soil: 5000 negro
troops were killed in this attack, and are buried round the hollow where
they died, fighting as gallantly as they fought everywhere throughout
the war. It is a singular testimony to the continuousness of the fire,
that the still remaining subterranean passages show that in
countermining the rebels came once within three feet of the mine, yet
failed to hear the working parties. Thousands of old army shoes were
lying on the earth, and negro boys were digging up bullets for old lead.
Within eighty yards of the Crater are the Federal investing lines, on
which the trumpet-flower of our gardens was growing wild in deep rich
masses. The negroes told me not to gather it, because they believe it
scalds the hand. They call it “poison plant,” or “blister weed.” The
blue-birds and scarlet tannagers were playing about the horn-shaped
flowers.
Just within Grant‘s earthworks are the ruins of an ancient church,
built, it is said, with bricks that were brought by the first colonists
from England in 1614. About Norfolk, about Petersburg, and in the
Shenandoah Valley, you cannot ride twenty miles through the Virginian
forest without bursting in upon some glade containing a quaint old
church, or a creeper-covered roofless palace of the Culpeppers, the
Randolphs, or the Scotts. The county names have in them all a history.
Taking the letter “B” alone, we have Barbour, Bath, Bedford, Berkeley,
Boone, Botetourt, Braxton, Brooke, Brunswick, Buchanan, Buckingham. A
dozen counties in the State are named from kings or princes. The
slaveowning cavaliers whose names the remainder bear are the men most
truly guilty of the late attempt made by their descendants to create an
empire founded on disloyalty and oppression; but within sight of this
old church of theirs at Petersburg, thirty-three miles of Federal
outworks stand as a monument of how the attempt was crushed by the
children of their New England brother-colonists.
The names of streams and hamlets in Virginia have often a quaint English
ring. On the Potomac, near Harper‘s Ferry, I once came upon “Sir John‘s
Run.” Upon my asking a tall, gaunt fellow, who was fishing, whether this
was the spot on which the Knight of Windsor “larded the lean earth,” I
got for sole answer: “Wall, don‘t know ’bout that, but it‘s a mighty
fine spot for yellow-fin trout.” The entry to Virginia is
characteristic. You sail between capes named from the sons of James I.,
and have fronting you the estuaries of two rivers called after the King
and the Duke of York.
The old “F. F. V.’s,” the first families of Virginia, whose founders
gave these monarchic names to the rivers and counties of the State, are
far off now in Texas and California--those, that is, which were not
extinct before the war. The tenth Lord Fairfax keeps a tiny ranch near
San Francisco; some of the chief Denmans are also to be found in
California. In all such cases of which I heard, the emigration took
place before the war; Northern conquest could not be made use of as a
plea whereby to escape the reproaches due to the slaveowning system.
There is a stroke of justice in the fact that the Virginian oligarchy
have ruined themselves in ruining their State; but the gaming hells of
Farobankopolis, as Richmond once was called, have much for which to
answer.
When the “burnt district” comes to be rebuilt, Richmond will be the most
beautiful of all the Atlantic cities; while the water-power of the
rapids of the James, and a situation at the junction of canal and river,
secure for it a prosperous future.
The superb position of the State-house (which formed the rebel capitol),
on the brow of a long hill, whence it overhangs the city and the James,
has in it something of satire. The Parliament-house of George
Washington‘s own State, the State-house, contains the famed statue set
up by the general assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to the hero‘s
memory. Without the building stands the still more noteworthy bronze
statue of the first President, erected jointly by all the States in the
then Union. That such monuments should overlook the battle-fields of the
war provoked by the secession from the Union of Washington‘s loved
Virginia, is a fact full of the grim irony of history.
Hollywood, the cemetery of Richmond, is a place full of touching sad
suggestion, and very beautiful, with deep shades and rippling streams.
During the war, there were hospitals in Richmond for 20,000 men, and
“always full,” they say. The Richmond men who were killed in battle were
buried where they fell; but 8000 who died in hospital are buried here,
and over them is placed a wooden cross, with the inscription in black
paint, “Dead, but not forgotten.” In another spot lie the Union dead,
under the shadow of the flag for which they died.
From Monroe‘s tomb the evening view is singularly soft and calm; the
quieter and calmer for the drone in which are mingled the trills of the
mocking-bird, the hoarse croaking of the bull-frog, the hum of the
myriad fire-flies, that glow like summer lightning among the trees, the
distant roar of the river, of which the rich red water can still be
seen, beaten by the rocks into a rosy foam.
With the moment‘s chillness of the sunset breeze, the golden glory of
the heavens fades into gray, and there comes quickly over them the
solemn blueness of the Southern night. Thoughts are springing up of the
many thousand unnamed graves, where the rebel soldiers lie unknown, when
the Federal drums in Richmond begin sharply beating the rappel.