pretty much all over the town, sometimes stopping to look in at the shop windows, for the sidewalks are so narrow that it is no trouble to see the things from the street. Then the men took us a little way out of the town to a place where there was a good view for us, and a bench where they could go and sit down and rest. I expect all the chair men that work by the hour manage to get to this place with a view as soon as they can.
After they had had a good rest we started off to go home by a different route. Jone’s man was a good strong fellow and always took the lead, but my puller was a different kind of a steed, and sometimes I was left pretty far behind. I had not paid much attention to the man at first, only noticing that he was mighty slow; but going back a good deal of the way was uphill, and then all his imperfections came out plain, and I couldn’t help studying him. If he had been a horse I should have said he was spavined and foundered, with split frogs and tonsilitis; but as he was a man, it struck me that he must have had several different kinds of rheumatism and been sent to Buxton to have them cured, but not taking the baths properly, or drinking the water at times when he ought not to have done it, his rheumatisms had all run together and had become fixed and immovable. How such a creaky person came to be a bath-chair man I could not think, but it may be that he wanted to stay in Buxton for the sake of the loose gas which could be had for nothing, and that bath-chairing was all he could get to do.
I pitied the poor old fellow, who, if he had been a horse, would have been no more than fourteen hands high, and as he went puffing along, tugging and grunting as if I was a load of coal, I felt as if I couldn’t stand it another minute, and I called out to him to stop. It did seem as if he would drop before he got me back to the hotel, and I bounced out in no time, and then I walked in front of him and turned around and looked at him. If it is possible for a human hack-horse to have spavins in two joints in each leg, that man had them; and he looked as if he couldn’t remember what it was to have a good feed.
He seemed glad to rest, but didn’t say anything, standing and looking straight ahead of him like an old horse that has been stopped to let him blow. He did look so dreadful feeble that I thought it would be a mercy to take him to some member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and have him chloroformed. “Look here,” said I, “you are not fit to walk. Get into that bath-chair, and I’ll pull you back to your stand.”
“Lady,” said he, “I couldn’t do that. If you dunno mind walking home, and will pay me for the two hours all the same, I will be right thankful for that. I’m poorly to-day.”
“Get into the chair,” said I, “and I’ll pull you back. I’d like to do it, for I want some exercise.”
“Oh, no, no!” said he. “That would be a sin; and besides I was engaged to pull you two hours, and I must be paid for that.”
“Get into that chair,” I said, “and I’ll pay you for your two hours and give you a shilling besides.”
He looked at me for a minute, and then he got into the chair, and I shut him up.
“Now, lady,” said he, “you can pull me a little way if you want exercise, and as soon as you are tired you can stop, and I’ll get out, but you must pay me the extra shilling all the same.”
“All right,” said I, and taking hold of the handle I started off. It was real fun; the bath-chair rolled along beautifully, and I don’t believe the old man weighed much more than my Corinne when I used to push her about in her baby carriage. We were in a back street, where there was hardly anybody; and as for Jone and his bath-chair, I could just see them ever so far ahead, so I started to catch up, and as the street was pretty level now I soon got going at a fine rate. I hadn’t had a bit of good exercise for a long time, and this warmed me up and made me feel gay.
[Illustration: “STOP, LADY, AND I’LL GET OUT”]
We was not very far behind Jone when the man began to call to me in a sort of frightened fashion, as if he thought I was running away. “Stop, lady!” he said; “we are getting near the gardens, and the people will laugh at me. Stop, lady, and I’ll get out.” But I didn’t feel a bit like stopping; the idea had come into my head that it would be jolly to beat Jone. If I could pass him and sail on ahead for a little while, then I’d stop and let my old man get out and take his bath-chair home. I didn’t want it any more.
Just as I got close up behind Jone, and was about to make a rush past him, his man turned into a side street. Of course I turned too, and then I put on steam, and, giving a laugh as I turned around to look at Jone, I charged on, intending to stop in a minute and have some fun in hearing what Jone had to say about it; but you may believe, ma’am, that I was amazed when I saw only a little way in front of me the bath-chair stand where we had hired our machines! And all the bath-chair men were standing there with their mouths wide open, staring at a woman running along the street, pulling an old bath-chair man in a bath-chair! For a second I felt like dropping the handle I held and making a rush for the front door of the hotel, which was right ahead of me; and then I thought, as now I was in for it, it would be a lot better to put a good face on the matter, and not look as if I had done anything I was ashamed of, and so I just slackened speed and came up in fine style at the door of the Old Hall. Four or five of the bath-chair men came running across the street to know if anything had happened to the old party I was pulling, and he got out looking as ashamed as if he had been whipped by his wife.
“It’s a lark, mates,” said he; “the lady’s to pay me two shillings extra for letting her pull me.”
“Two shillings?” said I. “I only promised you one.”
“That would be for pulling me a little way,” he said; “but you pulled me all the way back, and I couldn’t do it for less than two shillings.”
Jone now came up and got out quick.
“What’s the meaning of all this, Pomona?” said he.
“Meaning?” said I. “Look at that dilapidated old bag of bones. He wasn’t fit to pull me, and so I thought it would be fun to pull him; but, of course, I didn’t know when I turned the corner I would be here at the stand.”
Jone paid the men, including the two extra shillings, and when we went up to our room he said, “The next time we go out in two bath-chairs, I am going to have a chain fastened to yours, and I’ll have hold of the other end of it.”
_Letter Number Eighteen_
BUXTON
I have begun to take the baths. There really is so little to do in this place that I couldn’t help it, and so, while Jone was off tending to his hot soaks, I thought I might as well try the thing myself. At any rate it would fill up the time when I was alone. I find I like this sort of bathing very much, and I wish I had begun it before. It reminds me of a kind of medicine for colds that you used to make for me, madam, when I first came to the canal-boat. It had lemons and sugar in it, and it was so good I remember I used to think that I would like to go into a lingering consumption, so that I could have it three times a day, until I finally passed away like a lily on a snowbank.
Jone’s been going about a good deal in a bath-chair, and doesn’t mind my walking alongside of him. He says it makes him feel easier in his mind, on the whole.
Mr. Poplington came two or three days ago, and he is stopping at our hotel. We three have hired a carriage together two or three times and have taken drives into, the country. Once we went to an inn, the Cat and Fiddle, about five miles away, on a high bit of ground called Axe Edge. It is said to be the highest tavern in England, and it’s lucky that it is, for that’s the only recommendation it’s got. The sign in front of the house has on it a cat on its hind-legs playing a fiddle, with a look on its face as if it was saying, “It’s pretty poor, but it’s the best I can do for you.”
Inside is another painting of a cat playing a fiddle, and truly that one might be saying, “Ha! Ha! You thought that that picture on the sign was the worst picture you ever saw in your life, but now you see how you are mistaken.”
Up on that high place you get the rain fresher than you do in Buxton, because it hasn’t gone so far through the air, and it’s mixed with more chilly winds than anywhere else in England, I should say. But everybody is bound to go to the Cat and Fiddle at least once, and we are glad we have been there, and that it is over. I like the places near the town a great deal better, and some of them are very pretty. One day we two and Mr. Poplington took a ride on top of a stage to see Haddon Hall and Chatsworth.
Haddon Hall is to me like a dream of the past come true. Lots of other old places have seemed like dreams, but this one was right before my eyes, just as it always was. Of course, you must have read all about it, madam, and I am not going to tell it over again. But think of it; a grand old baronial mansion, part of it built as far back as the eleven hundreds, and yet in good condition and fit to live in. That is what I thought as I walked through its banqueting hall and courts and noble chambers. “Why,” said I to Jone, “in that kitchen our meals could be cooked; at that table we could eat them; in these rooms we could sleep; in these gardens and courts we could roam; we could actually live here!” We haven’t seen any other romance of the past that we could say that about, and to this minute it puzzles me how any duke in this world could be content to own a house like this and not live in it. But I suppose he thinks more of water-pipes and electric lights than he does of the memories of the past and time-hallowed traditions.
As for me, if I had been Dorothy Vernon, there’s no man on earth, not even Jone, that could make me run away from such a place as Haddon Hall. They show the stairs down which she tripped with her lover when they eloped; but if it had been me, it would have been up those stairs I would have gone. Mr. Poplington didn’t agree a bit with me about the joy of living in this enchanting old house, and neither did Jone, I am sure, although he didn’t say so much. But then, they are both men, and when it comes to soaring in the regions of romanticism you must not expect too much of men.
After leaving Haddon Hall, which I did backward, the coach took us to Chatsworth, which is a different sort of a place altogether. It is a grand palace, at least it was built for one, but now it is an enormous show place, bright and clean and sleek, and when we got there we saw hundreds of visitors waiting to go in. They was taken through in squads of about fifty, with a man to lead them, which he did very much as if they was a drove of cattle.
The man who led our squad made us step along lively, and I must say that never having been in a drove before, Jone and I began to get restive long before we got through. As for the show, I like the British Museum a great deal better. There is ever so much more to see there, and you have time to stop and look at things. At Chatsworth they charge you more, give you less, and treat you worse. When it came to taking us through the grounds, Jone and I struck. We left the gang we was with, and being shown where to find a gate out of the place, we made for that gate and waited until our coach was ready to take us back to Buxton.
It is a lot of fun going to the theatre here. It doesn’t cost much, and the plays are good and generally funny, and a rheumatic audience is a very jolly one. The people seemed glad to forget their backs, their shoulders, and their legs, and they are ready to laugh at things that are only half comic, and keep up a lively chattering between the acts. It’s fun to see them when the play is over. The bath-chairs that have come after some of them are brought right into the building, and are drawn up just like carriages after the theatre. The first time we went I wanted Jone to stop a while and see if we didn’t hear somebody call out, “Mrs. Barchester’s bath-chair stops the way!” but he said I expected too much, and would not wait.
We sit about so much in the gardens, which are lively when it is clear, and not bad even in a little drizzle, that we’ve got to know a good many of the people; and although Jone’s a good deal given to reading, I like to sit and watch them and see what they are doing.
When we first came here I noticed a good-looking young woman who was hauled about in a bath-chair, generally with an open book in her lap, which she never seemed to read much, because she was always gazing around as if she was looking for something. Before long I found out what she was looking for, for every day, sooner or later, generally sooner, there came along a bath-chair with a good-looking young man in it. He had a book in his lap too, but he was never reading it when I saw him, because he was looking for the young woman; and as soon as they saw each other they began to smile, and as they passed they always said something, but didn’t stop. I wondered why they didn’t give their pullers a rest and have a good talk if they knew each other, but before long I noticed not very far behind the young lady’s bath-chair was always another bath-chair with an old gentleman in it with a bottle-nose. After a while I found out that this was the young lady’s father, because sometimes he would call to her and have her stop, and then she generally seemed to get some sort of a scolding.
Of course, when I see anything of this kind going on, I can’t help taking one side or the other, and as you may well believe, madam, I wouldn’t be likely to take that of the old bottle-nosed man’s side. I had not been noticing these people for more than two or three days when one morning, when Jone and me was sitting under an umbrella, for there was a little more rain than common, I saw these two young people in their bath-chairs, coming along side by side, and talking just as hard as they could. At first I was surprised, but I soon saw how things was: the old gentleman couldn’t come out in the rain. It was plain enough from the way these two young people looked at each other that they was in love, and although it most likely hurt them just as much to come out into the rain as it would the old man, love is all-powerful, even over rheumatism.
Pretty soon the clouds cleared away without notice, as they do in this country, and it wasn’t long before I saw, away off, the old man’s bath-chair coming along lively. His bottle-nose was sticking up in the air, and he was looking from one side to the other as hard as he could. The two lovers had turned off to the right and gone over a little bridge and I couldn’t see them; but by the way that old nose shook as it got nearer and nearer to me, I saw they had reason to tremble, though they didn’t know it.
When the old father reached the narrow path he did not turn down it, but kept straight on, and I breathed a sigh of deep relief. But the next instant I remembered that the broad path turned not far beyond, and that the little one soon ran into it, and so it could not be long before the father and the lovers would meet. I like to tell Jone everything I am going to do, when I am sure that he’ll agree with me that it is right; but this time I could not bother with explanations, and so I just told him to sit still for a minute, for I wanted to see something, and I walked after the young couple as fast as I could. When I got to them, for they hadn’t gone very far, I passed the young woman’s bath-chair, and then I looked around and I said to her, “I beg your pardon, miss, but there is an old gentleman looking for you; but as I think he is coming round this way, you’ll meet him if you keep on this path.” “Oh, my!” said she unintentionally; and then she thanked me very much, and I went on and turned a corner and went back to Jone, and pretty soon the young man’s bath-chair passed us going toward the gate, he looking three-quarters happy, and the other quarter disappointed, as lovers are if they don’t get the whole loaf.
From that day until yesterday, which was a full week, I came into the gardens every morning, sometimes even when Jone didn’t want to come, because I wanted to see as much of this love business as I could. For my own use in thinking of them I named the young man Pomeroy and the young woman Angelica, and as for the father, I called him Snortfrizzle, being the worst name I could think of at the time. But I must wait until my next letter to tell you the rest of the story of the lovers, and I am sure you will be as much interested in them as I was.
_Letter Number Nineteen_
[Illustration]
BUXTON
I have a good many things to tell you, for we leave Buxton to-morrow, but I will first finish the story of Angelica and Pomeroy. I think the men who pulled the bath-chairs of the lovers knew pretty much how things was going, for whenever they got a chance they brought their chairs together, and I often noticed them looking out for the old father, and if they saw him coming they would move away from each other if they happened to be together.
If Snortfrizzle’s puller had been one of the regular bath-chair men they might have made an agreement with him so that he would have kept away from them; but he was a man in livery, with a high hat, who walked very regular, like a high-stepping horse, and who, it was plain enough to see, never had anything to do with common bath-chair men. Old Snortfrizzle seemed to be smelling a rat more and more–that is, if it is proper to liken Cupid to such an animal–and his nose seemed to get purpler and purpler. I think he would always have kept close to Angelica’s chair if it hadn’t been that he had a way of falling asleep, and whenever he did this his man always walked very slow, being naturally lazy. Two or three times I have seen Snortfrizzle wake up, shout to his man, and make him trot around a clump of trees and into some narrow path where he thought his daughter might have gone.
Things began to look pretty bad, for the old man had very strong suspicions about Pomeroy, and was so very wide awake when he was awake, that I knew it couldn’t be long before he caught the two together, and then I didn’t believe that Angelica would ever come into these gardens again.
It was yesterday morning that I saw old Snortfrizzle with his chin down on his shirt bosom, snoring so steady that his hat heaved, being very slowly pulled along a shady walk, and then I saw his daughter, who was not far ahead of him, turn into another walk, which led down by the river. I knew very well that she ought not to turn into that walk, because it didn’t in any way lead to the place where Pomeroy was sitting in his bath-chair behind a great clump of bushes and flowers, with his face filled with the most lively emotions, but overspread ever and anon by a cloudlet of despair on account of the approach of the noontide hour, when Angelica and Snortfrizzle generally went home.
[Illustration: “Your brother is over there”]
The time was short, and I believed that love’s young dream must be put off until the next day if Angelica could not be made aware where Pomeroy was sitting, or Pomeroy where Angelica was going; so I got right up and made a short cut down a steep little path, and, sure enough, I met her when I got to the bottom. “I beg your pardon very much, miss,” said I, “but your brother is over there in the entrance to the cave, and I think he has been looking for you.” “My brother?” said she, turning as red as her ribbons was blue. “Oh, thank you very much! Robertson, you may take me that way.”
It wasn’t long before I saw those two bath-chairs alongside of each other, and covered from general observation by masses of blooming shrubbery. As I had been the cause of bringing them together I thought I had a right to look at them a little while, as that would be the only reward I’d be likely to get, and so I did it. It was as I thought; things was coming to a climax; the bath-chair men standing with much consideration with their backs to their vehicles, and, united for the time being by their clasped hands, the lovers grew tender to a degree which I would have fain checked, had I been nearer, for fear of notice by passers-by.
But now my blood froze within my veins. I would never have believed that a man in a high hat and livery a size too small for him could run, but Snortfrizzle’s man did, and at a pace which ought to have been prohibited by law. I saw him coming from an unsuspected quarter, and swoop around that clump of flowers and foliage. Regardless of consequences I approached nearer. There was loud voices; there was exclamations; there was a rattling of wheels; there was the sundering of tender ties!
In a moment Pomeroy, who had backed off but a little way, began to speak, but his voice was drowned in the thunder of Snortfrizzle’s denunciations. Angelica wept, and her head fell upon her lovely bosom, and I am sure I heard her implore her man to remove her from the scene. Pomeroy remained, his face firm, his eyes undaunted, but Snortfrizzle shook his fist in unison with his nose, and, hurling an anathema at him, followed his daughter, probably to incarcerate her in her apartments.
All was over, and I returned to Jone with a heavy heart and faltering step. I could not but feel that I had brought about the sad end of this tender chapter in the lives of Pomeroy and Angelica. If I had let them alone they would not have met and they would not have been discovered together. I didn’t tell Jone what had happened, because he does not always sympathize with me in my interest in others, and for hours my heart was heavy.
It was about a half an hour before dinner that day when I thought that a little walk might raise my spirits, and I wandered into the gardens, for which we each have a weekly ticket, and there, to my amazement, not far from the gate I saw Angelica in tears and her bath-chair. Her man was not with her, and she was alone. When she saw me she looked at me for a minute, and then she beckoned to me to come to her. I flew. There were but few people in the gardens, and we was alone.
“Madam,” said she, “I think you must be very kind. I believe you knew that gentleman was not my brother. He is not.”
“My dear miss,” said I–I was almost on the point of calling her Angelica–“I knew that. I know that he is something nearer and dearer than even a brother.”
She blushed. “Yes,” said she, “you are right, and we are in great trouble.”
“Oh, what is it? Tell me quick. What can I do to help you?”
“My father is very angry,” said she, “and has forbidden me ever to see him again, and he is going to take me home to-morrow. But we have agreed to fly together to-day. It is our only chance, but he is not here. Oh, dear! I do not know what I shall do.”
“Where are you going to fly to?” said I.
“We want to take the Edinburgh train this evening if there is one,” she said, “and we get off at Carlisle, and from there it is only a little way to Gretna Green.”
“Gretna Green!” I cried. “Oh, I will help you! I will help you! Why isn’t the gentleman here, and where has he gone?”
“He has gone to see about the trains,” she said, almost crying, “and I don’t see what keeps him. I could not get away until father went into his room to dress for dinner, and as soon as he is ready he will call for me. Where can he be? I have sent my man to look for him.”
“Oh, I’ll go look for him! You wait here,” I cried, forgetting that she would have to, and away I went.
As I was hurrying out of the gates of the gardens I looked in the direction of the railroad station, and there I saw Pomeroy pulled by one bath-chair man and the other one talking to him. In twenty bounds I reached him. “Go back for your young lady,” I cried to Robertson, Angelica’s man, “and bring her here on the run. She sent me for you.” Away went Robertson, and then I said to the astonished Pomeroy, “Sir, there is no time for explanations. Your lady-love will be with you in a minute. My husband and I are going to Edinburgh to-morrow, and I have looked up all the trains. There is one which leaves here at twenty minutes past six. If she comes soon you will have time to catch it. Have you your baggage ready?”
He looked at me as if he wondered who on earth I was, but I am sure he saw my soul in my face and trusted me.
“Yes,” he said, “she has a little bag in her bath-chair, and mine is here.”
“Here she comes,” said I, “and you must fly to the station.”
In a moment Angelica was with us, her face beaming with delight.
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” she cried, but I would not listen to her gratitude. “Hurry!” I said, “or you will be too late. Joy go with you.”
They hastened off, and I walked back to the gardens. I looked at my watch, and to my horror I saw it was five minutes past six. Fifteen minutes left yet. Fifteen minutes in which they might be overtaken. I stopped for a moment irresolutely. What should I do? I thought of running after them to the station. I thought in some way I might help them–buy their tickets or do something. But while I was thinking I heard a rattle, and down the street came the man in livery, and Snortfrizzle’s bottle-nose like a volcano behind him. The minute they reached me, and there was nobody else in the street, the old man shouted, “Hi! Have you seen two bath-chairs with a young man and a young woman in them?”
I was on the point of saying No, but changed my mind like a flash. “Did the young lady wear a hat with blue ribbons?” I asked.
“Yes!” he roared. “Which way did they go?”
“And did the young man with her wear eyeglasses and a brown moustache?”
“With her, was he?” screamed Snortfrizzle. “That’s the rascal. Which way did they go? Tell me instantly.”
When I was a very little girl I knew an old woman who told me that if a person was really good at heart, the holy angels would allow that person, in the course of her life, twelve fibs without charge, provided they was told for the good of somebody and not to do harm. Now at such a moment as this I could not remember how many fibs of that kind I had left over to my credit, but I knew there must be at least one, and so I didn’t hesitate a second. “They have gone to the Cat and Fiddle,” said I. “I heard them tell their bath-chair men so, as they urged them forward at the top of their speed. They stopped for a second here, sir, and I heard the gentleman send a cabman for a clergyman, post haste, to meet them at the Cat and Fiddle.”
[Illustration: TO THE CAT AND FIDDLE]
If the sky had been lighted up by the eruption of Snortfrizzle’s nose I should not have been surprised.
“The fools! They can’t! Cat and Fiddle! But they can’t be half way there. Martin, to the Cat and Fiddle!”
The man touched his hat. “But I couldn’t do that, sir. I couldn’t run to the Cat and Fiddle. It’s long miles, sir. Shall I get a carriage?”
“Carriage!” cried the old man, and then he began to look about him.
Horror struck me. Perhaps they would go to the station for one! Just then a boy driving a pony and a grocery cart came up.
“There you are, sir,” I cried. “Hire that boy to tow you. Your butler can sit in the back of the cart and hold the handle of your bath-chair. It may take long to get a carriage, and the cart will go much faster. You may overtake them in a mile.”
Old Snortfrizzle never so much as thanked me or looked at me. He yelled to the boy in the cart, offered him ten shillings and sixpence to give him a tow, and in less time than I could take to write it, that flunky with a high hat was sitting in the tail of the cart, the pony was going at full gallop, and the old man’s bath-chair was spinning on behind it at a great rate.
I did not leave that spot–standing statue-like and looking along both roads–until I heard the rumble of the departing train, and then I repaired to the Old Hall, my soul uplifted. I found Jone in an awful fluster about my being out so late; but I do stay pretty late sometimes when I walk by myself, and so he hadn’t anything new to say.
_Letter Number Twenty_
EDINBURGH
We have been here five or six days now, but the first thing I must write is the rest of the story of the lovers. We left Buxton the next day after their flight, and I begged Jone to stop at Carlisle and let us make a little trip to Gretna Green. I wanted to see the place that has been such a well-spring of matrimonial joys, and besides, I thought we might find Pomeroy and Angelica still there.
I had not seen old Snortfrizzle again, but late that night I had heard a row in the hotel, and I expect it was him back from the Cat and Fiddle. Whether he was inquiring for me or not I don’t know, or what he was doing, or what he did.
Jone thought I had done a good deal of meddling in other people’s business, but he agreed to go to Gretna Green, and we got there in the afternoon. I left Jone to take a smoke at the station, because I thought this was a business it would be better for me to attend to myself, and I started off to look up the village blacksmith and ask him if he had lately wedded a pair; but, will you believe it, madam, I had not gone far on the main road of the village when, a little ahead of me, I saw two bath-chairs coming toward me, one of them pulled by Robertson, and the other by Pomeroy’s man, and in these two chairs was the happy lovers, evidently Mr. and Mrs.! Their faces was filled with light enough to take a photograph, and I could almost see their hearts swelling with transcendent joy. I hastened toward them, and in an instant our hands was clasped as if we had been old friends.
They told me their tale. They had reached the station in plenty of time, and Robertson had got a carriage for them, and he and the other man had gone with them third class, with the bath-chairs in the goods carriages. They had reached Gretna Green that morning, and had been married two hours. Then I told my tale. The eyes of both of them was dimmed with tears, hers the most, and again they clasped my hands. “Poor father,” said Angelica, “I hope he didn’t go all the way to the Cat and Fiddle, and that the night air didn’t strike into his joints; but he cannot separate us now.” And she looked confiding at the other bath-chair.
“What are you going to do?” said I, and they said they had just been making plans. I saw, though, that their minds was in too exalted a state to do this properly for themselves, and so I reflected a minute. “How long have you been in Buxton?”
“I have been there two weeks and two days,” said she, “and my husband”–oh, the effulgence that filled her countenance as she said this–“has been there one day longer.”
“Then,” said I, “my advice to you is to go back to Buxton and stay there five days, until you both have taken the waters and the baths for the full three weeks. It won’t be much to bear the old gentleman’s upbraiding for five days, and then, blessed with health and love, you can depart. No matter what you do afterward, I’d stick it out at Buxton for five days.”
“We’ll do it,” said they; and then, after more gratitude and congratulations, we parted.
And now I must tell you about ourselves. When Jone had been three weeks at Buxton, and done all the things he ought to do, and hadn’t done anything he oughtn’t to do, he hadn’t any more rheumatism in him than a squirrel that jumps from bough to bough. But will you believe it, madam, I had such a rheumatism in one side and one arm that it made me give little squeaks when I did up my back hair, and it all came from my taking the baths when there wasn’t anything the matter with me; for I found out, but all too late, that while the waters of Buxton will cure rheumatism in people that’s got it, they will bring it out in people who never had it at all. We was told that we ought not to do anything in the bathing line without the advice of a doctor; but those little tanks in the floors of the bathrooms, all lined with tiles and filled with warm, transparent water, that you went down into by marble steps, did seem so innocent, that I didn’t believe there was no need in asking questions about them. Jone wanted me to stay three weeks longer until I was cured, but I wouldn’t listen to that. I was wild to get to Scotland, and as my rheumatism did not hinder me from walking, I didn’t mind what else it did.
And there is another thing I must tell you. One day when I was sitting by myself on The Slopes waiting for Jone, about lunch time, and with a reminiscence floating through my mind of the Devonshire clotted cream of the past, never perhaps to return, I saw an elderly woman coming along, and when she got near she stopped and spoke. I knew her in an instant. She was the old body we met at the Babylon Hotel, who told us about the cottage at Chedcombe. I asked her to sit down beside me and talk, because I wanted to tell her what good times we had had, and how we liked the place, but she said she couldn’t, as she was obliged to go on.
“And did you like Chedcombe?” said she. “I hope you and your husband kept well.”
I said yes, except Jone’s rheumatism, we felt splendid; for my aches hadn’t come on then, and I was going on to gush about the lovely country she had sent us to, but she didn’t seem to want to listen.
“Really,” said she, “and your husband had the rheumatism. It was a wise thing for you to come here. We English people have reason to be proud of our country. If we have our banes, we also have our antidotes; and it isn’t every country that can say that, is it?”
[Illustration: “And did you like Chedcombe?”]
I wanted to speak up for America, and tried to think of some good antidote with the proper banes attached; but before I could do it she gave her head a little wag, and said, “Good morning; nice weather, isn’t it?” and wobbled away. It struck me that the old body was a little lofty, and just then Mr. Poplington, who I hadn’t noticed, came up.
“Really,” said he, “I didn’t know you was acquainted with the Countess.”
“The which?” said I.
“The Countess of Mussleby,” said he, “that you was just talking to.”
“Countess!” I cried. “Why, that’s the old person who recommended us to go to Chedcombe.”
“Very natural,” said he, “for her to do that, for her estates lie south of Chedcombe, and she takes a great interest in the villages around about, and knows all the houses to let.”
I parted from him and wandered away, a sadness stealing o’er my soul. Gone with the recollections of the clotted cream was my visions of diamond tiaras, tossing plumes, and long folds of brocades and laces sweeping the marble floors of palaces. If ever again I read a novel with a countess in it, I shall see the edge of a yellow flannel petticoat and a pair of shoes like two horse-hair bags, which was the last that I saw of this thunderbolt into the middle of my visions of aristocracy.
Jone and me got to like Buxton very much. We met many pleasant people, and as most of them had a chord in common, we was friendly enough. Jone said it made him feel sad in the smoking-room to see the men he’d got acquainted with get well and go home, but that’s a kind of sadness that all parties can bear up under pretty well.
I haven’t said a word yet about Scotland, though we have been here a week, but I really must get something about it into this letter. I was saying to Jone the other day that if I was to meet a king with a crown on his head I am not sure that I should know that king if I saw him again, so taken up would I be with looking at his crown, especially if it had jewels in it such as I saw in the regalia at the Tower of London. Now Edinburgh seems to strike me in very much the same way. Prince Street is its crown, and whenever I think of this city it will be of this magnificent street and the things that can be seen from it.
It is a great thing for a street to have one side of it taken away and sunk out of sight so that there is a clear view far and wide, and visitors can stand and look at nearly everything that is worth seeing in the whole town, as if they was in the front seats of the balcony in a theatre, and looking on the stage. You know I am very fond of the theatre, madam, but I never saw anything in the way of what they call spectacular representation that came near Edinburgh as seen from Prince Street.
But as I said in one of my first letters, I am not going to write about things and places that you can get much better description of in books, and so I won’t take up any time in telling how we stand at the window of our room at the Royal Hotel, and look out at the Old Town standing like a forest of tall houses on the other side of the valley, with the great castle perched up high above them, and all the hills and towers and the streets all spread out below us, with Scott’s monument right in front, with everybody he ever wrote about standing on brackets, which stick out everywhere from the bottom up to the very top of the monument, which is higher than the tallest house, and looks like a steeple without a church to it. It is the most beautiful thing of the kind I ever saw, and I have made out, or think I have, nearly every one of the figures that’s carved on it.
I think I shall like the Scotch people very much, but just now there is one thing about them that stands up as high above their other good points as the castle does above the rest of the city, and that is the feeling they have for anybody who has done anything to make his fellow-countrymen proud of him. A famous Scotchman cannot die without being pretty promptly born again in stone or bronze, and put in some open place with seats convenient for people to sit and look at him. I like this; glory ought to begin at home.
_Letter Number Twenty-one_
EDINBURGH
Jone being just as lively on his legs as he ever was in his life, thanks to the waters of Buxton, and I having the rheumatism now only in my arm, which I don’t need to walk with, we have gone pretty much all over Edinburgh, and a great place it is to walk in, so far as variety goes. Some of the streets are so steep you have to go up steps if you are walking, and about a mile around if you are driving. I never get tired wandering about the Old Town with its narrow streets and awfully tall houses, with family washes hanging out from every story.
The closes are queer places. They are very like little villages set into the town as if they was raisins in a pudding. You get to them by alleys or tunnels, and when you are inside you find a little neighborhood that hasn’t anything more to do with the next close, a block away, than one country village has with another.
We went to see John Knox’s house, and although Mr. Knox was pretty hard on vanities and frivolities, he didn’t mind having a good house over his head, with woodwork on the walls and ceilings that wasn’t any more necessary than the back buttons on his coat.
We have been reading hard since we have been in Edinburgh, and whenever Mr. Knox and Mary Queen of Scots come together, I take Mary’s side without asking questions. I have no doubt Mr. Knox was a good man, but if meddling in other people’s business gave a person the right to have a monument, the top of his would be the first thing travellers would see when they come near Edinburgh.
When we went to Holyrood Palace it struck me that Mary Queen of Scots deserved a better house. Of course, it wasn’t built for her, but I don’t care very much for the other people who lived in it. The rooms are good enough for an ordinary household’s use, although the little room that she had her supper party in when Rizzio was killed, wouldn’t be considered by Jone and me as anything like big enough for our family to eat in. But there is a general air about the place as if it belonged to a royal family that was not very well off, and had to abstain from a good deal of grandeur.
If Mary Queen of Scots could come to life again, I expect the Scotch people would give her the best palace that money could buy, for they have grown to think the world of her, and her pictures blossom out all over Edinburgh like daisies in a pasture field.
The first morning after we got here I was as much surprised as if I had met Mary Queen of Scots walking along Prince Street with a parasol over her head. We were sitting in the reading-room of the hotel, and on the other side of the room was a long desk at which people was sitting, writing letters, all with their backs to us. One of these was a young man wearing a nice light-colored sack coat, with a shiny white collar sticking above it, and his black derby hat was on the desk beside him. When he had finished his letter he put a stamp on it and got up to mail it. I happened to be looking at him, and I believe I stopped breathing as I sat and stared. Under his coat he had on a little skirt of green plaid about big enough for my Corinne when she was about five years old, and then he didn’t wear anything whatever until you got down to his long stockings and low shoes. I was so struck with the feeling that he was an absent-minded person that I punched Jone and whispered to him to go quick and tell him. Jone looked at him and laughed, and said that was the Highland costume.
Now if that man had had his martial plaid wrapped around him, and had worn a Scottish cap with a feather in it and a long ribbon hanging down his back, with his claymore girded to his side, I wouldn’t have been surprised; for this is Scotland, and that would have been like the pictures I have seen of Highlanders. But to see a man with the upper half of him dressed like a clerk in a dry goods store and the lower half like a Highland chief, was enough to make a stranger gasp.
[Illustration: “Jone looked at him and said that was the Highland costume.”]
But since then I have seen a good many young men dressed that way. I believe it is considered the tip of the fashion. I haven’t seen any of the bare-legged dandies yet with a high silk hat and an umbrella, but I expect it won’t be long before I meet one. We often see the Highland soldiers that belong to the garrison at the castle, and they look mighty fine with their plaid shawls and their scarfs and their feathers; but to see a man who looks as if one half of him belonged to London Bridge and the other half to the Highland moors, does look to me like a pretty bad mixture.
I am not so sure, either, that the whole Highland dress isn’t better suited to Egypt, where it doesn’t often rain, than to Scotland. Last Saturday we was at St. Giles’s Church, and the man who took us around told us we ought to come early next morning and see the military service, which was something very fine; and as Jone gave him a shilling he said he would be on hand and watch for us, and give us a good place where we could see the soldiers come in. On Sunday morning it rained hard, but we was both at the church before eight o’clock, and so was a good many other people, but the doors was shut and they wouldn’t let us in. They told us it was such a bad morning that the soldiers could not come out, and so there would be no military service that day. I don’t know whether those fine fellows thought that the colors would run out of their beautiful plaids, or whether they would get rheumatism in their knees; but it did seem to me pretty hard that soldiers could not come out in the weather that lots of common citizens didn’t seem to mind at all. I was a good deal put out, for I hate to get up early for nothing, but there was no use saying anything, and all we could do was to go home, as all the other people with full suits of clothes did.
Jone and I have got so much more to see before we go home, that it is very well we are both able to skip around lively. Of course there are ever and ever so many places that we want to go to, but can’t do it, but I am bound to see the Highlands and the country of the “Lady of the Lake.” We have been reading up Walter Scott, and I think more than I ever did that he is perfectly splendid. While we was in Edinburgh we felt bound to go and see Melrose Abbey and Abbotsford. I shall not say much about these two places, but I will say that to go into Sir Walter Scott’s library and sit in the old armchair he used to sit in, at the desk he used to write on, and see his books and things around me, gave me more a feeling of reverentialism than I have had in any cathedral yet.
As for Melrose Abbey, I could have walked about under those towering walls and lovely arches until the stars peeped out from the lofty vaults above; but Jone and the man who drove the carriage were of a different way of thinking, and we left all too soon. But one thing I did do: I went to the grave of Michael Scott the wizard, where once was shut up the book of awful mysteries, with a lamp always burning by it, though the flagstone was shut down tight on top of it, and I got a piece of moss and a weed. We don’t do much in the way of carrying off such things, but I want Corinne to read the “Lady of the Lake,” and then I shall give her that moss and that weed, and tell where I got them. I believe that, in the way of romantics, Corinne is going to be more like me than like Jone.
To-morrow we go to the Highlands, and we shall leave our two big trunks in the care of the man in the red coat, who is commander-in-chief at the Royal Hotel, and who said he would take as much care of them as if they was two glass jars filled with rubies; and we believed him, for he has done nothing but take care of us since we came to Edinburgh, and good care, too.
_Letter Number Twenty-two_
[Illustration]
KINLOCH RANNOCH.
It happened that the day we went north was a very fine one, and as soon as we got into the real Highland country there was nothing to hinder me from feeling that my feet was on my native heath, except that I was in a railway carriage, and that I had no Scotch blood in me, but the joy of my soul was all the same. There was an old gentleman got into our carriage at Perth, and when he saw how we was taking in everything our eyes could reach, for Jone is a good deal more fired up by travel than he used to be–I expect it must have been the Buxton waters that made the change–he began to tell us all about the places we were passing through. There didn’t seem to be a rock or a stream that hadn’t a bit of history to it for that old gentleman to tell us about.
We got out at a little town called Struan, and then we took a carriage and drove across the wild moors and hills for thirteen miles till we came to this village at the end of Loch Rannoch. The wind blew strong and sharp, but we knew what we had to expect, and had warm clothes on. And with the cool breeze, and remembering “Scots wha ha’ wi’ Wallace bled,” it made my blood tingle all the way.
We are going to stay here at least a week. We shall not try to do everything that can be done on Scottish soil, for we shall not stalk stags or shoot grouse; and I have told Jone that he may put on as many Scotch bonnets and plaids as he likes, but there is one thing he is not going to do, and that is to go bare-kneed, to which he answered, he would never do that unless he could dip his knees into weak coffee so that they would be the same color as his face.
There is a nice inn here with beautiful scenery all around, and the lovely Loch Rannoch stretches away for eleven miles. Everything is just as Scotch as it can be. Even the English people who come here put on knickerbockers and bonnets. I have never been anywhere else where it is considered the correct thing to dress like the natives, and I will say here that it is very few of the natives that wear kilts. That sort of thing seems to be given up to the fancy Highlanders.
Nearly all the talk at the inn is about, shooting and fishing. Stag-hunting here is very different from what it is in England in more ways than one. In the first place, stags are not hunted with horses and hounds. In the second place, the sport is not free. A gentleman here told Jone that if a man wanted to shoot a stag on these moors it would cost him one rifle cartridge and six five pound notes; and when Jone did not understand what that meant, the man went on and told him about how the deer-stalking was carried on here. He said that some of the big proprietors up here owned as much as ninety thousand acres of moorland, and they let it out mostly to English people for hunting and fishing. And if it is stag-hunting the tenant wants, the price he pays is regulated by the number of stags he has the privilege of shooting. Each stag he is allowed to kill costs him thirty pounds. So if he wants the pleasure of shooting thirty stags in the season, his rent will be nine hundred pounds. This he pays for the stag-shooting, but some kind of a house and about ten thousand acres are thrown in, which he has a perfect right to sit down on and rest himself on, but he can’t shoot a grouse on it unless he pays extra for that. And, what is more, if he happens to be a bad shot, or breaks his leg and has to stay in the house, and doesn’t shoot his thirty stags, he has got to pay for them all the same.
When Jone told me all this, I said I thought a hundred and fifty dollars a pretty high price to pay for the right to shoot one deer. But Jone said I didn’t consider all the rest the man got. In the first place, he had the right to get up very early in the morning, in the gloom and drizzle, and to trudge through the slop and the heather until he got far away from the neighborhood of any human being, and then he could go up on some high piece of ground and take a spyglass and search the whole country round for a stag. When he saw one way off in the distance snuffing the morning air, or hunting for his breakfast among the heather, he had the privilege of walking two or three miles over the moor so as to get that stag between the wind and himself, so that it could not scent him or hear him. Then he had the glorious right to get his rifle all ready, and steal and creep toward that stag to cut short his existence. He has to be as careful and as sneaky as if he was a snake in the grass, going behind little hills and down into gullies, and sometimes almost crawling on his stomach where he goes over an open place, and doing everything he can to keep that stag from knowing his end is near. Sometimes he follows his victim all day, and the sun goes down before he has the glorious right of standing up and lodging a bullet in its unsuspecting heart. “So you see,” said Jone, “he gets a lot for his hundred and fifty dollars.”
“They do get a good deal more for their money than I thought they did,” said I; “but I wonder if those rich sportsmen ever think that if they would take the money that they pay for shooting thirty or forty stags in one season, they might buy a rhinoceros, which they could set up on a hill and shoot at every morning if they liked. A game animal like that would last them for years, and if they ever felt like it, they could ask their friends to help them shoot without costing them anything.”
Jone is pretty hard on sport with killing in it. He does not mind eating meat, but he likes to have the butcher do the killing. But I reckon he is a little too tender-hearted. But, as for me, I like sport of some kinds, especially when you don’t have your pity or your sympathies awakened by seeing your prey enjoying life when you are seeking to encompass his end. Of course, by that I mean fishing.
There are a good many trout in the lake, and people can hire the privilege of fishing for them; and I begged Jone to let me go out in a boat and fish. He was rather in favor of staying ashore and fishing in the little river, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to go out and have some regular lake fishing. At last Jone agreed, provided I would not expect him to have anything to do with the fishing. “Of course I don’t expect anything like that,” said I; “and it would be a good deal better for you to stay on shore. The landlord says a gilly will go along to row the boat and attend to the lines and rods and all that, and so there won’t be any need for you at all, and you can stay on shore with your book, and watch if you like.”
“And suppose you tumble overboard,” said Jone.
“Then you can swim out,” I said, “and perhaps wade a good deal of the way. I don’t suppose we need go far from the bank.”
Jone laughed, and said he was going too.
“Very well,” said I; “but you have got to stay in the bow, with your back to me, and take an interesting book with you, for it is a long time since I have done any fishing, and I am not going to do it with two men watching me and telling me how I ought to do it and how I oughtn’t to. One will be enough.”
“And that one won’t be me,” said Jone, “for fishing is not one of the branches I teach in my school.”
I would have liked it better if Jone and me had gone alone, he doing nothing but row; but the landlord wouldn’t let his boat that way, and said we must take a gilly, which, as far as I can make out, is a sort of sporting farmhand. That is the way to do fishing in these parts.
Well, we started, and Jone sat in the front, with his back to me, and the long-legged gilly rowed like a good fellow. When we got to a good place to fish he stopped, and took a fishing-rod that was in pieces and screwed them together, and fixed the line all right so that it would run along the rod to a little wheel near the handle, and then he put on a couple of hooks with artificial flies on them, which was so small I couldn’t imagine how the fish could see them. While he was doing all this I got a little fidgety, because I had never fished except with a straight pole and line with a cork to it, which would bob when the fish bit; but this was altogether a different sort of a thing. When it was all ready he handed me the pole, and then sat down very polite to look at me.
Now, if he had handed me the rod, and then taken another boat and gone home, perhaps I might have known what to do with the thing after a while, but I must say that at that minute I didn’t. I held the rod out over the water and let the flies dangle down into it, but do what I would, they wouldn’t sink; there wasn’t weight enough on them.
“You must throw your fly, madam,” said the gilly, always very polite. “Let me give it a throw for you,” and then he took the rod in his hand and gave it a whirl and a switch which sent the flies out ever so far from the boat; then he drew it along a little, so that the flies skipped over the top of the water.
[Illustration: “I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING, AND TAKING THE POLE IN BOTH HANDS I GAVE IT A WILD TWIRL OVER MY HEAD”]
I didn’t say anything, and taking the pole in both hands I gave it a wild twirl over my head, and then it flew out as if I was trying to whip one of the leaders in a four-horse team. As I did this Jone gave a jump that took him pretty near out of the boat, for two flies swished just over the bridge of his nose, and so close to his eyes as he was reading an interesting dialogue, and not thinking of fish or even of me, that he gave a jump sideways, which, if it hadn’t been for the gilly grabbing him, would have taken him overboard. I was frightened myself, and said to him that I had told him he ought not to come in the boat, and it would have been a good deal better for him to have stayed on shore.
He didn’t say anything, but I noticed he turned up his collar and pulled down his hat over his eyes and ears. The gilly said that perhaps I had too much line out, and so he took the rod and wound up a good deal of the line. I liked this better, because it was easier to whip out the line and pull it in again. Of course, I would not be likely to catch fish so much nearer the boat, but then we can’t have everything in this world. Once I thought I had a bite, and I gave the rod such a jerk that the line flew back against me, and when I was getting ready to throw it out again, I found that one of the little hooks had stuck fast in my thumb. I tried to take it out with the other hand, but it was awfully awkward to do, because the rod wobbled and kept jerking on it. The gilly asked me if there was anything the matter with the flies, but I didn’t want him to know what had happened, and so I said, “Oh, no,” and turning my back on him I tried my best to get the hook out without his helping me, for I didn’t want him to think that the first thing I caught was myself, after just missing my husband–he might be afraid it would be his turn next. You cannot imagine how bothersome it is to go fishing with a gilly to wait on you. I would rather wash dishes with a sexton to wipe them and look for nicks on the edges.
At last–and I don’t know how it happened–I did hook a fish, and the minute I felt him I gave a jerk, and up he came. I heard the gilly say something about playing, but I was in no mood for play, and if that fish had been shot up out of the water by a submarine volcano it couldn’t have ascended any quicker than when I jerked it up. Then as quick as lightning it went whirling through the air, struck the pages of Jone’s book, turning over two or three of them, and then wiggled itself half way down Jone’s neck, between his skin and his collar, while the loose hook swung around and nipped him in his ear.
“Don’t pull, madam,” shouted the gilly, and it was well he did, for I was just on the point of giving an awful jerk to get the fish loose from Jone. Jone gave a grab at the fish, which was trying to get down his back, and pulling him out threw him down; but by doing this he jerked the other hook into his ear, and then a yell arose such as I never before heard from Jone. “I told you you ought not to come in this boat,” said I; “you don’t like fishing, and something is always happening to you.”
“Like fishing!” cried Jone. “I should say not,” and he made up such a comical face that even the gilly, who was very polite, had to laugh as he went to take the hook out of his ear.
When Jone and the fish had been got off my line, Jone turned to me and said, “Are you going to fish any more?”
“Not with you in the boat,” I answered; and then he said he was glad to hear that, and told the man he could row us ashore.
I can assure you, madam, that fishing in a rather wobbly boat with a husband and a gilly in it, is not to my taste, and that was the end of our sporting experiences in Scotland, but it did not end the glorious times we had by that lake and on the moors.
We hired a little pony trap and drove up to the other end of the lake, and not far beyond that is the beginning of Rannoch Moor, which the books say is one of the wildest and most desolate places in all Europe. So far as we went over the moor we found that this was truly so, and I know that I, at least, enjoyed it ever so much more because it was so wild and desolate. As far as we could see, the moors stretched away in every direction, covered in most places by heather, now out of blossom, but with great rocks standing out of the ground in some places, and here and there patches of grass. Sometimes we could see four or five lochs at once, some of them two or three miles long, and down through the middle of the moor came the maddest and most harum-scarum little river that could be imagined. It actually seemed to go out of its way to find rocks to jump over, just as if it was a young calf, and some of the waterfalls were beautiful. All around us was melancholy mountains, all of them with “Ben” for their first names, except Schiehallion, which was the best shaped of any of them, coming up to a point and standing by itself, which was what I used to think mountains always did; but now I know they run into each other so that you can hardly tell where one ends and the other begins.
For three or four days we went out on these moors, sometimes when the sun was shining, and sometimes when there was a heavy rain and the wind blew gales, and I think I liked this last kind of weather the best, for it gave me an idea of lonely desolation which I never had in any part of the world I have ever been in before. There is often not a house to be seen, not even a crofter’s hut, and we seldom met anybody. Sometimes I wandered off by myself behind a hillock or rocks where I could not even see Jone, and then I used to try to imagine how Eve would have felt if she had early become a widow, and to put myself in her place. There was always clouds in the sky, sometimes dark and heavy ones coming down to the very peaks of the mountains, and not a tree was to be seen, except a few rowan trees or bushes close to the river. But by the side of Lock Rannoch, on our way back to the village, we passed along the edge of a fine old forest called the “Black Woods of Rannoch.” There are only three of these ancient forests left in Scotland, and some of the trees in this one are said to be eight hundred years old.
[Illustration: Pomona drinking it in]
The last time we was out on the Rannoch Moor there was such a savage and driving wind, and the rain came down in such torrents, that my mackintosh was blown nearly off of me, and I was wet from my head to my heels. But I would have stayed out hours longer if Jone had been willing, and I never felt so sorry to leave these Grampian Hills, where I would have been glad to have had my father feed his flocks, and where I might have wandered away my childhood, barefooted over the heather, singing Scotch songs and drinking in deep draughts of the pure mountain air, instead of–but no matter.
To-morrow we leave the Highlands, but as we go to follow the shallop of the “Lady of the Lake,” I should not repine.
_Letter Number Twenty-three_
[Illustration]
OBAN, SCOTLAND
It would seem to be the easiest thing in the world, when looking on the map, to go across the country from Loch Rannoch over to Katrine and all those celebrated parts, but we found we could not go that way, and so we went back to Edinburgh and made a fresh start. We stopped one night at the Royal Hotel, and there we found a letter from Mr. Poplington. We had left him at Buxton, and he said he was not going to Scotland this season, but would try to see us in London before we sailed.
He is a good man, and he wrote this letter on purpose to tell me that he had had a letter from his friend, the clergyman in Somersetshire, who had forbidden the young woman whose wash my tricycle had run into to marry her lover because he was a Radical. This letter was in answer to one Mr. Poplington wrote to him, in which he gave the minister my reasons for thinking that the best way to convert the young man from Radicalism was to let him marry the young woman, who would be sure to bring him around to her way of thinking, whatever that might be.
I didn’t care about the Radicalism. All I wanted was to get the two married, and then it would not make the least difference to me what their politics might be; if they lived properly and was sober and industrious and kept on loving each other, I didn’t believe it would make much difference to them. It was a long letter that the clergyman wrote, but the point of it was, that he had concluded to tell the young woman that she might marry the fellow if she liked, and that she must do her best to make him a good Conservative, which, of course, she promised to do. When I read this I clapped my hands, for who could have suspected that I should have the good luck to come to this country to spend the summer and make two matches before I left it!
When we left Edinburgh to gradually wend our way to this place, which is on the west coast of Scotland, the first town we stopped at was Stirling, where the Scotch kings used to live. Of course we went to the castle, which stands on the rocks high above the town; but before we started to go there Jone inquired if the place was a ruin or not, and when he was told it was not, and that soldiers lived there, he said it was all right, and we went. He now says he must positively decline to visit any more houses out of repair. He is tired of them; and since he has got over his rheumatism he feels less like visiting ruins than he ever did. I tell him the ruins are not any more likely to be damp than a good many of the houses that people live in; but this didn’t shake him, and I suppose if we come to any more vine-covered and shattered remnants of antiquity I shall be obliged to go over them by myself.
The castle is a great place, which I wouldn’t have missed for the world; but the spot that stirred my soul the most was in a little garden, as high in the air as the top of a steeple, where we could look out over the battlefield of Bannockburn. Besides this, we could see the mountains of Ben-Lomond, Ben-Venue, Ben-A’an, Benledi, and ever so much Scottish landscape spreading out for miles upon miles. There is a little hole in the wall here called the Ladies’ Look-Out, where the ladies of the court could sit and see what was going on in the country below without being seen themselves, but I stood up and took in everything over the top of the wall.
I don’t know whether I told you that the mountains of Scotland are “Bens,” and the mouths of rivers are “abers,” and islands are “inches.” Walking about the streets of Stirling, and I didn’t have time to see half as much as I wanted to, I came to the shop of a “flesher.” I didn’t know what it was until I looked into the window and saw that it was a butcher shop.
I like a language just about as foreign as the Scotch is. There are a good many words in it that people not Scotch don’t understand, but that gives a person the feeling that she is travelling abroad, which I want to have when I am abroad. Then, on the other hand, there are not enough of them to hinder a traveller from making herself understood. So it is natural for me to like it ever so much better than French, in which, when I am in it, I simply sink to the bottom if no helping hand is held out to me.
I had some trouble with Jone that night at the hotel, because he had a novel which he had been reading for I don’t know how long, and which he said he wanted to get through with before he began anything else. But now I told him he was going to enter on the wonderful country of the “Lady of the Lake,” and that he ought to give up everything else and read that book, because if he didn’t go there with his mind prepared the scenery would not sink into his soul as it ought to. He was of the opinion that when my romantic feeling got on top of the scenery it would be likely to sink into his soul as deep as he cared to have it, without any preparation, but that sort of talk wouldn’t do for me. I didn’t want to be gliding o’er the smooth waters of Loch Katrine, and have him asking me who the girl was who rowed her shallop to the silver strand, and the end of it was that I made him sit up until a quarter of two o’clock in the morning while I read the “Lady of the Lake” to him. I had read it before and he had not, but I hadn’t got a quarter through before he was just as willing to listen as I was to read. And when I got through I was in such a glow that Jone said he believed that all the blood in my veins had turned to hot Scotch.
I didn’t pay any attention to this, and after going to the window and looking out at the Gaelic moon, which was about half full and rolling along among the clouds, I turned to Jone and said, “Jone, let’s sing ‘Scots wha ha’,’ before we go to bed.”
“If we do roar out that thing,” said Jone, “they will put us out on the curbstone to spend the rest of the night.”
“Let’s whisper it, then,” said I; “the spirit of it is all I want. I don’t care for the loudness.”
“I’d be willing to do that,” said Jone, “if I knew the tune and a few of the words.”
“Oh, bother!” said I; and when I got into bed I drew the clothes over my head and sang that brave song all to myself. Doing it that way the words and tune didn’t matter at all, but I felt the spirit of it, and that was all I wanted, and then I went to sleep.
The next morning we went to Callander by train, and there we took a coach for Trossachs. It is hardly worth while to say we went on top, because the coaches here haven’t any inside to them, except a hole where they put the baggage. We drove along a beautiful road with mountains and vales and streams, and the driver told us the name of everything that had a name, which he couldn’t help very well, being asked so constant by me. But I didn’t feel altogether satisfied, for we hadn’t come to anything quotable, and I didn’t like to have Jone sit too long without something happening to stir up some of the “Lady of the Lake” which I had pumped into his mind the day before, and so keep it fresh.
Before long, however, the driver pointed out the ford of Coilantogle. The instant he said this I half jumped up, and, seizing Jone by the arm, I cried, “Don’t you remember? This is the place where the Knight of Snowdoun, James Fitz-James, fought Roderick Dhu!” And then without caring who else heard me, I burst out with:
“‘His back against a rock he bore,
And firmly placed his foot before: “Come one, come all! This rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I.”‘”
“No, madam,” said the driver, politely touching his hat, “that was a mile farther on. This place is:
“‘And here his course the chieftain staid, Threw down his target and his plaid.'”
“You are right,” said I; and then I began again:
“‘Then each at once his falchion drew, Each on the ground his scabbard threw, Each look’d to sun, and stream, and plain, As what they ne’er might see again;
Then foot, and point, and eye opposed, In dubious strife they darkly closed.'”
I didn’t repeat any more of the poem, though everybody was listening quite respectful without thinking of laughing, and as for Jone, I could see by the way he sat and looked about him that his tinder had caught my spark; but I knew that the thing for me to do here was not to give out but take in, and so, to speak in figures, I drank in the whole of Lake Vannachar, as we drove along its lovely marge until we came to the other end, and the driver said we would now go over the Brigg of Turk. At this up I jumped and said:
“‘And when the Brigg of Turk was won, The headmost horseman rode alone.'”
I had sense enough not to quote the next two lines, because when I had read them to Jone he said that it was a shame to use a horse that way.
We now came to Loch Achray, at the other end of which is the Trossachs, where we stopped for the night, and when the driver told me the mountain we saw before us was Ben-Venue, I repeated the lines:
“‘The hunter marked that mountain high, The lone lake’s western boundary,
And deem’d the stag must turn to bay, Where that huge rampart barr’d the way.'”
At last we reached the Trossachs Hotel, which stands near the wild ravines filled with bristling woods where the stag was lost, with the lovely lake in front and Ben-Venue towering up on the other side. I was so excited I could scarcely eat, and no wonder, because for the greater part of the day I had breathed nothing but the spirit of Scott’s poetry. I forgot to say that from the time we left Callander until we got to the hotel the rain poured down steadily, but that didn’t make any difference to me. A human being soaked with the “Lady of the Lake” is rain-proof.
_Letter Number Twenty-four_
EDINBURGH
I was sorry to stop my last letter right in the middle of the “Lady of the Lake” country, but I couldn’t get it all in, and the fact is, I can’t get all I want to say in any kind of a letter. The things I have seen and want to write about are crowded together like the Scottish mountains.
On the day after we got to Trossachs Hotel, and I don’t know any place I would rather spend weeks at than there, Jone and I walked through the “darksome glen” where the stag,
“Soon lost to hound and hunter’s ken, In the deep Trossachs’ wildest nook
His solitary refuge took.”
And then we came out on the far-famed Loch Katrine. There was a little steamboat there to take passengers to the other end, where a coach was waiting, but it wasn’t time for that to start, and we wandered on the banks of that song-gilded piece of water. It didn’t lie before us like “one burnished sheet of living gold,” as it appeared to James Fitz-James but my soul could supply the sunset if I chose. There, too, was the island of the fair Ellen, and beneath our very feet was the “silver strand” to which she rowed her shallop. I am sorry to say there isn’t so much of the silver strand as there used to be, because, in this world, as I have read, and as I have seen, the spirit of realistics is always crowding and trampling on the toes of the romantics, and the people of Glasgow have actually laid water-pipes from their town to this lovely lake, and now they turn the faucets in their back kitchens and out spouts the tide which kissed
“With whispering sound and slow
The beach of pebbles bright as snow.”
This wouldn’t have been so bad, because the lake has enough and to spare of its limpid wave; but in order to make their water-works the Glasgow people built a dam, and that has raised the lake a good deal higher, so that it overflows ever so much of the silver strand. But I can pick out the real from a scene like that as I can pick out and throw away the seeds of an orange, and gazing o’er that enchanted scene I felt like the Knight of Snowdoun himself, when he first beheld the lake and said:
“How blithely might the bugle horn
Chide, on the lake, the lingering morn!”
and then I went on with the lines until I came to
“Blithe were it then to wander here! But now–beshrew yon nimble deer”–
“You’d better beshrew that steamboat bell,” said Jone, and away we went and just caught the boat. Realistics come in very well sometimes when they take the form of legs.
The steamboat took us over nearly the whole of Lake Katrine, and I must say that I was so busy fitting verses to scenery that I don’t remember whether it rained or the sun shone. When we left the boat we took a coach to Inversnaid on Loch Lomond, and, as we rode along, it made my heart almost sink to feel that I had to leave my poetry behind me, for I didn’t know any that suited this region. But when we got in sight of Loch Lomond a Scotch girl who was on the seat behind me, and had several friends with her, began to sing a song about Lomond, of which I only remember, “You take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll get to Scotland afore you.”
I am sure I must have Scotch blood in me, for when I heard that song it wound up my feelings to such a pitch that I believe if that girl had been near enough I should have given her a hug and a kiss. As for Jone, he seemed to be nearly as much touched as I was, though not in the same way, of course.
We took a boat on Loch Lomond to Ardlui, another little town, and then we drove nine miles to the railroad. This was through a wild and solemn valley, and by the side of a rushing river, full of waterfalls and deep and diresome pools. When we reached the railroad we found a train waiting, and we took it and went to Oban, which we reached about six o’clock. Even this railroad trip was delightful, for we went by the great Lake Awe, with another rushing river and mountains and black precipices. We had a carriage all to ourselves until an old lady got in at a station, and she hadn’t been sitting in her corner more than ten minutes before she turned to me and said:
“You haven’t any lakes like this in your country, I suppose.”
Now I must say that, in the heated condition I had been in ever since I came into Scotland, a speech like that was like a squirt of cold water into a thing full of steam. For a couple of seconds my boiling stopped, but my fires was just as blazing as ever, and I felt as if I could turn them on that old woman and shrivel her up for plastering her comparisons on me at such a time.
“Of course, we haven’t anything just like this,” I said, “but it takes all sorts of scenery to make up a world.”
“That’s very true, isn’t it?” said she. “But, really, one couldn’t expect in America such a lake as that, such mountains, such grandeur!”
Now I made up my mind if she was going to keep up this sort of thing Jone and me would change carriages when we stopped at the next station, for comparisons are very different from poetry, and if you try to mix them with scenery you make a mess that is not fit for a Christian. But I thought first I would give her a word back:
“I have seen to-day,” I said, “the loveliest scenery I ever met with; but we’ve got grand canons in America where you could put the whole of that scenery without crowding, and where it wouldn’t be much noticed by spectators, so busy would they be gazing at the surrounding wonders.”
“Fancy!” said she.
“I don’t want to say anything,” said I, “against what I have seen to-day, and I don’t want to think of anything else while I am looking at it; but this I will say, that landscape with Scott is very different from landscape without him.”
“That is very true, isn’t it?” said she; and then she stopped making comparisons, and I looked out of the window.
Oban is a very pretty place on the coast, but we never should have gone there if it had not been the place to start from for Staffa and Iona. When I was only a girl I saw pictures of Fingal’s Cave, and I have read a good deal about it since, and it is one of the spots in the world that I have been longing to see, but I feel like crying when I tell you, madam, that the next morning there was such a storm that the boat for Staffa didn’t even start; and as the people told us that the storm would most likely last two or three days, and that the sea for a few days more would be so rough that Staffa would be out of the question, we had to give it up, and I was obliged to fall back from the reality to my imagination. Jone tried to comfort me by telling me that he would be willing to bet ten to one that my fancy would soar a mile above the real thing, and that perhaps it was very well I didn’t see old Fingal’s Cave and so be disappointed.
“Perhaps it is a good thing,” said I, “that you didn’t go, and that you didn’t get so seasick that you would be ready to renounce your country’s flag and embrace Mormonism if such things would make you feel better.” But that is the only thing that is good about it, and I have a cloud on my recollection which shall never be lifted until Corinne is old enough to travel and we come here with her.
But although the storm was so bad, it was not bad enough to keep us from making our water trip to Glasgow, for the boat we took did not have to go out to sea. It was a wonderfully beautiful passage we made among the islands and along the coast, with the great mountains on the mainland standing up above everything else. After a while we got to the Crinan Canal, which is in reality a short cut across the field. It is nine miles long and not much wider than a good-sized ditch, but it saves more than a hundred miles of travel around an island. We was on a sort of a toy steamboat which went its way through the fields and bushes and grass so close we could touch them; and as there was eleven locks where the boat had to stop, we got out two or three times and walked along the banks to the next lock. That being the kind of a ride Jone likes, he blessed Buxton. At the other end of the canal we took a bigger steamboat which carried us to Glasgow.
In the morning it hailed, which afterward turned to rain, but in the afternoon there was only showers now and then, so that we spent most of the time on deck. On this boat we met a very nice Englishman and his wife, and when they had heard us speak to each other they asked us if we had ever been in this part of the world before, and when we said we hadn’t they told us about the places we passed. If we had been an English couple who had never been there before they wouldn’t have said a word to us.
As we got near the Clyde the gentleman began to talk about ship-building, and pretty soon I saw in his face plain symptoms that he was going to have an attack of comparison making. I have seen so much of this disorder that I can nearly always tell when it is coming on a person. In about a minute the disease broke out on him, and he began to talk about the differences between American and English ships. He told Jone and me about a steamship that was built out in San Francisco which shook three thousand bolts out of herself on her first voyage. It seemed to me that that was a good deal like a codfish shaking his bones out through swimming too fast. I couldn’t help thinking that that steamship must have had a lot of bolts so as to have enough left to keep her from scattering herself over the bottom of the ocean.
I expected Jone to say something in behalf of his country’s ships, but he didn’t seem to pay much attention to the boat story, so I took up the cudgels myself, and I said to the gentleman that all nations, no matter how good they might be at ship-building, sometimes made mistakes, and then to make a good impression on him I whanged him over the head with the “Great Eastern,” and asked him if there ever was a vessel that was a greater failure than that.
He said, “Yes, yes, the ‘Great Eastern’ was not a success,” and then he stopped talking about ships.
When we got fairly into the Clyde and near Glasgow the scene was wonderful. It was nearly night, and the great fires of the factories lit up the sky, and we saw on the stocks a great ship being built.
We stayed in Glasgow one day, and Jone was delighted with it, because he said it was like an American city. Now, on principle, I like American cities, but I didn’t come to Scotland to see them; and the greatest pleasure I had in Glasgow was standing with a tumbler of water in my hand, repeating to myself as much of the “Lady of the Lake” as I could remember.
_Letter Number Twenty-five_
LONDON
Here we are in this wonderful town, where, if you can’t see everything you want to see, you can generally see a sample of it, even if your fad happens to be the ancientnesses of Egypt. We are at the Babylon Hotel, where we shall stay until it is time to start for Southampton, where we shall take the steamer for home. What we are going to do between here and Southampton I don’t know yet; but I do know that Jone is all on fire with joy because he thinks his journeys are nearly over, and I am chilled with grief when I think that my journeys are nearly over.
We left Edinburgh on the train called the “Flying Scotsman,” and it deserved its name. I suppose that in the days of Wallace and Bruce and Rob Roy the Scots must often have skipped along in a lively way; but I am sure if any of them had ever invaded England at the rate we went into it, the British lion would soon have been living on thistles instead of roses.
The speed of this train was sometimes a mile a minute, I think; and I am sure I was never on any railroad in America where I was given a shorter time to get out for something to eat than we had at York. Jone and I are generally pretty quick about such things, but we had barely time to get back to our carriage before that “Flying Scotsman” went off like a streak of lightning.
On the way we saw a part of York Minster, and had a splendid, view of Durham Cathedral, standing high in the unreachable–that is, as far as I was concerned. Peterborough Cathedral we also saw the outside of, and I felt like a boy looking in at a confectioner’s window with no money to buy anything. It wasn’t money that I wanted; it was time, and we had very little of that left.
The next day, after we reached London, I set out to attend to a piece of business that I didn’t want Jone to know anything about. My business was to look up my family pedigree. It seemed to me that it would be a shame if I went away from the home of my ancestors without knowing something about those ancestors and about the links that connected me with them. So I determined to see what I could do in the way of making up a family tree.
By good luck, Jone had some business to attend to about money and rooms on the steamer, and so forth, and so I could start out by myself without his even asking me where I was going. Now, of course, it would be a natural thing for a person to go and seek out his ancestors in the ancient village from which they sprang, and to read their names on the tombstones in the venerable little church, but as I didn’t know where this village was, of course I couldn’t go to it. But in London is the place where you can find out how to find out such things.
[Illustration: “A PERSON WHO WAS A FAMILY-TREE-MAN”]
As far back as when we was in Chedcombe I had had a good deal of talk with Miss Pondar about ancestors and families. I told her that my forefathers came from this country, which I was very sure of, judging from my feelings; but as I couldn’t tell her any particulars, I didn’t go into the matter very deep. But I did say there was a good many points that I would like to set straight, and asked her if she knew where I could find out something about English family trees. She said she had heard there was a big heraldry office in London, but if I didn’t want to go there, she knew of a person who was a family-tree-man. He had an office in London, and his business was to go around and tend to trees of that kind which had been neglected, and to get them into shape and good condition. She gave me his address, and I had kept the thing quiet in my mind until now.
I found the family-tree-man, whose name was Brandish, in a small room not too clean, over a shop not far from St. Paul’s Churchyard. He had another business, which related to patent poison for flies, and at first he thought I had come to see him about that, but when he found out I wanted to ask him about my family tree his face brightened up.
When I told Mr. Brandish my business the first thing he asked me was my family name. Of course I had expected this, and I had thought a great deal about the answer I ought to give. In the first place, I didn’t want to have anything to do with my father’s name. I never had anything much to do with him, because he died when I was a little baby, and his name had nothing high-toned about it, and it seemed to me to belong to that kind of a family that you would be better satisfied with the less you looked up its beginnings; but my mother’s family was a different thing. Nobody could know her without feeling that she had sprung from good roots. It might have been from the stump of a tree that had been cut down, but the roots must have been of no common kind to send up such a shoot as she was. It was from her that I got my longings for the romantic.
She used to tell me a good deal about her father, who must have been a wonderful man in many ways. What she told me was not like a sketch of his life, which I wish it had been, but mostly anecdotes of what he said and did. So it was my mother’s ancestral tree I determined to find, and without saying whether it was on my mother’s or father’s side I was searching for ancestors, I told Mr. Brandish that Dork was the family name.
“Dork,” said he; “a rather uncommon name, isn’t it? Was your father the eldest son of a family of that name?”
Now I was hoping he wouldn’t say anything about my father.
“No, sir,” said I; “it isn’t that line that I am looking up. It is my mother’s. Her name was Dork before she was married.”
“Really! Now I see,” said he, “you have the paternal line all correct, and you want to look up the line on the other side. That is very common; it is so seldom that one knows the line of ancestors on one’s maternal side. Dork, then, was the name of your maternal grandfather.”
It struck me that a maternal grandfather must be a grandmother, but I didn’t say so.
“Can you tell me,” said he, “whether it was he who emigrated from this country to America, or whether it was his father or his grandfather?”
Now I hadn’t said anything about the United States, for I had learned there was no use in wasting breath telling English people I had come from America, so I wasn’t surprised at his question, but I couldn’t answer it.
“I can’t say much about that,” I said, “until I have found out something about the English branches of the family.”
“Very good,” said he. “We will look over the records,” and he took down a big book and turned to the letter D. He ran his finger down two or three pages, and then he began to shake his head.
“Dork?” said he. “There doesn’t seem to be any Dork, but here is Dorkminster. Now if that was your family name we’d have it all here. No doubt you know all about that family. It’s a grand old family, isn’t it? Isn’t it possible that your grandfather or one of his ancestors may have dropped part of the name when he changed his residence to America?”
Now I began to think hard; there was some reason in what the family-tree-man said. I knew very well that the same family name was often different in different countries, changes being made to suit climates and people.
“Minster has a religious meaning, hasn’t it?” said I.
“Yes, madam,” said he; “it relates to cathedrals and that sort of thing.”
Now, so far as I could remember, none of the things my mother had ever told me about her father was in any ways related to religion. They was mostly about horses; and although there is really no reason for the disconnection between horses and religion, especially when you consider the hymns with heavenly chariots in them must have had horses, it didn’t seem to me that my grandfather could have made it a point of being religious, and perhaps he mightn’t have cared for the cathedral part of his name, and so might have dropped it for convenience in signing, probably being generally in a hurry, judging from what my mother had told me. I said as much to Mr. Brandish, and he answered that he thought it was likely enough, and that that sort of thing was often done.
“Now, then,” said he, “let us look into the Dorkminster line and trace out your connection with that. From what place did your ancestors come?”
It seemed to me that he was asking me a good deal more than he was telling me, and I said to him: “That is what I want to find out. What is the family home of the Dorkminsters?”
“Oh, they were a great Hampshire family,” said he. “For five hundred years they lived on their estates in Hampshire. The first of the name was Sir William Dorkminster, who came over with the Conqueror, and most likely was given those estates for his services. Then we go on until we come to the Duke of Dorkminster, who built a castle, and whose brother Henry was made bishop and founded an abbey, which I am sorry to say doesn’t now exist, being totally destroyed by Oliver Cromwell.”
You cannot imagine how my blood leaped and surged within me as I listened to those words. William the Conqueror! An ancestral abbey! A duke! “Is the family castle still standing?” said I.
“It fell into ruins,” said he, “during the reign of Charles I., and even its site is now uncertain, the park having been devoted to agricultural purposes. The fourth Duke of Dorkminster was to have commanded one of the ships which destroyed the Spanish Armada, but was prevented by a mortal fever which cut him off in his prime; he died without issue, and the estates passed to the Culverhams of Wilts.”
“Did that cut off the line?” said I, very quick.
“Oh, no,” said the family-tree man, “the line went on. One of the duke’s younger sisters must have married a man on condition that he took the old family name, which is often done, and her descendants must have emigrated somewhere, for the name no longer appears in Hampshire; but probably not to America, for that was rather early for English emigration.”
“Do you suppose,” said I, “that they went to Scotland?”
“Very likely,” said he, after thinking a minute; “that would be probable enough. Have you reason to suppose that there was a Scotch branch in your family?”
“Yes,” said I, for it would have been positively wrong in me to say that the feelings that I had for the Scotch hadn’t any meaning at all.
“Now then,” said Mr. Brandish, “there you are, madam. There is a line all the way down from the Conqueror to the end of the sixteenth century, scarcely one man’s lifetime before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.”
I now began to calculate in my mind. I was thirty years old; my mother, most likely, was about as old when I was born; that made sixty years. Then my grandfather might have been forty when my mother was born, and there was a century. As for my great-grandfather and his parents, I didn’t know anything about them. Of course, there must have been such persons, but I didn’t know where they came from or where they went to.
“I can go back a century,” said I, “but that doesn’t begin to meet the end of the line you have marked out. There’s a gap of about two hundred years.”
“Oh, I don’t think I would mind that,” said Mr. Brandish. “Gaps of that kind are constantly occurring in family trees. In fact, if we was to allow gaps of a century or so to interfere with the working out of family lines, it would cut off a great many noble ancestries from families of high position, especially in the colonies and abroad. I beg you not to pay any attention to that, madam.”
My nerves was tingling with the thought of the Spanish Armada, and perhaps Bannockburn (which then made me wish I had known all this before I went to Stirling, but which battle, now as I write, I know must have been fought a long time before any of the Dorks went to Scotland), and I expect my eyes flashed with family pride, for do what I would I couldn’t sit calm and listen to what I was hearing. But, after all, that two hundred years did weigh upon my mind. “If you make a family tree for me,” said I, “you will have to cut off the trunk and begin again somewhere up in the air.”
“Oh, no,” said he, “we don’t do that. We arrange the branches so that they overlap each other, and the dotted lines which indicate the missing portions are not noticed. Then, after further investigation and more information, the dots can be run together and the tree made complete and perfect.”
Of course, I had nothing more to say, and he promised to send me the tree the next morning, though, of course, requesting me to pay him in advance, which was the rule of the office, and you would be amazed, madam, if you knew how much that tree cost. I got it the next morning, but I haven’t shown it to Jone yet. I am proud that I own it, and I have thrills through me whenever my mind goes back to its Norman roots; but I am bound to say that family trees sometimes throw a good deal of shade over their owners, especially when they have gaps in them, which seems contrary to nature, but is true to fact.
_Letter Number Twenty-six_
SOUTHWESTERN HOTEL, SOUTHAMPTON
To-morrow our steamer sails, and this is the last letter I write on English soil; and although I haven’t done half that I wanted to, there are ever so many things I have done that I can’t write you about.
I had seen so few cathedrals that on the way down here I was bound to see at least one good one, and so we stopped at Winchester. It was while walking under the arches of that venerable pile that the thought suddenly came to me that we were now in Hampshire, and that, perhaps, in this cathedral might be some of the tombs of my ancestors. Without saying what I was after I began at one of the doors, and I went clean around that enormous church, and read every tablet in the walls and on the floor.
Once I had a shock. There was a good many small tombs with roofs over them, and statues of people buried within, lying on top of the tombs, and some of them had their faces and clothes colored so as to make them look almost as natural as life. They was mostly bishops, and had been lying there for centuries. While looking at these I came to a tomb with an opening low down on the side of it, and behind some iron bars there lay a stone figure that made me fairly jump. He was on his back with hardly any clothes on, and was actually nothing but skin and bones. His mouth was open, as if he was gasping for his last breath. I never saw such an awful sight, and as I looked at the thing my blood began to run cold, and then it froze. The freezing was because I suddenly thought to myself that this might be a Dorkminster, and that that horrible object was my ancestor. I was actually afraid to look at the inscription on the tombstone for fear that this was so, for if it was, I knew that whenever I should think of my family tree this bag of bones would be climbing up the trunk, or sitting on one of the branches. But I must know the truth, and trembling so that I could scarcely read, I stooped down to look at the inscription and find out who that dreadful figure had been. It was not a Dorkminster, and my spirits rose.
[Illustration: “This might be a Dorkminster”]
We got here three days ago, and we have made a visit to the Isle of Wight. We went straight down to the southern coast, and stopped all night at the little town of Bonchurch. It was very lovely down there with roses and other flowers blooming out-of-doors as if it was summer, although it is now getting so cold everywhere else. But what pleased me most was to stand at the top of a little hill, and look out over the waters of the English Channel, and feel that not far out of eyeshot was the beautiful land of France with its lower part actually touching Italy.
You know, madam, that when we was here before, we was in France, and a happy woman was I to be there, although so much younger than now I couldn’t properly enjoy it; but even then France was only part of the road to Italy, which, alas, we never got to. Some day, however, I shall float in a gondola and walk amid the ruins of ancient Rome, and if Jone is too sick of travel to go with me, it may be necessary for Corinne to see the world, and I shall take her.
Now I must finish this letter and bid good-by to beautiful Britain, which has made us happy and treated us well in spite of some comparisons in which we was expected to be on the wrong side, but which hurt nobody, and which I don’t want even to think of at such a moment as this.
_Letter Number Twenty-seven_
NEW YORK
I send you this, madam, to let you know that we arrived here safely yesterday afternoon, and that we are going to-day to Jone’s mother’s farm where Corinne is.
I liked sailing from Southampton because when I start to go to a place I like to go, and when we went home before and had to begin by going all the way up to Liverpool by land, and then coming all the way back again by water, and after a couple of days of this to stop at Queenstown and begin the real voyage from there, I did not like it, although it was a good deal of fun seeing the bumboat women come aboard at Queenstown and telescope themselves into each other as they hurried up the ladder to get on deck and sell us things.
We had a very good voyage, with about enough rolling to make the dining saloon look like some of the churches we’ve seen abroad on weekdays where there was services regular, but mighty small congregations.
When we got in sight of my native shore, England, Scotland, and even the longed-for Italy, with her palaces and gondolas, faded from my mind, and my every fibre tingled with pride and patriotism. We reached our dock about six o’clock in the afternoon, and I could scarcely stand still, so anxious was I to get ashore. There was a train at eight which reached Rockbridge at half-past nine, and there we could take a carriage and drive to the farm in less than an hour, and then Corinne would be in my arms, so you may imagine my state of mind–Corinne before bedtime! But a cloud blacker than the heaviest fog came down upon me, for while we was standing on the deck, expecting every minute to land, a man came along and shouted at the top of his voice that no baggage could be examined by the custom-house officers after six o’clock, and the passengers could take nothing ashore with them but their hand-bags, and must come back in the morning and have their baggage examined. When I heard this my soul simply boiled within me! I looked at Jone, and I could see he was boiling just as bad.
“Jone,” said I, “don’t say a word to me.”
“I am not going to say a word,” said he, and he didn’t. All our belongings was in our trunks. Jone didn’t carry any hand-bag, and I had only a little one which had in it three newspapers, which we bought from the pilot, a tooth-brush, a spool of thread and some needles, and a pair of scissors with one point broken off. With these things we had to go to a hotel and spend the night, and in the morning we had to go back to have our trunks examined, which, as there was nothing in them to pay duty on, was waste time for all parties, no matter when it was done.
[Illustration: “Jone didn’t carry any hand-bag, and I had only a little one”]
That night, when I was lying awake thinking about this welcome to our native land, I don’t say that I hauled down the stars and stripes, but I did put them at half mast. When we arrived in England we got ashore about twelve o’clock at night, but there was the custom-house officers as civil and obliging as any people could be, ready to tend to us and pass us on. And when I thought of them, and afterward of the lordly hirelings who met us here, I couldn’t help feeling what a glorious thing it would be to travel if you could get home without coming back.
Jone tried to comfort me by telling me that we ought to be very glad we don’t like this sort of thing. “In many foreign countries,” said he, “people are a good deal nagged by their governments and they like it; we don’t like it, so haul up your flag.”
I hauled it up, and it’s flying now from the tiptop of my tallest mast. In an hour our train starts, and I shall see Corinne before the sun goes down.