SPECIAL EDITION

WITH THE WORLD’S
GREAT TRAVELLERS

EDITED BY CHARLES MORRIS
AND OLIVER H. G. LEIGH

Vol. I

CHICAGO

UNION BOOK COMPANY

1901

Copyright 1896 and 1897
BY
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

Copyright 1901
E. R. DuMONT

THE PRODIGAL’S RETURN

Painting by Spada

CONTENTS.

List of Illustrations

VOLUME I

PREFACE.

Next to actual travel, the reading of first-class travel stories by men and women of genius is the finest aid to the broadening of views and enlargement of useful knowledge of men and the world’s ways. It is the highest form of intellectual recreation, with the advantage over fiction-reading of satisfying the wholesome desire for facts. With all our modern enthusiasm for long journeys and foreign travel, now so easy of accomplishment, we see but very little of the great world. The fact that ocean voyages are now called mere “trips” has not made us over-familiar with even our own kinsfolk in our new dependencies. Foreign peoples and lands are still strange to us. Tropic and Arctic lands are as far apart in condition as ever; Europe differs from Asia, America from Africa, as markedly as ever. Man still presents every grade of development, from the lowest savagery to the highest civilization, and our interest in the marvels of nature and art, the variety of plant and animal life, and the widely varied habits and conditions, modes of thought and action, of mankind, is in no danger of losing its zest.

These considerations have guided us in our endeavor to tell the story of the world, alike of its familiar and unfamiliar localities, as displayed in the narratives of those who have seen its every part. Special interest attaches to the stories of those travellers who first gazed upon the wonders and observed the inhabitants of previously unknown lands, and whose descriptions are therefore those of discoverers.

One indisputable advantage belongs to this work over the average record of travel: the reader is not tied down to the perusal of a one-man book. He has the privilege of calling at pleasure upon any one of these eminent travellers to recount his or her exploit, with the certainty of finding they are all in their happiest vein and tell their best stories.

The adventures and discoveries here described are gathered from the four quarters of the globe, and include the famous stories of men no longer living, as well as those of present activity. Many of the articles were formerly published in the exhaustive work entitled, “The World’s Library of Literature, History and Travel” [The J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia].

For the rich variety and quality of our material we are indebted to many travellers of note, and to the courtesy of numerous publishers and authors. Among these it is desired to acknowledge particularly indebtedness to the following publishers and works: To Harper and Brothers, for selections from Stanley’s “Through the Dark Continent,” Du Chaillu’s “Equatorial Africa,” Prime’s “Tent-Life in the Holy Land,” Orton’s “The Andes and the Amazon,” and Browne’s “An American Family in Germany.” To Charles Scribner’s Sons: Stanley’s “In Darkest Africa,” Field’s “The Greek Islands,” and Schley’s “The Rescue of Greely.” To G. P. Putnam’s Sons: De Amicis’s “Holland and its People,” Taylor’s “Lands of the Saracens,” and Brace’s “The New West.” To Houghton, Mifflin and Co.: Melville’s “In the Lena Delta,” and Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home.” To Roberts Brothers: Hunt’s “Bits of Travel at Home.” To H. C. Coates and Co.: Leonowen’s “Life and Travel in India.” Equal tribute is offered to the authors who have courteously permitted the use of their material, and in these acknowledgments we include Charles Morris, editor of the above work, and Oliver H. G. Leigh, whose pen has won honors in various fields, for their special contributions to this edition.

WITH THE WORLD’S
GREAT TRAVELLERS.

NEW DEPENDENCIES OF THE UNITED STATES.

OLIVER H. G LEIGH.

[The trend of events makes it certain that our geographical knowledge is going to be enlarged by personal investigation. The boom of Dewey’s big guns sent us to our school-books with mixed feelings as to the practical value of much of our alleged learning. The world suddenly broadened as we gazed in surprise. Hawaii invited itself into the circle of new relations. The near West Indies and the remote Philippines craved peculiar attentions. Whether moved by commercial zeal, official duty or the profitable curiosity of pleasure or scientific investigation, he is in the highest sense a patriotic benefactor of his own country and the land he visits, who devotes his energies to making Americans more intimately acquainted with the communities now linked with the most powerful of nations.]

The scope of holiday travel, or tours of profitable investigation, has been widely extended by the new relationship between the United States and Hawaii, now included in its possessions, and the former Spanish islands over which it exercises a kindly protectorate. Through the usual channels public sentiment is being formed upon the resources and responsibilities of the new dependencies. Many will be attracted to Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, and even to the remote Philippines, by considerations of a practical kind. No truer patriotic motive can inspire the American traveller than the desire to develop the natural resources, and, by consequence, the social welfare of a dependent community Whether bent on business, pleasure, or official duty in the service of the United States the prospective voyager, and the friends he leaves behind him, will profit by these gatherings from the impressions and experiences of former travellers.

The approach to Havana at daybreak overwhelms the senses with the gorgeous beauties of the sky and landscape. Foul as the harbor may be with city drainage it seems a silvery lake encircled with the charms of Paradise and over-arched with indescribable glories of celestial forms and hues and ever-changing witcheries wrought by the frolicsome sun in his ecstasy of morning release. Strange that where nature most lavishes her wealth of charms and favors, the listlessness of perverse man responds in ungrateful contrasts rather than in harmonies. Havana has the interest of age, with the drawbacks incident to hereditary indifference to progressive change. As in all important cities there are sharp contrasts in its quarters. With long avenues of stately mansions, marble-like and colonnaded, and exquisitely designed courtyards, there are unpaved thoroughfares with an open sewer in the mid-roadway, flanked by tenement houses with a family in each room. Most of Havana’s two hundred thousand citizens live in one-story buildings, lacking conveniences which the poorest American considers necessities. The older streets are mere alleys, about twenty feet wide, of which the sidewalks take up seven. Light and ample ventilation are obtained by grated window-openings without frames or glass. The dwellings and public buildings throughout Cuba are planned to give free passage to every zephyr that wafts relief from the oppressive heat. This is not because the thermometer mounts much higher than it does in the United States, for it never touches the records of our great cities, where a hundred in the shade is not unknown. From 80 to 50 degrees is the year’s average, and it is this steady continuance of warmth that tries strength and temper.

In the better districts of Havana the driveways are twenty-three feet and the sidewalks about ten feet wide. Politeness keeps native and foreign men hopping up and down the foot deep curb to allow ladies a fair share of elbow-room on the pavements. Your guest-chamber in a well-to-do family residence has probably a window twenty by eight feet, sashless, but with several lace curtains and shutters to suit the weather. The walls are tinted with the Spaniard’s eye for rich color display, the massive furniture is solid carved old mahogany, and the graceful mosquito curtains suggest experiences better left untold. House-rent is high, owing to the heavy taxation, which will doubtless be modified after American administration has put the city in a sanitary condition. Flour used to cost the poorer classes from two to three times its price in the United States.

Before we leave the capital for the interior we must note two or three of the time-mellowed edifices, which give the flavor of old-world mediævalism to the island. The gloomy Morro Castle is familiar in the chronicles of the war. It stands guard at the water-gate of the city, a grim-visaged dungeon that echoes with the despairing groans of more victims of cruel oppression than can ever be counted. A more cheerful landmark is the old Cathedral, looking as if it dates further back than 1724, cooped up in its crowded quarter. Here rest the ashes of Columbus, say the faithful, and they are probably right. He died in Spain May 20, 1506. In 1856, his bones were brought to San Domingo and from there were transferred in January, 1796, to this Cathedral, where they rest in the wall behind the bust and tablet to his memory. The elaborate monument under the dome is a splendid work of art. Four life-size sculptured ecclesiastics bear a sarcophagus on their shoulders. There is also a supposed portrait bust on a mural tablet.

The Spanish element in the city is popularly said to be an exaggeration of the old country quality. The Tacon theatre holds three thousand people. Cafés and restaurants abound, and never lack customers. Some day Havana may be transformed into a nearer Paris, with a larger American colony than haunts the dearer city across the sea. Cuba has nearly the same area as England. The Province of Havana has a population of 452,000, of whom 107,500 are black. Large tracts of the island have not yet been explored. The long years of intermittent battling between the Cubans and Spaniards have grievously hindered progress in all directions. Nature is bountiful beyond belief, yet her overtures have been scorned, partly because of native inertia, but mainly through dread of loss. Both sides have been guilty of laying waste vast areas of cultivated land, ruining its husbandmen, capitalists and laborers alike. The millennium bids fair to come before long. Peace is restoring confidence. The reign of justice will bring capital and labor back to the soil and tempt American migration to the cities and towns, where life can be lived so enjoyably by those who bring modern methods and ideas to bear in the task of converting a man-made wilderness into an alluring paradise. Not long ago an American bought seventy acres of ground in Trinidad valley, which he cleared and planted at a cost of $3,070 for the first year. The second year’s cultivation cost $1,120. He made it a banana orchard. At the end of the second year he had realized $30,680 net profit by the sale of his crop of 54,000 bunches.

Havana has the cosmopolitan air. Clubs, cafés, and entertainments abound and flourish. Its suburbs and nearby towns afford all the allurements the modern city-man seeks in country life. The rural charms of Marianao are unsurpassed in any land. Ornately simple architecture marks the columned houses of its best street. Around it are the cosy cottages in their luxuriant gardens, and beyond these the open country, a veritable Eden of foliage, flowers and fruit. In one spot a famous old banyan tree has thrown out its limbs, thrusting them deep into the soil till they have sprouted and spread over a five-acre field.

As we traverse the garden landscape in any settled part of the island, and in Porto Rico, we note the habits of the rustic native in his interesting simplicity. Poor enough in all conscience, but wonderfully contented with his crust of bread, his cigarette, the family pig, bananas for the pickaninnies’ staple fare, and the frequent sips of rum which are to the West Indian laborer what beefsteak is to the American toiler. He is by no means a drunkard, and if he lacks book-learning he excels in some civic virtues of the homelier kind, and is not extravagant in his tailor-bills. The children’s costume is usually that of Eve before the fall, and the apparel of a goodly family might be bought for the price of a dude’s red vest.

Cock-fighting is the favorite native sport. It is encountered at any hour, anywhere. There are other sports, such as boar hunts, spearing fish, not to mention that of killing tarantulas, sand-flies, land-crabs, and the gentle crocodile. The thousand miles of steam railway in Cuba are unevenly distributed. From Havana the trip through Pinar del Rio gives an astounding revelation of the wealth of forest and soil and mines. Devastated as so much of this country was during the long years of dragging war, its charms of scenery and possibilities of development will work its speedy salvation. A single acre of choice land has produced $3,000 worth of tobacco.

Two crops of corn and two of strawberries grow each year, vegetables and many fruits are superabundant, yet wheat and flour are imported, and cotton, besides other important staples, can be successfully cultivated.

Journeying to the charming Isle of Pines, and then south and east through Matanzas, Santa Clara, and Puerto Principe to Santiago, there is the same invitation of Nature to come and enjoy all that makes earth lovely. The island is dotted with towns large and small having much the same characteristics as Havana. Her virgin forests have some of the richest woods known to commerce. Her hills hold stores of iron, copper, coal and other minerals. Her soil is ready to yield many-fold to the courageous cultivator. When the swords have been turned into plough-shares and the spears to pruning-hooks, there will come a new day for the native Cuban. He will feel himself liberated from the hindering rancors and jealousies, inevitable in the light of recent history, which alone now stand between his beautiful island and the prosperity that hovers, waiting his encouragement to alight. Then the traveller will return with reports of Havana rejuvenated, her harbor dredged and purified, her highways paved, homes made healthy and the whole island lifted to the higher and happier plane that will give the Pearl of the Antilles its rightful setting among the other gems of God’s earth.

MORRO CASTLE, HAVANA

Porto Rico, the “rich port,” so named by Columbus, came gladly under the American flag. Its population of about 900,000 has had a sorry time for three hundred years. They have been steeped in spiritless poverty from first to last, so used to the oppressor’s yoke that ambition seems to have been crushed. Yet their island is an earthly paradise, save for its rain-storms and occasional droughts. It is rich in undeveloped mineral deposits and splendid forests. Nature has helped to discourage native effort by providing the means of sustenance over-lavishly, in one sense. The people scattered through the interior find everything ready grown to hand. The bulk of the population throng the shore areas and are as listlessly happy with the minimum of life’s necessaries as are the animals.

Spain has left its mark upon the island, a mark representing a civilization not to be sneered at, though not of the modern stamp. Range through the island’s lovely valleys, struggle up its mountain slopes to isolated hamlets where primitive life lingers in all its bewildering unloveliness; thread the rude thoroughfare of its picturesque towns, and you will come upon replicas of the familiar Spanish church, the symbol and centre of an ever potent influence for good. With all its faults, this local haven of peace and good cheer has tempered the lot of generations that never fully realized the hopelessness of their fate. A venerable church peeping out of a leafy glade gives a touch of poetic grace to the landscape. It is something, perhaps, though not very much, that sectarian animosities do not embitter the easy minds of these peasants, who dwell together in enviable fraternity.

Porto Rico is only one of some thirteen hundred islands in the West Indies that are now in the American fold. It has several large towns that will intensely interest the traveller. San Juan, with twenty-five thousand inhabitants, is the principal city. A fine old military road runs from it across the mountains to Ponce, on the south shore. It is twenty feet wide, hard and dustless, winds along through eighty miles of scenery unsurpassed in any country, though the island is only forty miles directly across.

Every considerable town has its cathedral. That at Sabana Grande was built in 1610. Some of them have gorgeous altars and precious paintings. In one little church the figure of the Blessed Virgin is of pure gold. Another has an altar of silver.

The retail stores in the cities make little or no front display. The store is virtually a sample room, with extensive warehouses in the rear. Town life is, in its way, Parisian. The cathedral stands in a square or park, the promenade and gossiping ground for both sexes. The midday siesta is the rule, a two hours’ cessation from the round of toil. The evenings are given to music and dancing, or the merry chatter of groups as they enjoy the strains of the band. The lacy mantilla adds grace to the generally captivating beauty of the women, as they cunningly drape it over their heads to take the place of hats. The palms and cocoa-nut trees, the clusters of coffee-trees, the sugar-cane, the groves of oranges, lemons, bananas, and other fruits lend great beauty to the landscape. Tobacco is largely cultivated, with plenty of inducements for a more systematic treatment of a commodity which ought greatly to increase the wealth of the island.

Since it has come under American influence many improvements have been effected. The cities are treated to the modern system of drainage, and roads have been constructed which will make traffic between the towns easier and thus encourage trade.

Exceptionally fierce hurricanes and floods wrought havoc with many plantations soon after the war. Other misfortunes plunged the always poor laboring class into absolute starvation, many of the well-to-do were ruined, and business has been severely hampered by questions of tariff arising out of the change in political status. The United States government has done much and will continue its kindly endeavors to ameliorate the condition of these people. With the speedy return of good times there ought to be a growing stream of pleasure as well as business traffic to an island so exceptionally rich in the natural features which give fresh delight to the travelled eye and unfold a new world of charm to the fortunate ones who go abroad for the first time.

Honolulu, the capital of the Hawaiian group, has long been an American city in all but name. The geographical position of the islands destined them to come within the pale of our civilization. Within a century the natives have been transformed from a state of animalism into a self-respecting, progressive people. While the aborigines have been rapidly dying out there has been a steady influx of new blood from various sources. The population is about 120,000, immigrants from Japan and Portugal forming a considerable proportion of the laboring class. Chinese immigration has been restricted.

The traveller might almost imagine himself in some New England or Pennsylvania town as he drives through the streets of Honolulu. The capital is laid out on the American plan, the churches and houses might have been transplanted by a cyclone, and the very attire of the people in general keeps up the illusion of being at home from home. The palace of the last king and queen bears as little relation to the hut of their great predecessor, Kamehameha the First, as do the New York tailor-made suits and dresses of the citizens of Honolulu to the scanty loin-cloth which their grandparents considered the height of Sandwich Islands fashion.

More and more will these lovely isles become the pleasure-grounds for our people and for all world-tourists. The important practical value of their annexation will be better understood if it ever becomes necessary to back up the essential principle of the Monroe Doctrine against foreign foes. As a growing metropolis Honolulu has charms of its own independent of the ideal climate and luxuriant flora of the twelve islands.

The narratives of the first travellers to Owhyee, as they styled it, glowed with descriptions of the voluptuous charms of the natives, whose life was a round of pleasure, untempered by the wholesome necessity for hard toil. It was a lotos land for all who sojourned there. The harmful consequences of unwholesome ease are not yet eradicated. Christianity has achieved almost miraculous triumphs, and the conditions of modern life in crowded communities are helping to harden the native temperament. The leper colony in Molokai is one of several sad sights which are, perhaps, better left unseen. Also the clandestine Saturnalia still kept up on the old lines, with some winking or dozing on the part of natives in authority.

Trips can be made to the surrounding islands, famous for their volcanic mountains and tropical verdure. The largest active crater in the world is that of Kilauea, being nine miles in circumference, with vertical sides about one thousand feet deep and at the bottom a lake of molten lava, boiling furiously in some parts and throwing off fibres like spun silk which float in the air. These craters are apt to break into activity without warning.

City life in Honolulu, as already remarked, can almost delude a Southerner into fancying himself at home. It is quite cosmopolitan in its degree. There are well-equipped hotels, an English library, street railways, electric lights, telephones, insurance offices, colonies and clubs of American and British lawyers, business men, physicians and journalists. Modern progress is strikingly impressed on the visitor who draws his own picture of the primitive semi-savages he expects to see, when he hears the familiar hum of mills and factories, the roar and pounding noises of foundries, and the imposing array of wharves and vessels. Hawaii is a natural hub of the wheel of world-traffic. From its ports there is a large and fast-growing steamship trade with the principal commercial centres all over the globe. We shall pass from Honolulu round to the Philippines in the easiest fashion. One is surprised at the number of Chinese and Japanese laborers in Hawaii, some of whom have prospered and own large business establishments. The foreign element in the labor field has been a source of mild trouble but is now in a fair way to solve itself. A gratifying feature is the public school system. Everywhere are centres of light and learning, promising a grand future for the island population. The abundant yield of rice, sugar, coffee, bananas, and other foodstuffs is mostly bought for the American people.

The pleasures and pains of the voyage to the Philippines have been the subject of too many public letters since the war to need re-telling. The two thousand islands which form the little-known archipelago are the homes of a number of mixed tribes, with whom the traveller will not crave intimate acquaintance for some time. In Luzon, the chief island, we may feel fairly at home, now that its all but pathless wilds, as well as its long-settled towns and hamlets, are sprinkled with American soldiers. In time, doubtless, scientific exploration will approximately fix the value of the mineral and arable fields of the archipelago. Until knowledge increases in this direction there will not be much inducement to roam among peoples with questionable manners, strange religions and outlandish dialects. The Tagal folk has reached, as regards the more favored class, a high degree of civilization. The Malay blood has peculiarities of its own. Under long-continued Spanish rule the Luzon native has developed intellectually and nurtured an ambition for self-government. This half-amicable, half-hostile relationship between the Spanish friars, who have been the spiritual, and perhaps still more the civic, trainers and masters of the natives, is a most interesting study for the newly arrived visitor.

Landing at Manila, the commercial centre and capital of the islands, we find ourselves in a city blending the characteristics of an old-fashioned Spanish town with the mild business air of a third-rate western port. The buildings speak of the tropical perils to be encountered. Dewey’s bombardment was more generous than the earthquakes and gales that smote the Cathedral. These visitations come oftener than those of angels. Houses are built low and massively on the ground floor, to insure that a one-story home shall remain when the upstairs section flies away. Terrific gales come unannounced and life is temporarily suspended until it is possible to swim into the streets and rake in the flotsam and jetsam that once lodged within your walls. Periodical rains lend variety to the novice’s experience. They descend in Niagaras, giving free and wholesome baths to the many who need them and to those who need them not, and give the mud lanes that serve for streets a timely cleaning up. The rainfall record has shown as much as 114 inches in a year.

Your hotel will be the perfection of cleanliness, but the window openings are vast and glass-panes are unknown. The mahogany bedstead is bedless, a mat of woven cane strips, bare of everything that can encourage warmth or harbor little neighbors, but winged visitors float in to remind the sleeper he is not in the Waldorf-Astoria, and then depart, perhaps. By day life can be very enjoyable. Churches, which are largely art-galleries also, fine squares and promenades, fashionable drives, town clubs and country clubs, shared by the American, English, and German business men, these and other aids to happiness flourish in Manila and suburbs.

The general aspect of Philippine scenery to the untutored eye of a stranger resembles the tropical views already described, allowance being made for differing conditions. When the fortunes of war brought the islands within our ken the principal trade was divided between Spain and outside countries. The treaty of 1898 brought the archipelago into closer trade relations, with mutual advantages. When Aguinaldo, the Tagal leader, declared his allegiance to the United States, the fact assured the establishment of a friendly arrangement which in time will bring high prosperity to the islands and civilization to their people. The two hundred thousand who live in and around Manila are mainly Christians.

Generally the natives with whom we are in closest contact are a civil and good-tempered people. Picturesque in costume, or the lack of it, they share with the scenery around the characteristic freedom from commonplace. Prolonged familiarity with modern methods of culture will take much of the charm out of life in the Philippines, replacing it, no doubt, with the practical methods which conduce to progress. A voyage to these distant islands affords a rare opportunity to trace the process of evolution from the simple and natural to the complex machinery which is grinding organized society into drab-tinted duplications of a rather uninteresting original.

WINTER AND SUMMER IN NEW ENGLAND.

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

[The “Society in America” and the “Retrospect of Western Travel,” by Harriet Martineau, contain many interesting pictures of life and scenery in the United States. Of the descriptive passages of the latter work we select that detailing her experience of winter weather in Boston, which she seems to have looked upon with true English eyes, and not with the vision of one “to the manner born.”]

I believe no one attempts to praise the climate of New England. The very low average of health there, the prevalence of consumption and of decay of the teeth, are evidences of an unwholesome climate which I believe are universally received as such. The mortality among children throughout the whole country is a dark feature of life in the United States.... Wherever we went in the North we heard of the “lung fever” as a common complaint, and children seemed to be as liable to it as grown persons.

The climate is doubtless chiefly to blame for all this, and I do not see how any degree of care could obviate much of the evil. The children must be kept warm within-doors; and the only way of affording them the range of the house is by warming the whole, from the cellar to the garret, by means of a furnace in the hall. This makes all comfortable within; but, then, the risk of going out is very great. There is far less fog and damp than in England, and the perfectly calm, sunny days of midwinter are endurable; but the least breath of wind seems to chill one’s very life. I had no idea what the suffering from extreme cold amounted to till one day, in Boston, I walked the length of the city and back again in a wind, with the thermometer seven degrees and a half below zero. I had been warned of the cold, but was anxious to keep an appointment to attend a meeting. We put on all the merinoes and furs we could muster, but we were insensible of them from the moment the wind reached us. My muff seemed to be made of ice; I almost fancied I should have been warmer without it. We managed getting to the meeting pretty well, the stock of warmth we had brought out with us lasting till then. But we set out cold on our return, and by the time I got home I did not very well know where I was and what I was about. The stupefaction from cold is particularly disagreeable, the sense of pain remaining through it, and I determined not to expose myself to it again. All this must be dangerous to children; and if, to avoid it, they are shut up through the winter, there remains the danger of encountering the ungenial spring....

Every season, however, has its peculiar pleasures, and in the retrospect these shine out brightly, while the evils disappear.

On a December morning you are awakened by the domestic scraping at your hearth. Your anthracite fire has been in all night; and now the ashes are carried away, more coal is put on, and the blower hides the kindly red from you for a time. In half an hour the fire is intense, though, at the other end of the room, everything you touch seems to blister your fingers with cold. If you happen to turn up a corner of the carpet with your foot, it gives out a flash, and your hair crackles as you brush it. Breakfast is always hot, be the weather what it may. The coffee is scalding, and the buckwheat cakes steam when the cover is taken off. Your host’s little boy asks whether he may go coasting to-day, and his sisters tell you what days the schools will all go sleighing. You may see boys coasting on Boston Common all the winter day through, and too many in the streets, where it is not so safe.

To coast is to ride on a board down a frozen slope, and many children do this in the steep streets which lead down to the Common, as well as on the snowy slopes within the enclosure where no carriages go. Some sit on their heels on the board, some on their crossed legs. Some strike their legs out, put their arms akimbo, and so assume an air of defiance amid their velocity. Others prefer lying on their stomachs, and so going headforemost, an attitude whose comfort I could never enter into. Coasting is a wholesome exercise for hardy boys. Of course, they have to walk up the ascent, carrying their boards between every feat of coasting; and this affords them more exercise than they are at all aware of taking.

As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms. No doubt early association has something to do with the American fondness for this mode of locomotion, and much of the affection which is borne to music, dancing, supping, and all kinds of frolic is transferred to the vehicle in which the frolicking parties are transported. It must be so, I think, or no one would be found to prefer a carriage on runners to a carriage on wheels, except on an untrodden expanse of snow. On a perfectly level and crisp surface I can fancy the smooth, rapid motion to be exceedingly pleasant; but such surfaces are rare in the neighborhood of populous cities. The uncertain, rough motion in streets hillocky with snow, or on roads consisting for the season of a ridge of snow with holes in it, is disagreeable and provocative of headache. I am no rule for others as to liking the bells; but to me their incessant jangle was a great annoyance. Add to this the sitting, without exercise, in a wind caused by the rapidity of the motion, and the list of désagrémens is complete. I do not know the author of a description of sleighing which was quoted to me, but I admire it for its fidelity. “Do you want to know what sleighing is like? You can soon try. Set your chair on a spring-board out on the porch on Christmas-day; put your feet in a pailful of powdered ice; have somebody to jingle a bell in one ear, and somebody else to blow into the other with the bellows, and you will have an exact idea of sleighing.”

[This quotation would appear to be a variant of Dr. Franklin’s recipe for sleighing. As for Miss Martineau’s experience “behind the bells,” it seems to have been very unfortunate.]

If the morning be fine, you have calls to make, or shopping to do, or some meeting to attend. If the streets be coated with ice, you put on your India-rubber shoes—unsoled—to guard you from slipping. If not, you are pretty sure to measure your length on the pavement before your own door. Some of the handsomest houses in Boston, those which boast the finest flights of steps, have planks laid on the steps during the season of frost, the wood being less slippery than stone. If, as sometimes happens, a warm wind should be suddenly breathing over the snow, you go back to change your shoes, India-rubbers being as slippery in wet as leather soles are on ice. [It must be borne in mind that the writer is speaking of the rubber shoes of sixty years ago.] Nothing is seen in England like the streets of Boston and New York at the end of the season, while the thaw is proceeding. The area of the street had been so raised that passengers could look over the blinds of your ground-floor rooms; when the sidewalks become full of holes and puddles they are cleared, and the passengers are reduced to their proper level; but the middle of the street remains exalted, and the carriages drive along a ridge. Of course, this soon becomes too dangerous, and for a season ladies and gentlemen walk; carts tumble, slip, and slide, and get on as they can; while the mass, now dirty, not only with thaw, but with quantities of refuse vegetables, sweepings of the poor people’s houses, and other rubbish which it was difficult to know what to do with while every place was frozen up, daily sinks and dissolves into a composite mud. It was in New York and some of the inferior streets of Boston that I saw this process in its completeness.

If the morning drives are extended beyond the city there is much to delight the eye. The trees are cased in ice; and when the sun shines out suddenly the whole scene looks like one diffused rainbow, dressed in a brilliancy which can hardly be conceived of in England. On days less bright, the blue harbor spreads in strong contrast with the sheeted snow which extends to its very brink....

The skysights of the colder regions of the United States are resplendent in winter. I saw more of the aurora borealis, more falling stars and other meteors, during my stay in New England than in the whole course of my life before. Every one knows that splendid and mysterious exhibitions have taken place in all the Novembers of the last four years, furnishing interest and business to the astronomical world. The most remarkable exhibitions were in the Novembers of 1833 and 1835, the last of which I saw....

On the 17th of November in question, that of 1835, I was staying in the house of one of the professors of Harvard University at Cambridge. The professor and his son John came in from a lecture at nine o’clock, and told us that it was nearly as light as day, though there was no moon. The sky presented as yet no remarkable appearance, but the fact set us telling stories of skysights. A venerable professor told us of a blood-red heaven which shone down on a night of the year 1789, when an old lady interpreted the whole French Revolution from what she saw. None of us had any call to prophesying this night. John looked out from time to time while we were about the piano, but our singing had come to a conclusion before he brought us news of a very strange sky. It was now near eleven. We put cloaks and shawls over our heads, and hurried into the garden. It was a mild night, and about as light as with half a moon. There was a beautiful rose-colored flush across the entire heavens, from southeast to northwest. This was every moment brightening, contracting in length, and dilating in breadth.

My host ran off without his hat to call the Natural History professor. On the way he passed a gentleman who was trudging along, pondering the ground. “A remarkable night, sir,” cried my host. “Sir! how, sir?” replied the pedestrian. “Why, look above your head!” The startled walker ran back to the house he had left to make everybody gaze. There was some debate about ringing the college-bell, but it was agreed that it would cause too much alarm.

The Natural Philosophy professor came forth in curious trim, and his household and ours joined in the road. One lady was in her nightcap, another with a handkerchief tied over her head, while we were cowled in cloaks. The sky was now resplendent. It was like a blood-red dome, a good deal pointed. Streams of a greenish-white light radiated from the centre in all directions. The colors were so deep, especially the red, as to give an opaque appearance to the canopy, and as Orion and the Pleiades and many more stars could be distinctly seen, the whole looked like a vast dome inlaid with constellations. These skysights make one shiver, so new are they, so splendid, so mysterious. We saw the heavens grow pale, and before midnight believed that the mighty show was over; but we had the mortification of hearing afterwards that at one o’clock it was brighter than ever, and as light as day.

Such are some of the wintry characteristics of New England.

If I lived in Massachusetts, my residence during the hot months should be beside one of its ponds. These ponds are a peculiarity in New England scenery very striking to the traveller. Geologists tell us of the time when the valleys were chains of lakes; and in many parts the eye of the observer would detect this without the aid of science. There are many fields and clusters of fields of remarkable fertility, lying in basins, the sides of which have much the appearance of the greener and smoother of the dykes of Holland. These suggest the idea of their having been ponds at the first glance. Many remain filled with clear water, the prettiest meres in the world. A cottage on Jamaica Pond, for instance, within an easy ride of Boston, is a luxurious summer abode. I know of one unequalled in its attractions, with its flower-garden, its lawn, with banks shelving down to the mere,—banks dark with nestling pines, from under whose shade the bright track of the moon may be seen, lying cool on the rippling waters. A boat is moored in the cove at hand. The cottage itself is built for coolness, and the broad piazza is draperied with vines, which keep out the sun from the shaded parlor.

WASHINGTON ELM, CAMBRIDGE

The way to make the most of a summer’s day in a place like this is to rise at four, mount your horse and ride through the lanes for two hours, finding breakfast ready on your return. If you do not ride, you slip down to the bathing-house on the creek; and, once having closed the door, have the shallow water completely to yourself, carefully avoiding going beyond the deep-water mark, where no one knows how deep the mere may be. After breakfast you should dress your flowers, before those you gather have quite lost the morning dew. The business of the day, be it what it may, housekeeping, study, teaching, authorship, or charity, will occupy you till dinner at two. You have your dessert carried into the piazza, where, catching glimpses of the mere through the wood on the banks, your watermelon tastes cooler than within, and you have a better chance of a visit from a pair of humming-birds.

You retire to your room, all shaded with green blinds, lie down with a book in your hands, and sleep soundly for two hours at least. When you wake and look out, the shadows are lengthening on the lawn, and the hot haze has melted away. You hear a carriage behind the fence, and conclude that friends from the city are coming to spend the evening with you. They sit within till after tea, telling you that you are living in the sweetest place in the world. When the sun sets you all walk out, dispersing in the shrubbery or on the banks. When the moon shows herself above the opposite woods, the merry voices of the young people are heard from the cove, where the boys are getting out the boat. You stand, with a companion or two, under the pines, watching the progress of the skiff and the receding splash of the oars. If you have any one, as I had, to sing German popular songs to you, the enchantment is all the greater. You are capriciously lighted home by fireflies, and there is your table covered with fruit and iced lemonade. When your friends have left you you would fain forget it is time to rest, and your last act before you sleep is to look out once more from your balcony upon the silvery mere and moonlit lawn.

The only times when I felt disposed to quarrel with the inexhaustible American mirth was on the hottest days of summer. I liked it as well as ever; but European strength will not stand more than an hour or two of laughter in such seasons. I remember one day when the American part of the company was as much exhausted as the English. We had gone, a party of six, to spend a long day with a merry household in a country village, and, to avoid the heat, had performed the journey of sixteen miles before ten o’clock. For three hours after our arrival the wit was in full flow; by which time we were all begging for mercy, for we could laugh no longer with any safety. Still, a little more fun was dropped all round, till we found that the only way was to separate, and we all turned out of doors. I cannot conceive how it is that so little has been heard in England of the mirth of the Americans; for certainly nothing in their manner struck and pleased me more. One of the rarest characters among them, and a great treasure to all his sportive neighbors, is a man who cannot take a joke.

The prettiest playthings of summer are the humming-birds. I call them playthings because they are easily tamed, and are not very difficult to take care of for a time. It is impossible to attend to book, work, or conversation while there is a humming-bird in sight, its exercises and vagaries are so rapid and beautiful. Its prettiest attitude is vibrating before a blossom which is tossed in the wind. Its long beak is inserted in the flower, and the bird rises and falls with it, quivering its burnished wings with dazzling rapidity. My friend E—— told me how she had succeeded in taming a pair. One flew into the parlor where she was sitting, and perched. E——’s sister stepped out for a branch of honeysuckle, which she stuck up over the mirror. The other bird followed, and the pair alighted on the branch, flew off, and returned to it. E—— procured another branch, and held it on the top of her head; and thither also the little creatures came without fear. She next held it in her hand, and still they hovered and settled. They bore being shut in for the night, a nest of cotton-wool being provided. Of course, it was impossible to furnish them with honeysuckles enough for food; and sugar-and-water was tried, which they seemed to relish very well.

One day, however, when E—— was out of the room, one of the little creatures was too greedy in the saucer; and, when E—— returned, she found it lying on its side, with its wings stuck to its body and its whole little person clammy with sugar. E—— tried a sponge and warm water: it was too harsh; she tried old linen, but it was not soft enough; it then occurred to her that the softest of all substances is the human tongue. In her love for her little companion she thus cleansed it, and succeeded perfectly, so far as the outward bird was concerned. But though it attempted to fly a little, it never recovered, but soon died of its surfeit. Its mate was, of course, allowed to fly away.

NIAGARA FALLS AND THE THOUSAND ISLANDS.

CHARLES MORRIS.

[Among travellers’ descriptions of the natural marvels of this continent, much has been written of perhaps the greatest of them all, the celebrated cataract of the Niagara River. The Thousand Islands have also excited much admiration. Fortunately, these two scenic wonders are sufficiently contiguous to be dealt with in one record, and the compiler of the present work ventures to give his own impressions of them, from a printed statement made some twenty-five years ago.]

Who has not read in story and seen in picture, countless times, how the water goes over at Niagara? I came here expecting to find every curve and plunge of the river appealing like a household thing to my memory. So in great measure it proved, yet travellers never succeed in exhausting a situation in their narratives; something of the unexpected always remains to freshen the sated appetite of new-comers.

Tourists are apt to be disappointed at first sight of the cataract. Their expectations have been overwhetted; and, moreover, the first glance is usually obtained from the American shore, an edgewise view that gives but an inkling of the full majesty of the scene. Yet even from this point of view we behold the river, almost at our feet, rushing with concentrated energy to the brink of the precipice, and pouring headlong, in an agony of froth and foam, into a fearful void, from which forever rises a rainbow-crowned mist. To stand on the brink and gaze into this terrible abyss, with the foaming waters plunging in a white wall downward, is apt to rouse an undefined desire to cast one’s self after the torrent, while minute by minute the mind grows into a realization of the sublimity of Niagara.

But to behold the cataract in the fulness of its might and glory one must cross to the Canadian shore, and make his way on foot from the bridge westward. Carriages will be found in abundance, manned by drivers more importunate than mellifluous; but if the tourist would see the Falls at leisure and from every point of view, he must be obdurate, and resolutely foot his way along the river’s precipitous bank.

First, arriving opposite the American Fall, we seat ourselves under a tree, and gaze with admiration on this magnificent water front, spread before us in one broad, straight sheet of milk-white foam, swooping ever downward with graceful undulations, until beaten into mist on the rocks below.

Passing onward, we approach that grand curved reach of falling water, whose sublime aspect has been a fruitful theme for poet and artist since America has had poetry and art. The Horseshoe Fall is the paragon of cataracts. Sitting on what remains of Table-Rock, and gazing on the tumbling, heaving, foaming world of waters, which seem to fill the whole horizon of vision, the mind becomes oppressed with a feeling of awe, and realizes to its full extent nature’s grandest vision.

With one vast leap the broad river shoots headlong into an abyss whose real depth we are left to imagine, since the feet of the cataract are forever hidden in a white cloud of mist, shrouded in a dense veil which no eye can penetrate. At the centre of the curve, where the water is deepest, the creamy whiteness of the remainder of the cataract is replaced by a hue of deep green. It seems one vast sheet of liquid emerald, curving gracefully over the edge of the precipice, and swooping downward with endless change yet endless stability, its green tinge relieved with countless flecks of white foam.

The mind cannot long maintain its high level of appreciation of so grand a scene. The mighty monotony of the view soon loses its absorbing hold on the senses, and from sheer reaction one perforce passes to prosaic conceptions of the situation. For our part, we found ourselves purchasing popped corn from a peripatetic merchant who ludicrously misplaced the h’s in his conversation, and, taking a seat above the Falls, where the edge of the rapids swerved in and broke in mimic billows at our feet, we enjoyed mental and creature comforts together.

One need but return to the American side, and cross to the islands which partly fill the river above the Falls, to obtain rest for his overstrained brain among quieter aspects of nature. Goat Island one cannot appreciate without a visit. Travellers, absorbed in the wilder scenery, rarely do justice to its peculiar charm. Instead of the contracted space one is apt to expect, he finds himself in an area of many acres in extent, probably a mile in circumference, its whole surface to the water’s edge covered with dense forest. Passing inward from its shore, scarce twenty steps are taken before every vestige of the river is lost to sight, and on reaching its centre we find ourselves, to all appearance, in the heart of a primeval forest,—only the subdued roar of the rapids reminding us of the grand scene surrounding. On all sides rise huge trunks of oaks and beeches, straight, magnificent trees, many of the beeches seemingly from six to eight feet in circumference, their once smooth bark covered inch by inch with a directory of the names of notoriety-loving visitors. At our feet wild flowers bloom, the twittering of birds is heard overhead, nimble ground-squirrels fearlessly cross our path, soft mosses and thick grass form a verdant carpet, and on all sides nature presents us one of her most charming phases, a picture from Arcadia framed in the heart of a scene of hurry and turmoil undescribable.

Near the edge of the Falls a rickety bridge leads to a small island on which stands Terrapin Tower, which yields a fine outlook upon the Horseshoe Fall, with its mists and rainbows. From the opposite side of Goat Island we pass to the charming little Luna Island, from whose brink one may lave his hand in the edge of the American Fall. From the upper end of Goat Island bridges lead to the Three Sisters. These are small, thickly-timbered islands, standing in the stream far back from the edge of the precipice, but in the very foam and fume of the rapids, the contracted stream dashing under their graceful suspension bridges with frightful speed and roar.

From the bridge joining the two outer islands one may see the rapids in their wildest aspect. Here the river, dashing fiercely onward, plunges over a shelf of rock six or eight feet deep, and is tossed upward in so tumultuous a turmoil of foam that the heart involuntarily stops beating and the teeth set hard, as if one were preparing for a desperate conflict with the fierce power beneath him. From every point on the shore of the outer island the rapids are seen heaving and tossing as far as the sight can reach, like the waves of a sea fretted by contrary winds, here tossed many feet into the air, there sweeping fiercely over a long ledge of rocks, and ever hurrying forward with eager speed to where in the distance we see a long, curved, liquid edge, with a light mist floating upward and hovering in the air beyond it. Here one hears only the roar of the rapids. Indeed, anywhere in the nearer vicinity, the sound of the rapids is chiefly heard, the voice of the cataract itself predominating only on the Canadian side near the Horseshoe Fall.

Here, on this outreaching island, I sat for hours on the gnarled trunk of a fallen tree that overhung the water, drinking in the grandeur and glory of Niagara with a mental thirst that seemed unquenchable, and feeling in my soul that I could willingly stretch the hours into days and the days into weeks, and still descend with regret from the poetry of life into its prose.

Leaving Niagara, I took car for Lewistown, the railroad running for its whole length in full view of the river, whose lofty and rigidly-erect walls, stretching in unbroken lines for miles below the cataract, give striking evidence of the vast work performed by the stream in cutting its way, century after century, through the ridge of solid limestone that separates the lakes. Far down below the level of the railroad the water is seen, placidly winding through the deep gorge, or speeding onward in rapids, its hue intensely green, its banks as lofty and precipitous as the Palisades of the Hudson.

Before Lewistown is reached the ridge sinks to the river level. At this point the cataract began its long career, inch by inch eating its way backward through the former rapids, until they were converted into one mighty vertical downfall. At Lewistown boat is taken for Toronto,—of which city only a lake view of warehouses and church steeples is seen as we change boats for the lake journey.

For the rest of the day and evening we steamed along in full view of the Canadian shore, an ever-changing panorama of farm lands, sandy bluffs, occasional hamlets, and several towns of some pretensions to size and beauty. Kingston, a city at the head of the lake, is reached at four o’clock in the morning. Immediately after leaving this thriving town the state-rooms begin to disgorge their occupants, for we now enter the broad throat of the St. Lawrence River, and here the Thousand Islands begin. Who that has a soul beyond cakes and ale would let the desire to indulge in his own dreams cheat him from enjoying one of nature’s loveliest visions?

For some four hours thereafter the boat runs through an uninterrupted succession of the most beautiful island scenery. These islands number, in fact, more than eighteen hundred, and are of every conceivable size and shape; some so minute that they seem but rock pediments to the single tree that is rooted upon their surface, while the rocky shores of others stretch for a mile or more along the channel. They are all heavily wooded, with here and there a light-house, or a rude hovel, as the only indication of man’s contest with primitive nature.

[This description, it may be said, does not apply to the present time, when mansions and hotels have taken possession of many of these islands, and evidences of man’s occupancy are somewhat too numerous.]

Every few turns of the wheel reveal some new feature of the scene, unexpected channels cutting through the centre of a long, wooded reach, broad open spaces studded with islets, narrow creek-like channels between rocky island shores, in which the whole river seems contracted to a slender stream, while farther on the channel expands to a mile in width, and glimpses of other channels open behind distant islands. Quick turns in our course plunge us into archipelagoes, through which a dozen channels run and wind in every direction. Sudden openings in the wooded shore along which we are swiftly gliding yield glimpses of charming islands, here closing the view, there cut by narrow channels which reveal more distant wooded shores, and lead the imagination suggestively onward till we fancy that scenes of fairy-like beauty lie hidden beyond those leafy coverts, enviously torn from our sight by the remorseless onward flight of the boat. For hours we sit in rapt delight, drinking in new beauty at every turn, and heedless of the fact that the breakfast gong has long since sounded, and the more prosaic of the passengers have allowed their physical to overcome their mental hunger.

One tall, long-whiskered old devotee of “cakes and ale,” hailing from somewhere in Ohio, shaped somewhat like a note of interrogation, and sustaining his character by asking everybody all sorts of questions, did not, I am positive, digest his breakfast well, for I took a wicked pleasure in assuring him that we had passed far the most beautiful portions of the scenery while he was engaged in absorbing creature comforts, and that the world beside had nothing to compare with the fairy visions he had lost. Old Buckeye, as I had irreverently christened him, wished his breakfast was in Hades, and at once set out on a tour of interrogation to learn if he could not return by the same route and pick up the lost threads of beauty he had so idly dropped.

Another of our fellow-passengers was an English gentleman of perfect Lord Dundreary pattern, his every movement being so suggestive of those of his stage counterpart as to furnish us an unfailing source of amusement. At Prescott, Canada, a New England college boat-club came on board with their boat, and highly amused the passengers during the remainder of the journey with a long succession of comical songs. Three of them were sons of one of our venerable New England professors, one an unvenerable professor himself, yet their tanned faces, worn habiliments, and wild songs bore so strong a flavor of the backwoods that it was hard mentally to locate them within college walls.

We were roused from dinner by the announcement that the Long Sault Rapid was at hand, and gladly deserted one of the meanest tables we had ever encountered to partake of one of nature’s rarest banquets.

The boat was entering what seemed a heaving sea, the waters lifting into dangerous billows, and tossing our craft with unmitigated rudeness, until it became almost impossible to retain a level footing. But the appearance of these rapids was different from what we had been led to expect. The frightful aspect of danger, the rapid down-hill plunge of the boat, and all the fear-inspiring adornments of the guide-books, while they might be visible from the shore, did not appear to those on the deck. Apparently the boat was fixed in the heart of a watery turmoil, her onward motion lost in her various upward and sidelong movements, while as for fear, its only evidence lay in little shrieks full of laughter, as the equilibrium of the craft was suddenly destroyed.

Five minutes or so of this experience carried us through the perilous portion of the great rapid, and brought us into safe waters again. The St. Lawrence has various other rapids between the Long Sault and Montreal, differing in appearance, some of them being, as far as the eye can reach, a succession of crossing and tumbling waves, which give the boat unexpected little heaves, and appear like the waves of a tossing sea. Here the water plunges rapidly down a narrow throat between two islands, there it curves round a rocky shore, on which it breaks in ocean-like billows. But the only point where danger becomes apparent to untrained eyes is at the La Chine Rapids, near Montreal, where the river runs through a narrow foaming channel between two long ridges of rock, over which the water tumbles with a terrible suggestion of peril.

The peak of Montreal mountain has been long visible, and now we rapidly approach the long line of Victoria bridge, the great pride of Canadian engineering. Under this we glide with a gymnast at the mast-head, whose erected feet seem nearly to touch the bridge; and in a short time we round in to the wharf and are ashore in the largest city of Canada.

FROM NEW YORK TO WASHINGTON IN 1866.

HENRY LATHAM.

[It is not our purpose to enter into descriptions of the cities of the United States. They are sufficiently familiar already to our readers. But Mr. Latham has given so graphic a picture of the outward aspect of the two leading coast cities and the capital of this country during a past generation that we have been tempted to quote it. It need scarcely be said that this account represents only in embryo these cities as they appear to-day.]

Safe arrived last night, after spending twelve days of my life at sea. I say last night, as it took us so long to land and get through the custom-house that it was dark before we reached the Fifth Avenue Hotel. But it was bright daylight and sunshine as we steamed up the splendid harbor of New York, a view which I should have been sorry to have missed. As far as our personal experiences go, the custom-house officers of New York are not half so troublesome as they are said to be. We had nothing to smuggle, but there was a vast amount of smuggling done by some of our fellow-passengers. One man landed with his pocket full of French watches, and another with a splendid Cashmere shawl round his neck. The custom-house officer, searching the next luggage to mine, unearthed two boxes of cigars; of course these were contraband. He spoke as follows: “Which are the best?” Opens box. “Have you a light? I forgot; we must not smoke here. Well, I will take a few to smoke after my supper.” Takes twenty cigars, and passes the rest.

December 14, 1866.—I have been on my feet all day, delivering letters of introduction. These are plants that require to be put in early, or they are apt to flower after the sower has quitted the country. The stores of the Broadway are the most wonderfully glorified shops ever seen. Something between a Manchester warehouse and a London club-house.

I have spent all my day in going to and fro in Broadway, the wonderful street of New York; in ten years’ time the finest street in the world. At present there are still so many small old houses standing in line with the enormous stores, that the effect is somewhat spoiled, by reason of the ranks not being well dressed. Broadway is now much in the condition of a child’s mouth when cutting its second set of teeth,—slightly gappy. The enormous stores look even larger now than they will do when the intervals are filled up. The external splendor of the shops is chiefly architectural; they make no great display of goods in the windows; but the large size of the rooms within enables them to set out and exhibit many times the amount of goods that an English shop-keeper shows.

The city of New York is on the southern point of Manhattan Island, having the East River running along one side, and the North River or Hudson along the other. Some day far in the future, when the present municipality is purged or swept away, and the splendor of the Thames Embankment scheme has been realized, New York will probably have two lines of quays, planted with trees and edged with warehouses, which will make it one of the finest cities in the world. The business quarter is at the point of the peninsula. The fashionable quarter is to the north, reaching every year farther inland. As the city increases, the stores keep moving northward, taking possession of the houses, and driving the residents farther back. The land is not yet built over up to Central Park, said to be called so because it will be the future centre of the city that is to be.

The concentrated crowd that passes along Broadway in the morning “down-town” to its business, and back in the evening “up-town” to its homes, is enormous; but the pavements are bad for men and abominable for horses: to-day I saw five horses down, and two lying dead. At the same time, allowance must be made for the fact that it has been snowing and thawing and freezing again; but as this is no uncommon state of things in this climate, why pave the streets with flat stones that give no foothold? The “street-cars” are the universal means of conveyance. These are omnibuses running on tramways, but the name of omnibus is unknown: if you speak of a “bus” you are stared at. A young New Yorker, recently returned from London, was escorting his cousin home one evening; as the way was long, he stopped and said, “Hold on, Mary, and let’s take a bus.” “No, George, not here in the street,” the coy damsel replied....

We went to-day to the top of Trinity Church tower; a beautiful panorama, with the bay of New York to the south, the city stretching away northward, and a great river on either side. But it was bitterly cold at the top, as we had heavy snow yesterday, and the wind was blowing keenly. We went also to the Gold Exchange, and gold happened to be “very sensitive” this morning, in consequence of some rumors from Mexico which made it possible that the time for United States interference was nearer than had been supposed. The noise was deafening; neither the Stock Exchange nor the ring at Epsom at all approach it. All the men engaged in a business which one would suppose required more experience than any other, the buying and selling of gold, seemed to be under twenty-five years of age; most of them much younger, some quite boys. The reason given me was that older heads could not stand the tumult, all gesticulating, all vociferating, every man with a note-book and pencil, crowded round a ring in the centre of the hall like a little cock-pit, to which you descend by steps. Every now and then a man rushes out of the telegraph corner with some news, which oozes out and makes the crowd howl and seethe again. The hands of a big dial on the wall are moved on from time to time, marking the hour of the day and the price of gold. This is the dial of the barometer of national prosperity, marked by gold instead of mercury....

NEW YORK AND THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE

A huge sum of money has been laid out on Central Park, the Bois de Boulogne of New York. When the timber has grown larger it will be very pretty. The ground is rocky, with little depth of soil in it; this makes it difficult to get the trees to grow, but, on the other hand, gives the place a feature not to be found in our parks or at the Bois, in the large masses of brown sandstone cropping up through the turf here and there, and in the rocky shores of the little lakes.

In the evening we went, by invitation of our courteous banker, to the Assembly at Delmonico’s rooms. In this we consider ourselves highly honored and introduced to the best society of New York. The toilets and the diamonds were resplendent, and one figure of the “German” (cotillon), in which the ladies formed two groups in the centre, facing inward with their bright trains spread out behind them, was a splendid piece of color and costume. Prince Doria was there, and most of the magnates of the city looked in. Some of the wealthiest people in the room were pointed out to me as the present representatives of the families of the old Dutch settlers; those are the pedigrees respected here.

December 20, 1866.—We left New York, having stayed exactly a week, and meaning to return again. By rail to Philadelphia, ninety-two miles, through a flat, snow-covered country, which, under the circumstances, looked as dismal as might be. The latter part of our journey lay along the left bank of the Delaware, which we crossed by a long wooden bridge, and arrived at the Continental Hotel just at dusk. It is evident we are moving South. The waiters at this hotel are all darkies.

December 21, 1866.—Philadelphia is a most difficult town just now for pedestrians, the door-steps being all of white marble glazed with ice, and sliding on the pavement may be had in perfection. Spent the best part of the day in slipping about, trying to deliver letters of introduction. The system of naming the streets of Philadelphia and of numbering the houses is extremely ingenious, and answers perfectly when you have made yourself acquainted with it; but as it takes an ordinary mind a week to find it out, the stranger who stops four or five days is apt to execrate it. All the streets run at right angles to one another, so that a short cut, the joy of the accomplished Londoner, is impossible. It is a chess-board on which the bishop’s move is unknown. Nothing diagonal can be done. The city is ruled like the page of a ledger, from top to bottom with streets, from side to side with avenues. It is all divided into squares. When you are first told this, a vision arises of the possibility of cutting across these squares from corner to corner. Not a bit of it: a square at Philadelphia means a solid block of houses, not an open space enclosed by buildings. When you have wandered about for some time, the idea suggests itself that every house is exactly like the house next to it; although the inhabitants have given up the old uniformity of costume, the houses have not; and without this elaborate system of numbering, the inhabitants of Philadelphia would never be able to find their way home.

Nevertheless, if that is the finest town in which its inhabitants are best lodged, Philadelphia is the finest town in the world. It lodges a much smaller population than that of New York in more houses. In no other large town are rents comparatively so cheap. Every decent workingman can afford to have his separate house, with gas and water laid on, and fitted with a bath.

We have been making a study of the negro waiters. Perhaps cold weather affects them; but the first thing about them that strikes you is the apathetic infantine feeble-mindedness of the “colored persons” lately called niggers. I say nothing of the seven colored persons, of various shades, who always sit in a row on a bench in the hall, each with a little clothes-brush in his hand, and never attempt to do anything; I allude to those who minister to my wants in the coffee-room with utterly unknown dishes. I breakfasted yesterday off dun-fish and cream, Indian pudding, and dipped toast; for dinner I had a baked black-fish with soho sauce, and stewed venison with port wine; for vegetables, marrow, squash, and stewed tomatoes; and for pudding, “floating island.”

You see there is something exciting about dinner. After you have ordered four courses of the unknown, and your colored person has gone in the direction of the kitchen, you sit with the mouth of expectation wide open. Sometimes you get grossly deceived. Yesterday F—— ordered “jole,” and was sitting in a state of placid doubt, when his colored person returned with a plate of pickled pork. At present I am quite of the opinion of the wise man who discovered that colored persons are born and grow in exactly the same way as uncolored persons up to the age of thirteen, and that they then cease to develop their skulls and their intelligence. All the waiters in this hotel appear to be just about the age of thirteen. There are two who in wisdom are nearly twelve, and one gray-headed old fellow who is just over fourteen.

[Our traveller contented himself in the way of sight-seeing by following Charles Dickens’s path to the Penitentiary, and afterwards visited Girard College. He concludes as follows:]

Even in this city of Penn the distinctive marks of Quakerism are dying out. The Quaker dress does not seem much more common in Philadelphia than in any other city, nor do they use the “thee” and “thou” in the streets; but at their own firesides, where the old people sit, they still speak the old language. A Quaker in the streets is not to be distinguished from other Philadelphians. I was talking to Mr. C—— about this, and he said, “Let me introduce you to a Quaker; I am a member of the church myself.” L—— was not quite clear whether he was a Quaker or not. His parents had been; his sons certainly were not. Some of the best of the Southern soldiers came from the city of the Quakers. There is a story of a Quaker girl, who was exchanging rings with her lover as he set off to join the army; when they parted she said, “Thee must not wear it on thy trigger-finger, George.”

Dined with Mr. L——, the publisher. He showed us over his enormous store, which seemed to be a model of discipline and organization, and described the book-market of America as being, like the Union, one and indivisible, and opened his ledger, in which were the names of customers in every State in the Union. He told us that he had about five thousand open accounts with different American booksellers. His policy is to keep in stock everything that a country bookseller requires, from a Bible to a stick of sealing-wax, so that when their stores get low they are able to write to him for everything they want. He contends, as other Philadelphians do, that New York is not the capital of America, but only its chief port of import, and that Philadelphia is the chief centre for distribution. Mr. Hepworth Dixon had been here not long before, and, as was right and fitting in the city of Quakers, a high banquet had been held in honor of the vindicator of William Penn.

[Thence Mr. Latham went to Baltimore, of which he describes the following old-time experience: “When an American train reaches a town it does not dream of pulling up short in a suburb, but advances slowly through the streets; the driver on the engine rings a large bell, and a man on horseback rides in front to clear the way. Thus we entered Baltimore, arrived at the terminus and uncoupled the engine; and then, still sitting in the railway-car, were drawn by a team of horses along the street-rails to the terminus of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway on the other side of the town.” He is talking of antediluvian days. We have reformed all that. After some experience in duck and partridge shooting, and a taste of terrapin soup, he proceeded to Washington. Of his varied experience there we can give but a single out-door example.]

We went this morning over the Capitol, an enormous edifice still in progress; parts of it are continually built on to, and rebuilt, to meet the wants of the legislature. The two new white marble wings are very beautiful and nearly complete, and the dome is on the same scale with them, and of the same material. The centre is now out of proportion since the wings were built, and is of stone, painted white to match the rest in color and preserve it from the frost. If the South had succeeded in seceding it might have sufficed; but now it is bound to grow, and Congress are going to vote the amount of dollars necessary to make the Capitol complete. When completed it will be magnificent.

We are very unlucky in seeing these great marble palaces (for several of the public buildings of Washington are of this material) with the snow upon the ground. Against the pure white snow they appear dingy; under a summer sun they must show to far greater advantage. What ancient Athens appeared like, surrounding its marble temples, I can hardly realize; but the effect of the splendid public buildings in Washington is very much detracted from by the sheds and shanties which are near them. The builders of Washington determined that it should be a great city, and staked out its streets accordingly twice the width and length of any other streets: rightly is it named the city of magnificent distances. But although the Potomac is certainly wide enough, and apparently deep enough, to justify a certain amount of trade, and its situation is more central than that of Philadelphia, the town has never grown to fill the outlines traced for it.

To make a Washington street, take one marble temple or public office, a dozen good houses of brick, and a dozen of wood, and fill in with sheds and fields. Some blight seems to have fallen upon the city. It is the only place we have seen which is not full of growth and vitality. I have even heard its inhabitants tell stories of nightly pig-hunts in the streets, and of the danger of tumbling over a cow on the pavement on a dark night; but this must refer to by-gone times.

One of the most curious and characteristic of the great public buildings of Washington is the Patent Office, in which a working model is deposited of every patent taken out in the United States for the improvement of machinery.

This assemblage of specimens is an exhibition of which all Americans are proud, as a proof of the activity of American ingenuity working in every direction. Capacity to take out a patent is a quality necessary to make up the character of the perfect citizen. Labor is honorable, but the man who can invent a labor-saving machine is more honorable; he has gained a step in the great struggle with the powers of nature. An American who has utilized a water-power feels, I take it, two distinct and separate pleasures: first, in that dollars and cents drip off his water-wheel, and, secondly, in that he has inveigled the water-sprites into doing his work. If you tell an American that you are going to Washington, his first remark is not, “Then you will see Congress sitting,” but, “Mind you go and see the Patent Office.”

THE NATURAL BRIDGE AND TUNNEL OF VIRGINIA.

EDWARD A. POLLARD.

[The Old Dominion—to give Virginia its home title—is full of natural wonders, some of them unsurpassed in beauty and attractiveness elsewhere in the world. In number and variety of mineral springs it stands unequalled; its caverns, Luray and Weyer’s, are rich in charms of subterranean scenery; and its two remarkable examples of nature’s grandeur, the Natural Bridge and Natural Tunnel, are unique in their peculiar characteristics. Edward A. Pollard, in his “Virginia Tourist,” has ably described the various attractions of the Old Dominion, and we select from this work his word picture of the Natural Bridge. He made his way thither from Lynchburg, via the James River Canal.]

As the traveller enters the gap of the Blue Ridge from the east, the winding courses of the stage-coach carry him up the mountain’s side until he has gained an elevation of hundreds of feet above the James River, over the waters of which the zigzag and rotten road hangs fearfully. On every side are gigantic mountains hemming him in; there are black ravines in the great prison-house; and the lengthened arms of the winds smite the strained ear with the sounds of the rapids below. While he looks at the distance, a mountain rivulet, slight and glittering from amid the primeval forest, dashes across his path, and, leaping from rock to rock, goes joyously on its way.

On the North River the scenes are quieter. Emerging here, the traveller sees a beautiful and fertile country opening before him, while still westward the blue outlines of distant mountains in Rockbridge bound his vision. The water landscape is beautiful. Lovely valleys debouch upon the stream; there are peaceful shadows in the steel-blue waters, and on the broad shoulders of the cattle on the banks we see the drapery of the shadows of the trees beneath which they rest. The fisherman standing leg-deep in the water can see his face as in a mirror.

But at present our way does not lie through these scenes. The canal-boat is taking us along the James in the moonlit night, and by the time the day has broken we are within two miles of the Natural Bridge. A rickety team awaits us at the lock-house where we disembark. Through an air filled with golden vapor, and with the mists of the morning yet hanging in the trees by the wayside, we proceed on our journey. The old stage-coach lumbers along under the thick, overhanging boughs of the forest pines, which ever and anon scrape its top or strike in through the windows, scattering the dew-drops in the very faces of the passengers, or perhaps smiting their cheeks with their sharp-pointed leaves.

The first view of the bridge is obtained half a mile from it at a turn on the stage-road. It is revealed with the suddenness of an apparition. Raised a hundred feet above the highest trees of the forest, and relieved against the purple side of a distant mountain, a whitish-gray arch is seen, in the effect of distance as perfect and clean-cut an arch as its Egyptian inventor could have defined. The tops of trees are waving in the interval, the upper half of which we only see, and the stupendous arch that spans the upper air is relieved from the first impression that it is man’s masonry, the work of art, by the fifteen or twenty feet of soil that it supports, in which trees and shrubbery are firmly embedded,—the verdant crown and testimony of nature’s great work. And here we are divested of an imagination which we believe is popular, that the bridge is merely a huge slab of rock thrown across a chasm, or some such hasty and violent arrangement. It is no such thing. The arch and whole interval are contained in one solid rock; the average width of that which makes the bridge is eighty feet, and beyond this the rock extends for a hundred feet or so in mural precipices, divided by only a single fissure, that makes a natural pier on the upper side of the bridge, and up which climb the hardy firs, ascending step by step on the noble rock-work till they overshadow you.

This mighty rock, a single mass sunk in the earth’s side, of which even what appears is stupendous, is of the same geological character,—of limestone covered to the depth of from four to six feet with alluvial and clayey earth. The span of the arch runs from forty-five to sixty feet wide, and its height to the under line is one hundred and ninety-six feet, and to the head two hundred and fifteen feet. The form of the arch approaches to the elliptical; the stage-road which passes over the bridge runs from north to south, with an acclivity of thirty-five degrees, and the arch is carried over on a diagonal line,—the very line of all others the most difficult for the architect to realize, and the one best calculated for picturesque effects. It is the proportions of art in this wild, strange work of nature, its adjustment in the very perfection of mechanical skill, its apparently deliberate purpose, that create an interest the most curious and thoughtful. The deep ravine over which it sweeps, and through which traverses the beautiful Cedar Creek, is not otherwise easily passed for several miles, either above or below the bridge. It is needful to the spot, and yet so little likely to have survived the great fracture, the evidences of which are visible around, and which has made a fissure of about ninety feet through the breadth of a rock-ribbed hill, that we are at first disposed to reflect upon it as the work of man. It is only when we contemplate its full measure of grandeur that we are assured it is the work of God. We have the pier, the arch, the studied angle of ascent; and that nothing might be wanted in the evidences of design, the bridge is guarded by a parapet of rocks, so covered with fine shrubs and trees that a person travelling the stage-road running over it would, if not informed of the curiosity, pass it unnoticed.

But let him approach through the foliage to the side. More than two hundred feet below is the creek, apparently motionless, except where it flashes with light as it breaks on an obstruction in the channel; there are trees, attaining to grander heights as they ascend the face of the pier; and far below this bed of verdure the majestic rock rises with the decision of a wall, and the spectator shrinks from contemplating the grand but cruel depths, and turns away with dizzy sensations. But the most effective view is from the base of the bridge, where you descend by a circuitous and romantic path. Even to escape from the hot sun into these verdant and cool bottoms is of itself a luxury, and it prepares you for the deliberate enjoyment of the scene. Everything reposes in the most delightful shade, set off by the streaming rays of the sun, which shoot across the head of the picture far above you, and sweeten with softer touches the solitude below.

Standing by the rippling, gushing waters of the creek, and raising your eyes to the arch, massive and yet light and beautiful from its height, its elevation apparently increased by the narrowness of its piers and by its projection on the blue sky, you gaze on the great work of nature in wonder and astonishment. Yet a hundred beauties beckon you from the severe emotion of the sublime. When you have sustained this view of the arch raised against the sky, its black patches here and there shaped by imagination into grand and weird figures,—among them the eagle, the lion’s head, and the heroic countenance of Washington; when you have taken in the proportions and circumstances of this elevated and wide span of rock,—so wide that the skies seem to slope from it to the horizon,—you are called to investigate other parts of the scene which strain the emotions less, and are distributed around in almost endless variety.

Looking through the arch, the eye is engaged with a various vista. Just beyond rises the frayed, unseamed wall of rock; the purple mountains stand out in the background; beneath them is a rank of hills and matted woods enclosing the dell below, while the creek coursing away from them appears to have been fed in their recesses. A few feet above the bridge the stream deflects, and invites to a point of view of the most curious effect. Taking a few steps backward, moving diagonally on the course of the stream, we see the interval of sky between the great abutments gradually shut out; thus apparently joined or lapped over, they give the effect of the face of a rock, with a straight seam running down it, and the imagination seizes the picture as of mighty gates closed upon us. We are shut in a wild and perturbed scene by these gates of hell; behind and around us is the contracted and high boundary of mountains and hills, and in this close and vexed scene we are for a moment prisoners.

Now let us move across, step by step, to a position fronting where these gates apparently close. Slowly they seem to swing open on unseen and noiseless hinges; wider and wider grows the happy interval of sky, until at last wide open stands the gate-way raised above the forest, resting as it were on the brow of heaven,—a world lying beyond it, its rivers and its hills expanding themselves to the light and splendor of the unshadowed day.

To an observer of both places a comparison is naturally suggested between the Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls in respect of the sublime and the beautiful; and, indeed, as in this respect the two greatest works of nature on this continent, they may well be used as illustrations in our American schools of æsthetics. The first is unique in its aspects of nature like art; it is nature with the proportions of art. In its expressions of power, in its concentration of emotion, as when we look at it distinct or complete, it is truly sublime; and its effect is alleviated (for it is a maxim in æsthetics that the sublime cannot be long sustained) by the picturesque scenery which surrounds it. It is a greater natural curiosity and more wonderful than Niagara, although it lacks the elements of sublimity which the other has in sound, and of the visible, actual struggle in which it displays the powers of nature. Niagara is a living thing, while the Natural Bridge is monumental. The first represents the sublime as allied to the terrific,—in contemplating it we are overwhelmed with a sense of our insignificance; while the Natural Bridge associates the sublime with the pleasing and curious, and, not transporting us as violently as Niagara, entertains us more equably, and dismisses us, we think, with more distinct and fruitful perceptions of the grandeur and beneficence and variety of nature which have been distributed in the picture.

[Washington, a century and a half ago, carved his name at a high elevation on the rock walls of the abyss. In 1818 these walls were climbed to the top by James H. Piper, a student of Washington College, Virginia. The narrative here given of this daring feat is from the pen of William A. Caruthers.]

Mr. Piper, the hero of the occasion, commenced climbing on the opposite side of the creek from the one by which the pathway ascends the ravine. He began down on the banks of the brook so far that we did not know where he had gone, and were only apprised of his whereabouts by his shouting above our heads. When we looked up, he was standing apparently right under the arch, I suppose a hundred feet from the bottom, and that on the smooth side, which is generally considered inaccessible without a ladder. He was standing far above the spot where General Washington is said to have inscribed his name when a youth. The ledge of the rock by which he ascended to this perilous height does not appear from below to be three inches wide, and runs almost at right angles to the abutment of the bridge....

The ledge of rock on which he was standing appeared so narrow to us below as to make us believe his position a very perilous one, and we earnestly entreated him to come down. He answered us with loud shouts of derision....

He soon after descended from that side, crossed the brook, and commenced climbing on the side by which all visitors ascend the ravine. He first mounted the rocks on this side, as he had done on the other, far down the abutment, but not so far as on the opposite side. The projecting ledge may be distinctly seen by any visitor. It commences four or five feet from the pathway on the lower side, and winds round, gradually ascending, until it meets the cleft of rock over which the celebrated cedar stump hangs. Following this ledge to its termination, it brought him thirty or forty feet from the ground, and placed him between two deep fissures, one on each side of the gigantic column of rock on which the aforementioned cedar stump stands.

This column stands out from the bridge, as separate and distinct as if placed there by nature on purpose for an observatory to the wonderful arch and ravine which it overlooks. A huge crack or fissure extends from its base to the summit; indeed, it is cracked on both sides, but much more perceptibly on one side than the other. Both of these fissures are thickly overgrown with bushes, and numerous roots project into them from trees growing on the precipice. It was between these that the aforementioned ledge conducted him. Here he stopped, pulled off his coat and shoes and threw them down to me. And this, in my opinion, is a sufficient refutation of the story so often told, that he went up to inscribe his name, and ascended so high that he found it more difficult to return than to go forward. He could have returned easily from the point where he disencumbered himself, but the fact that he did thus prepare so early, and so near the ground, and after he had ascended more than double that height on the other side, is clear proof that to inscribe his name was not, and to climb the bridge was, his object. He had already inscribed his name above Washington himself more than fifty feet.

Around the face of this huge column, and between the clefts, he now moved backward and forward, still ascending as he found convenient foothold. When he had ascended about one hundred and seventy feet from the earth, and had reached the point where the pillar overhangs the ravine, his heart seemed to fail him. He stopped, and seemed to us to be balancing midway between heaven and earth. We were in dread suspense, expecting every moment to see him dashed in atoms at our feet. We had already exhausted our powers of entreaty in persuading him to return, but all to no purpose. Now it was perilous even to speak to him, and very difficult to carry on conversation at all, from the immense height to which he had ascended, and the noise made by the bubbling of the little brook as it tumbled in tiny cascades over its rocky bed at our feet. At length he seemed to discover that one of the clefts before mentioned retreated backward from the overhanging position of the pillar. Into this he sprang at once, and was soon out of sight and out of danger.

There is not a word of truth in all that story about our hauling him up with ropes, and his fainting away so soon as he landed on the summit. Those acquainted with the localities will at once perceive its absurdity; for we were beneath the arch, and it is half a mile round to the top, and for the most part up a rugged mountain. Instead of fainting away, Mr. Piper proceeded down the hill to meet us and obtain his hat and shoes. We met about half-way, and then he lay down for a few moments to recover himself of his fatigue.

[Virginia possesses another marvel of nature’s handiwork of the same general character as the Natural Bridge, and of which Mr. Pollard’s description may here fitly be given.]

After progressing about three miles from the ford of the Clinch River, and after having repeatedly crossed its crooked tributary, Stock Creek, we come to a small mountain or globular hill which is our wondrous destination, for here is the Natural Tunnel. There is nothing which advertises in advance this great wonder, or in any way excites the expectations of the traveller. There is a common road, from which we depart a few hundred yards to make a half circuit of the base of the mountain, that goes clean over the ridge, leading to a settlement some miles farther, called Rye Cove, and which was once the abode of a fierce Indian tribe. This main road goes over the arch of the tunnel, furnishing a curious convenience to the traveller, of which he would be unaware, seeing nothing through the foliage but glimpses of the mural rocks that guard and sustain the termination of the secret passage-way many hundred feet below him. It is from this convenience that the neighboring people name the gigantic work of nature we are proceeding to explore a natural bridge. But this name is certainly insufficient and paltry for a rock-work that on one flank at least extends some eight hundred feet, and which, if regarded with reference to the breadth of the interval it spans, is, in fact, a complication of bridges, arranged, as we shall presently see, in one single massive spectacle.

The western face of the tunnel, near which we dismount, continues partly concealed from view, or is imperfectly exposed, until we nearly approach it, the immense rock which is perforated being here dressed with the thick foliage of the spruce-pine, and the harsh surface adorned with a beautiful tracery of vines and creepers. At last is seen the entrance of what appears to be a huge subterraneous cavern or grotto, into which the stream disappears; a towering rock rising here about two hundred feet above the surface of the stream, and a rude entrance gouged into it, varying in width, as far as the eye can reach, from one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet, and rising in a clear vault from seventy to eighty feet above the floor. The view here terminates in the very blackness of darkness; it is broken on the first curve of the tunnel. The bed of the stream, from which the water has disappeared on account of the drouth, the reduced currents sinking to lower subterranean channels, is piled with great irregular rocks, on the sharp points of which we stumble and cut our hands: there is no foothold but on rocks, and it is only when we have struggled through the awful, cruel darkness, holding up some feeble lights in it, and issued into the broad sunshine, that we find we have travelled nearly two hundred yards (or say, more exactly, five hundred feet) through one solid rock, in which there is not an inch of soil, not a seam, not a cleft, and which, even beyond the debouchure of the tunnel, yet runs away a hundred yards in a wall five hundred feet high, as clean and whetted as the work of the mason.

But we must not anticipate this majestical scene, “wonderful beyond all wondrous measure.” Happily, in entering the tunnel from the western side we have adopted the course of exploration which affords a gradual ascent of the emotions, until at last they tower to the standard of a perfect sublimity. The course of the tunnel may be described as a continuous curve: it resembles, indeed, a prostrate ഗ. For a distance of twenty yards midway of this course we are excluded from a view of either entrance, and the darkness is about that of a night with one quarter of the moon. The vault becomes lower here—in some places scarcely more than thirty feet high—and springs immediately from the floor. The situation is awful and oppressive: the voice sounds unnatural, and rumbles strangely and fearfully along the arch of stone. We are encoffined in the solid rock: there is a strange pang in the beating heart in its imprisonment, so impenetrable, black, hopeless, and we hurry to meet the light of day. In that light we are disentombed: we cast off the confinements of the black space through which we have passed, and we are instantly introduced to a scene so luminous and majestic that in a moment our trembling eyes are captivated and our hearts lifted in unutterable worship of the Creator’s works.

It is that sheer wall of rock which we have already mentioned, where the arch and other side of the tunnel break away into the mountain slope; a high wall, slightly impending; an amphitheatre, extending one hundred yards, of awful precipices; a clean battlement, without a joint in it, five hundred feet high. And this splendid height and breadth of stone, that a thousand storms have polished, leaving not a cleft of soil in it,—this huge, unjointed masonry raised against the sky, gray and weather-stained, with glittering patches of light on it,—is yet part of the same huge rock which towered at the farther end of the tunnel, and through whose seamless cavity we have travelled two hundred yards. It is in this view that the mystery of the scene seizes the mind, and the last element of sublimity is added to it. It is in this view that the Natural Tunnel we had come to see as a mere “curiosity” takes rank among the greatest wonders of the world. What power, what possible imaginable agency of nature, could have worked out this stupendous scene?...

Turning our eyes away from the battlement of rock to the opposite side of the ravine, a new revelation of the grand and picturesque awaits us. Here a gigantic cliff, but one broken with rock and soil, and threaded to its summit by a sapling growth of the buckeye, the linden, and the pine, rises almost perpendicularly from the water’s edge to a height almost equal to that of the opposite wall of rock. A natural platform is seen to project over it, and yet a few yards farther there is an insulated cliff, a cyclopean chimney, so to speak, scarcely more than a foot square at its top, rising in the form of a turret at least sixty feet above its basement, which is a portion of the imposing cliff we have mentioned. It is at once perceived that here are two points of view that will give us new and perhaps the most imposing aspects of the scene. To attain these points, however, it is necessary to make a circuit of half a mile; and the sinking sun admonishes us to defer this new interest of the scene until to-morrow....

We remounted for the tunnel in the early morning, and were soon to find that the rising sun was to give a new and unexpected glory to the scene. This time we ascend the mountain instead of deflecting as before. The road is easy; there are no difficulties of access to the points of view from the top of the tunnel, and they are undoubtedly the grandest. We pass to the platform before described by a few steps from the main road. It is a slab of rock projecting from an open patch of ground; a dead cedar-tree is standing at its edge, throwing its gnarled and twisted arms, as in wild and widowed sorrow, over the awful scene below. We now see the great opposite amphitheatre of rock in added grandeur, for we see it from above,—we see it across a chasm nine hundred feet wide and five hundred feet deep, and the exposure being almost exactly eastern, the long spears of the rising sun are being shattered on it. The effect is inexpressibly grand. But there is one more circumstance to be added to the scene; we do not see from this observatory the arch, the entrance of the tunnel. A few yards farther the fearful chimney-shaped rock invites to a more commanding view, but the ascent is dangerous; the stone on top is loose, and so narrow that two persons can scarcely stand on it. A single misstep, a moment’s loss of balance, and we would fall into eternity. But now the sense of peril is lost, or is rather mingled, in the grandeur of the scene. It is a panoramic view. We have now the whole sweep of the mural precipice opposite; the sun’s glitter is incessant on the polished stone; the trees which fringe the bottom appear now scarcely more than shrubs; the entrance of the tunnel has now come into view, and that which yesterday we thought so high and wide, now appears, from our amazing height, as a stooped door-way. We imagine the gloomy entrance into a cave of Erebus and Death, the broken rocks lying within which look like black and mangled entrails. It is a fearful picture,—it is that of a supernatural abode.

[This marvel of nature is not without its tradition,—one of Indian origin,—in which is repeated, with suitable variations, the familiar Lover’s Leap narrative. A more prosaic and modern interest attaches to it, in its having been chosen as the route of a railroad, nature’s contribution of a passage through a difficult mountain wall.]

PLANTATION LIFE IN WAR TIMES.

WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL.

[Russell, of former celebrity as war correspondent of The Times, visited the seceded States during the early period of the American Civil War. His letters thence, published later as “Pictures of Southern Life,” are full of graphic descriptions of scenes and feelings in the Confederate States during the era of enthusiasm and hopefulness, before the war had borne its harvest of doubt and misery. It is not our purpose, however, to give his experiences in this special field. It is travel, not war, with which we are concerned, and we confine ourself to an account of a visit to a plantation in the vicinity of Charleston. A short preliminary sketch of the ebb and flow of rumor in war times, however, may be of interest.]

The rolling fire of the revolution is fast sweeping over the prairie, and one must fly before it or burn. I am obliged to see all that can be seen of the South at once, and then, armed with such safeguards as I can procure, to make an effort to recover my communications. Bridges broken, rails torn up, telegraphs pulled down,—I am quite in the air, and air charged with powder and fire. One of the most extraordinary books in the world could be made out of the cuttings and parings of the newspapers which have been published within the last few days. The judgments, statements, asseverations of the press, everywhere necessarily hasty, ill-sifted, and off-hand, do not aspire to even an ephemeral existence here. They are of use if they serve the purpose of the moment, and of the little boys who commence their childhood in deceit, and continue to adolescence in iniquity, by giving vocal utterance to the “sensation” headings of the journals they retail so sharply and so curtly.

Talk of the superstition of the Middle Ages, or of the credulity of the more advanced period of rural life; laugh at the Holy Coat of Treves, or groan over the Lady of Salette; deplore the faith in winking pictures, or in a communiqué of the Moniteur; moralize on the superstition which discovers more in the liquefaction of the ichor of St. Gennaro than a chemical trick; but if you desire to understand how far faith can see and trust among the people who consider themselves the most civilized and intelligent in the world, you will study the American journals, and read the telegrams which appear in them.

One day the Seventh New York Regiment is destroyed for the edification of the South, and is cut up into such small pieces that none of it is ever seen afterwards. The next day it marches into Washington or Annapolis, all the better for the process. Another, in order to encourage the North, it is said that hecatombs of dead were carried out of Fort Moultrie, packed up, for easy travelling, in boxes. Again, to irritate both, it is credibly stated that Lord Lyons is going to interfere, or that an Anglo-French fleet is coming to watch the ports; and so on, through a wild play of fancy, inexact in line, as though the batteries were charged with the aurora borealis or summer lightning, instead of the respectable, steady, manageable offspring of acid and metal....

I am now, however, dealing with South Carolina, which has been the fons et origo of the secession doctrines and their development into the full life of the Confederate States. The whole foundation on which South Carolina rests is cotton and a certain amount of rice; or rather she bases her whole fabric on the necessity which exists in Europe for those products of her soil, believing and asserting, as she does, that England and France cannot and will not do without them. Cotton, without a market, is so much flocculent matter encumbering the ground. Rice, without demand for it, is unsalable grain in store and on the field. Cotton at ten cents a pound is boundless prosperity, empire, and superiority, and rice and grain need no longer be regarded.

In the matter of slave labor, South Carolina argues pretty much in this way: England and France require our products. In order to meet their wants we must cultivate our soil. There is only one way of doing so. The white man cannot live on our land at certain seasons of the year; he cannot work in the manner required by the crops. He must, therefore, employ a race suited to the labor, and that is a race which will only work when it is obliged to do so.

[And so on throughout the old argument, which, fortunately, the logic of time has in great measure disproved. But, leaving this phase of the subject, we shall accompany our traveller on a visit to the land of rice and slave labor.]

Early one morning I started in a steamer to visit a plantation in the Pedee and Maccamaw district, in the island coast of the State, north of Charleston. Passing Sumter, on which men are busily engaged, under the Confederate flag, in making good damages and mounting guns, we put out a few miles to sea, and with the low sandy shore, dotted with soldiers and guard-houses and clumps of trees, on our left, in a few hours pass the Santee River, and enter an estuary into which the Pedee and Maccamaw run a few miles farther to the northwest.

The steamer ran alongside a jetty and pier, which was crowded by men in uniform, waiting for the news and for supplies of creature comforts. Ladies were cantering along the fine hard beach, and some gigs and tax-carts, fully laden, rolled along very much as one sees them at Scarborough. The soldiers on the pier were all gentlemen of the county. Some, dressed in gray tunics and yellow facings, in high felt-hats and plumes and jack-boots, would have done no discredit in face, figure, and bearing to the gayest cavaliers who ever thundered at the heels of Prince Rupert. Their horses, full of Carolinian fire and mettle, stood picketed under the trees along the margin of the beach. Among these men, who had been doing the duty of common troopers in patrolling the sea-coast, were gentlemen possessed of large estates and princely fortunes; and one who stood among them was pointed out to me as captain of a company, for whose use his liberality provided unbounded daily libations of champagne, and the best luxuries which French ingenuity can safely imprison in those well-known caskets with which Crimean warriors were not unacquainted at the close of the campaign.

They were eager for news, which was shouted out to them by their friends in the steamer, and one was struck by the intimate personal cordiality and familiar acquaintance which existed among them. Three heavy guns, mounted in an earthwork defended by palisades, covered the beach and the landing-place, and the garrison was to have been reinforced by a regiment from Charleston, which, however, had not got in readiness to go up on our steamer, owing to some little difficulties between the volunteers, their officers, and the quartermaster-general’s department.

As the “Nina” approaches the tumble-down wharf, two or three citizens advance from the shade of shaky sheds to welcome us, and a few country vehicles and light phaetons are drawn forth from the same shelter to receive the passengers, while the negro boys and girls who have been playing upon the bales of cotton and barrels of rice, which represent the trade of the place on the wharf, take up commanding positions for the better observation of our proceedings. There is an air of quaint simplicity and old-fashioned quiet about Georgetown, refreshingly antagonistic to the bustle and tumult of most American cities. While waiting for our vehicle we enjoyed the hospitality of one of our friends, who took us into an old-fashioned angular wooden mansion, more than a century old, still sound in every timber, and testifying in its quaint wainscotings, and the rigid framework of door and window, to the durability of its cypress timbers and the preservative character of the atmosphere. In early days it was the crack house of the old settlement, and the residence of the founder of the female branch of the family of our host, who now only makes it his halting-place when passing to and fro between Charleston and his plantation, leaving it the year round in charge of an old servant and her grandchild. Rose-trees and flowering shrubs clustered before the porch and filled the garden in front, and the establishment gave me a good idea of a London merchant’s retreat about Chelsea a hundred and fifty years ago.

At length we were ready for our journey, and, mounted in two light covered vehicles, proceeded along the sandy track, which, after a while, led us to a deep cut in the bosom of the woods, where silence was only broken by the cry of a woodpecker, the boom of a crane, or the sharp challenge of the jay. For miles we passed through the shadow of this forest, meeting only two or three vehicles, containing female planterdom on little excursions of pleasure or business, who smiled their welcome as we passed. Arrived at a deep chocolate-colored stream, called Black River, full of fish and alligators, we find a flat large enough to accommodate vehicles and passengers, and propelled by two negroes pulling upon a stretched rope, in the manner usual in the ferry-boats of Switzerland, ready for our reception.

Another drive through a more open country, and we reach a fine grove of pine and live-oak, which melts away into a shrubbery, guarded by a rustic gate-way, passing through which, we are brought by a sudden turn into the planter’s house, buried in trees, which dispute with the greensward and with wild flower-beds every yard of the space which lies between the hall-door and the waters of the Pedee; and in a few minutes, as we gaze over the expanse of fields just tinged with green by the first life of the early rice crops, marked by the deep water cuts, and bounded by a fringe of unceasing forest, the chimneys of the steamer we had left at Georgetown gliding as it were through the fields indicate the existence of another navigable river still beyond.

Leaving with regret the veranda which commanded so charming a foreground, we enter the house, and are reminded by its low-browed, old-fashioned rooms, of the country houses yet to be found in parts of Ireland or on the Scottish border, with additions, made by the luxury and love of foreign travel, of more than one generation of educated Southern planters. Paintings from Italy illustrate the walls, in juxtaposition with interesting portraits of early colonial governors and their lovely womankind, limned with no uncertain hand, and full of the vigor of touch and naturalness of drapery of which Copley has left us too few exemplars; and one portrait of Benjamin West claims for itself such honor as his own pencil can give. An excellent library—filled with collections of French and English classics, and with those ponderous editions of Voltaire, Rousseau, the mémoires pour servir, books of travel and history such as delighted our forefathers in the last century, and many works of American and general history—affords ample occupation for a rainy day.

But, alas! these, and all things good which else the house affords, can be enjoyed but for a brief season. Just as nature has expanded every charm, developed every grace, and clothed the scene with all the beauty of opened flower, of ripening grain, and of mature vegetation, on the wings of the wind the poisoned breath comes, borne to the home of the white man, and he must fly before it or perish. The books lie unopened on their shelves, the flower blooms and dies unheeded, and, pity ’tis true, the old Madeira garnered ’neath the roof settles down for a fresh lease of life, and sets about its solitary task of acquiring a finer flavor for the infrequent lips of its banished master and his welcome visitors. This is the story, at least, that we hear on all sides, and such is the tale repeated to us beneath the porch, when the moon enhances while softening the loveliness of the scene, and the rich melody of mocking-birds fills the grove.

Within these hospitable doors Horace might banquet better than he did with Nasidienus, and drink such wine as can only be found among the descendants of the ancestry who, improvident enough in all else, learnt the wisdom of bottling up choice old Bual and Sercial ere the demon of oidium had dried up their generous sources forever. To these must be added excellent bread, ingenious varieties of the galette, compounded now of rice and now of Indian meal, delicious butter and fruits, all good of their kind. And is there anything bitter rising up from the bottom of the social bowl? My black friends who attend on me are grave as Mussulman Khitmutgars. They are attired in liveries, and wear white cravats and Berlin gloves. At night when we retire, off they go to their outer darkness in the small settlement of negrohood, which is separated from our house by a wooden palisade. Their fidelity is undoubted. The house breathes an air of security. The doors and windows are unlocked. There is but one gun, a fowling-piece, on the premises. No planter hereabouts has any dread of his slaves. But I have seen, within the short time I have been in this part of the world, several dreadful accounts of murder and violence, in which masters suffered at the hands of their slaves. There is something suspicious in the constant, never-ending statement that “we are not afraid of our slaves.” The curfew and the night patrol in the streets, the prisons and watch-houses, and the police regulations, prove that strict supervision, at all events, is needed and necessary. My host is a kind man and a good master. If slaves are happy anywhere, they should be so with him.

These people are fed by their master. They have upward of half a pound per diem of fat pork, and corn in abundance. They rear poultry and sell their chickens and eggs to the house. They are clothed by their master. He keeps them in sickness as in health. Now and then there are gifts of tobacco and molasses for the deserving. There was little labor going on in the fields, for the rice has been just exerting itself to get its head above water. These fields yield plentifully; for the waters of the river are fat, and they are let in whenever the planter requires it, by means of floodgates and small canals, through which the flats can carry their loads of grain to the river for loading the steamers.

[Following our traveller in his peregrinations through the South, we next take him up on a sugar plantation on the Mississippi. The part of his journey in which we now find him is to be taken by boat.]

Charon pushed his skiff into the water—there was a good deal of rain in it—in shape of snuffer-dish, some ten feet long and a foot deep. I got in, and the conscious waters immediately began vigorously spurting through the cotton wadding wherewith the craft was calked. Had we got out into the stream we should have had a swim for it, and they do say the Mississippi is the most dangerous river for that healthful exercise in the known world.

“Why! deuce take you” (I said at least that, in my wrath), “don’t you see the boat is leaky?”

“See it now for true, massa. Nobody able to tell dat till massa get in, tho’.”

Another skiff proved to be stanch. I bade good-by to my friend, and sat down in my boat, which was soon forced along up-stream close to the bank, in order to get a good start across to the other side. The view, from my lonely position, was curious, but not at all picturesque. The landscape had disappeared at once. The world was bounded on both sides by a high bank, and was constituted by a broad river,—just as if one were sailing down an open sewer of enormous length and breadth. Above the bank rose, however, the tops of tall trees and the chimneys of sugar-houses. A row of a quarter of an hour brought us to the levee on the other side. I ascended the bank, and directly in front of me, across the road, appeared a carriage gate-way and wickets of wood, painted white, in a line of park palings of the same material, which extended up and down the road far as the eye could follow, and guarded wide-spread fields of maize and sugar-cane. An avenue of trees, with branches close set, drooping and overarching a walk paved with red brick, led to the house, the porch of which was just visible at the extremity of the lawn, with clustering flowers, rose, jasmine, and creepers clinging to the pillars supporting the veranda.

The proprietor, who had espied my approach, issued forth with a section of sable attendants in his rear, and gave me a hearty welcome. The house was larger and better than the residences even of the richest planters, though it was in need of some little repair, and had been built perhaps fifty years ago, in the old Irish fashion, who built well, ate well, drank well, and, finally, paid very well. The view from the belvedere was one of the most striking of its kind in the world. If an English agriculturist could see six thousand acres of the finest land in one field, unbroken by hedge or boundary, and covered with the most magnificent crops of tasselling Indian corn and sprouting sugar-cane, as level as a billiard-table, he would surely doubt his senses. But here is literally such a sight. Six thousand acres, better tilled than the finest patch in all the Lothians, green as Meath pastures, which can be cultivated for a hundred years to come without requiring manure, of depth practically unlimited, and yielding an annual profit on what is sold off it of at least twenty pounds an acre at the old prices and usual yield of sugar. Rising up in the midst of the verdure are the white lines of the negro cottages and the plantation offices and sugar-houses, which look like large public edifices in the distance. And who is the lord of all this fair domain? The proprietor of Houmas and Orange grove is a man, a self-made one, who has attained his apogee on the bright side of half a century, after twenty-five years of successful business.

When my eyes “uncurtained the early morning,” I might have imagined myself in the magic garden of Cherry and Fair Star, so incessant and multifarious were the carols of the birds, which were the only happy colored people I saw in my Southern tour, notwithstanding the assurances of the many ingenious and candid gentlemen who attempted to prove to me that the palm of terrestrial felicity must be awarded to their negroes. As I stepped through my window upon the veranda, a sharp chirp called my attention to a mocking-bird perched upon a rose-bush beneath, whom my presence seemed to annoy to such a degree that I retreated behind my curtain, whence I observed her flight to a nest, cunningly hid in a creeping rose trailed around a neighboring column of the house, where she imparted a breakfast of spiders and grasshoppers to her gaping and clamorous offspring. While I was admiring the motherly grace of this melodious fly-catcher, a servant brought coffee, and announced that the horses were ready, and that I might have a three hours ride before breakfast.

If I regretted the absence of the English agriculturist when I beheld the six thousand acres of cane and sixteen hundred of maize unfolded from the belvedere the day previous, I longed for his presence still more when I saw those evidences of luxuriant fertility attained without the use of phosphates or guano. The rich Mississippi bottoms need no manure; a rotation of maize with cane affords them the necessary recuperative action. The cane of last year’s plant is left in stubble, and renews its growth this spring under the title of ratoons. When the maize is in tassel, cow-peas are dropped between the rows, and when the lordly stalk, of which I measured many twelve or even fifteen feet in height, bearing three and sometimes four ears, is topped to admit the ripening sun, the pea-vine twines itself around the trunk with a profusion of leaf and tendril that supplies the planter with the most desirable fodder for his mules in “rolling-time,” which is their season of trial. Besides this, the corn-blades are culled and cured. These are the best meals of the Southern race-horse, and constitute nutritious hay without dust....

As we ride through the wagon-roads,—of which there are not less than thirty miles in this confederation of four plantations held together by the purse and the life of our host,—the unwavering exactitude of the rows of cane, which run without deviation at right angles with the river down to the cane-brake, two miles off, proves that the negro would be a formidable rival in a ploughing-match. The cane has been “laid by;” that is, it requires no more labor, and will soon “lap,” or close up, though the rows are seven feet apart. It feathers like a palm top: a stalk which was cut measured six feet, although from the ridges it was but waist-high. On dissecting it near the root we find five nascent joints not a quarter of an inch apart. In a few weeks more these will shoot up like a spy-glass pulled out to its focus....

In the rear of this great plantation there are eighteen thousand additional acres of cane-brake which are being slowly reclaimed.... We extended our ride into this jungle, on the borders of which, in the unfinished clearing, I saw plantations of “negro corn,” the sable cultivators of which seem to have disregarded the symmetry practised in the fields of their master, who allows them from Saturday noon until Monday’s cockcrow for the care of their private interests....

Corn, chicken, and eggs are, from time immemorial, the perquisites of the negro, who has the monopoly of the two last-named articles in all well-ordered Louisiana plantations. Indeed, the white man cannot compete with them in raising poultry, and our host was evidently delighted when one of his negroes, who had brought a dozen Muscovy ducks to the mansion, refused to sell them to him except for cash. “But, Louis, won’t you trust me? Am I not good for three dollars?” “Good enough, massa; but dis nigger want de money to buy flour and coffee for him young family. Folks at Donaldsonville will trust massa,—won’t trust nigger.” The money was paid, and, as the negro left us, his master observed, with a sly, humorous twinkle, “That fellow sold forty dollars’ worth of corn last year, and all of them feed their chickens with my corn, and sell their own.”

AMONG FLORIDA ALLIGATORS.

S. C. CLARKE.

[To the several stories of hunting life which we have introduced into these pages we may add one description of the large game of the streams and lakes of Florida, the bone-clad alligator. With it is given a sketch of the Everglade region which may be of interest.]

Having organized an expedition to the great Lake Okechobee, some thirty miles due west from the Indian River Inlet, we hired a wagon and pair of mules to carry our tents and necessary baggage, but, no other animals being attainable, only those of us who were fit for a tramp of nearly a hundred miles could go. Colonel Vincent, Macleod and Herbert of the “Victoria,” Captain Morris, Roberts, and myself, with the two pilots, Pecetti and Weldon, as guides, and Tom and a negro whom we picked up at Capron for cooks,—ten men in all, well-armed,—we were strong enough to insure respect from any roving party of Seminoles who might have been tempted to rob a weaker party. There are at this time, it is supposed, two or three hundred of these Indians in the region between Lake Okechobee and the Keys, descendants of a few Seminoles who concealed themselves in these inaccessible fastnesses when the greater part of their nation was sent West in 1842. They plant some corn on the islands of the Everglades, but live principally by the chase. Hitherto they have not been hostile to the whites, but as they increase in numbers faster than the white settlers, it is not impossible that they may reoccupy Southern Florida sooner or later, it being, in fact, a region suited only to the roving hunter....

The first day we made about twenty miles through a forest of yellow pine, such as stretches along the Southern coast from Virginia to Alabama, the trees standing thirty or forty feet apart, with little underbrush. Here and there we came upon a hummock of good soil, covered with the live-oak, magnolia, and cabbage-palm, all interlaced with vines and creepers, so as to form an almost impassable jungle. Now the road would lead into a wide savanna or meadow, waving with grass and browsed by herds of wild cattle and deer. In these meadows were set bright, mirror-like lakes, the abodes of water-fowl and wading birds, black bass, and the grim alligator, which in these solitudes, not being impressed with the fear of man, will hardly trouble himself to move out of the way. March in this region corresponding to May in the Middle States, the birds were in full spring song in every thicket,—the cardinal, the nonpareil, the mocking-bird, and our old familiar robin, whose cheerful note greets the traveller all over North America. Up and down the great pine trunks ran the red and gray squirrels, the little brown hare scudded through the palmetto scrub, and the turkey-buzzards floated above our heads in long easy circles.

So we fared on our way till about four P.M., when we made our camp on a clear branch or creek which issued from a lake near by, and while some of the party went to look for a deer, Captain Herbert and I took our rods and went up the creek towards the lake. Casting our spoons into a deep hole, we soon took a mess of bass and pike, which were very abundant and eager to be caught, when, as we were preparing to return to camp, we suddenly saw an alligator about eight feet long quietly stealing towards us. I seized a young pine-tree about as thick as my arm, and made for him. Not at all alarmed, the beast opened his jaws and advanced, hissing loudly. I brought down my club with full force upon his head, but it seemed to produce no impression; he still advanced as I retreated battering his skull.

“What is that brute’s head made of?” inquired Herbert, as he came to my assistance with another club; and between us we managed to stun the hard-lived reptile, and left him on the ground.

The hunters brought in a young buck and two turkeys, so that we had a plentiful supper after our tramp....

About two o’clock that night we were disturbed by the mules, which had been staked out to graze hard by, and which retreated towards the camp to the end of their ropes, snorting with terror. The dogs rushed to the scene of disturbance, and appeared to have a fight with some animal which escaped in the woods. Our guides thought it was a panther, and at daylight they started, with Morris and myself and all the dogs, to hunt for it. The hounds soon hit the trail, which we followed into a cypress swamp about half a mile from the camp, in the midst of which they started a large panther, which, being hotly pressed by the hounds, treed in a big live-oak on the farther side of the swamp. When we came up we plainly saw the beast lying out on a branch which stretched horizontally from the trunk about twenty-five feet from the ground.

“Now,” said Pecetti, “you two fire first, and if you don’t kill, Weldon and I will be ready. Aim at the heart.”

Morris and I fired, and the panther sprang from the tree among the dogs, which all piled on him at once. There was a confused mass of fur rolling on the ground, snarling, and snapping, for half a minute; then the panther broke loose, and was making off, when Weldon put half a dozen buckshot in his head, and he rolled over and over, so nearly dead that when the dogs mounted him again he could do no mischief. He had badly cut both the deer-hounds, however, which had been the first to seize him: Weldon’s fox-hounds, having more experience with this sort of game, had kept clear of his claws. It was a fine male, measuring eight feet from the nose to the tip of the tail, and we took the skin for a trophy. The tenacity of life in these large cats is very great. One of our balls had penetrated the chest, and the other had broken the fore leg, but he was still able to shake off the dogs, and would probably have escaped but for Weldon’s shot....

The next morning, March 13, we breakfasted upon a couple of gophers or land-tortoises which the men had found the day before in the pine-woods. These creatures are about eighteen inches long, and weigh twelve or fifteen pounds. A stew of the gopher and the terminal buds of the cabbage-palm is a favorite Florida dish. About noon we came suddenly upon the shore of the great lake Okechobee, which extends away to the west and south as far as the eye can reach: in fact, the shores are so low as to be invisible at any distance. This is by far the largest sheet of water in the State, being about forty miles long and thirty wide, but it is not deep. It contains on the western side several islands, which are occupied by the Seminoles. To the south and east of this lake are the Everglades, or Grassy Lakes, a region where land and water are mingled,—rivers, lakes, dry islands, and wet marshes all jumbled together in confusion, and extending over many hundred square miles, the chosen abode of the alligator, the gar-fish, the snapping-turtle, the moccasin snake, and other hideous and ferocious creatures more or less mythical, and recalling those earlier periods in the earth’s history when the great monsters, the Ichthyosauri and the Plesiosauri, wallowed and crawled over the continents.

We made our camp in a grove near the lake, almost on the spot where Taylor fought his battle in 1838. As soon as this was done the pilots went in search of a tree to make canoes. They found not far off a large cypress which served, and by the next night they had completed two canoes, each about twelve feet long and eighteen inches wide, suitable for navigating the lake and able to carry four men each. In the mean time we had commenced hostilities against the alligators, which were here very large, bold, and numerous. They lay basking in the sun upon the beach in front of our camp, some of them fifteen feet long, and it became necessary to drive them away, lest they should devour our dogs, or even our mules, for some of these monsters looked able to do it. We opened fire upon them with repeating rifles, and if any Indians were within hearing they must have supposed that General Taylor had come back again, such was the rapidity of our fusillade. The brain of the alligator is small, and developed chiefly in the region of destructiveness; but after a dozen were killed and many more wounded, it seemed to dawn upon their perceptions that this part of the lake was unsafe, and they gradually took themselves away. I disapprove of killing animals for mere sport, and destroy not deliberately except when I wish to use them for food; but the alligator is the enemy of all living creatures, the tyrant of the waters, and the death of one saves the lives of hundreds of other animals. So blaze away at the ’gators, O ye Florida tourists!—you will not kill many of them, anyway: their shells are too thick,—but spare the pelicans, who are a harmless race of fisherfolk, like ourselves.

ON THE COAST OF FLORIDA

From a Steel Plate

There were great numbers of large turtles in the lake, Chelonura and Trionyx, from two to three feet long; gar-fish also, almost as big as the alligators. These mailed warriors, like the knights of old, exercise their prowess chiefly upon the defenceless multitudes of the fresh waters, but I have heard of half a large alligator being found in the stomach of a shark at a river mouth. In spite of all these destroyers, the lake swarmed with fish. Pecetti could generally get enough black bass, pike, or perch at one or two casts of his net to feed our whole party if at any time it happened that they would not bite at the hook.

A curious feature of the lake and river scenery is the floating island. This is principally formed of the water-lettuce, or Pistia, an aquatic plant with long roots which descend to the bottom. These beds of Pistia become matted together with grass and weeds, so as to be thick enough to bear the weight of small animals, and even sometimes of man. In strong winds these islands break loose from their anchorage and float away for miles, till they bring up in some quiet bay, where the plants again take root. Lake Okechobee contains many of these floating meadows, which are a great resort for ducks and water-fowl. In fact, one would think that all the ducks, divers, herons, curlews, ibises, cranes, and waders generally had assembled here in mass-meeting. Among them are those rare and beautiful species, the scarlet ibis, roseate spoonbill, and black-necked stilt. The ducks, being birds of passage, spending their summers up North, are acquainted with men and their arts, and are comparatively shy, but the native birds are very tame and can easily be approached.

I was awakened the next morning at sunrise by sounds from the woods as of a gang of ship-carpenters or calkers at work. It was the great ivory-billed woodpecker (Picus principalis) tearing off the bark and probing the dead trees for insects and grubs, and making a noise which could plainly be heard half a mile in the still morning air. Another sound of a different character now made itself heard from the swamps. It was something like the bellowing of bulls, and proceeded from the old male alligators calling to their mates. This indicates the coming of spring, the breeding-season of these creatures. William Bartram, who travelled in East Florida a hundred years ago, gives a thrilling account of the terrible combats which he witnessed in the St. John’s River between these rival champions, who did not hesitate to attack him in his boat.

The next day, March 15, being in want of meat, Colonel Vincent, Dr. Macleod, Morris, and I started for a hunt, taking Pecetti for guide, since nothing is easier than to get lost in this wilderness. We kept up the lake shore to the north on the sandy beach, towards the mouth of the Kissimmee River, which here enters the lake. This is a deep and rapid stream, which drains the great wet prairies to the north, and in the rainy season must carry a large volume of water. Like the lake, it has great patches of water-lettuce, which in some places almost bridge the channel. Much of its course is through swamps, though in some places the pine barrens and live-oak hummocks approach its banks. It contains immense quantities of fish,—pike, bass, and perch.

In the first hummock which we reached the colonel shot a buck, and I got two young turkeys from a flock. As we emerged from this hummock the guide spied a herd of wild cattle feeding on the prairie about half a mile off, and by his direction we crept through the scrub as far as it afforded cover, and then trusted to the high grass for concealment till we got within a hundred yards of the herd, which consisted of about twenty cows and calves, with a couple of bulls. The doctor and colonel fired together and brought down a heifer. A big bull immediately charged towards the smoke and report of the guns, for he could not see us. On he came, head down and tail erect, bellowing with rage,—a magnificent animal of brindled color, with an immensely heavy neck and shoulder, like a bison, but without the mane. When within fifty yards I fired at his head: the ball struck him full in the forehead and staggered him, but he shook his head and kept straight for us. I gave him another shot, which struck him in the chest and turned him, when Pecetti gave him sixteen buckshot in the shoulder from his big double-barrel, which brought him down, dying bravely in defence of his family.

“His carcass is too old and tough to be of any good,” said the guide, “but I’ll take off his hide; the heifer will give us meat enough.”

While he was butchering, Morris returned to the camp and sent out Tom with the wagon to bring in the beef and venison. It was not long before a flock of turkey-buzzards appeared in sight and floated in circles above our heads, waiting for our departure to begin their feast. It was formerly the opinion of naturalists that these birds were guided by scent in the discovery of the dead animals upon which they feed, but later investigations show that they are led by their acute vision; and my own experience convinces me that this is the fact. As we were returning to camp through the hummock, Pecetti killed a large rattlesnake: it was over five feet long, and as thick as the calf of a man’s leg....

On the morning of March 20, Captain Herbert, Pecetti and I went on a fishing excursion up the lake in a canoe. A few casts of the net near the shore procured a supply of small fish of the mullet species for bait, and we paddled up near to the inlet of the Kissimmee. Here we found the alligators and gars too numerous, they having collected probably to prey upon the fish which there enter the lake. In a quiet bay near the fringe of Pistia and water-lilies, where the water was five or six feet deep, we trolled with a spoon for black bass, and took some of very large size,—eight, ten and twelve pounds....

What adds much to the interest of fishing in strange waters is the uncertainty of the sport and the variety of species; and in this lake we could not tell whether the next offer would be from a peaceful perch, a bounding bass, a piratical pike, or a gigantic gar. I put a chub, or a fish resembling it, eight or nine inches long upon a gang of large hooks, and cast it astern with a hand-line. Presently I saw a great roll towards it from out the weeds, and my line stopped short. I had something very heavy, which, however, played in the sluggish fashion of the pike family, and in ten minutes, without much resistance, I had it alongside the canoe, and it was gaffed by Pecetti. It was a huge pike, four feet four inches long, and weighed, when we got to camp, thirty-four pounds. Pecetti called it the striped pike, and said he had seen them six feet long in some of the lakes: perhaps Esox vittatus (Rafinesque) of the Mississippi Basin.

By this time the gars had collected about us in such numbers that the other fish were driven away: we found it impossible to get a hook into their bony jaws or bills, and only succeeded in capturing one of small size by slipping a noose over its head as it followed the bait. This gar-fish is useless as food, but we wanted a few specimens for Dr. White, it being in demand for museums, particularly in foreign countries, as it belongs to a species exclusively American, and represents an order of fishes (the ganoids) of which few families at present exist. This one, Lepidosteus, has a wide range in America, being found from Florida to Wisconsin. Another American ganoid is Amia calva, the dog-fish or bow-fin, which is very numerous in Western rivers. Both are voracious, but unfit for food. They are described by Agassiz as being of an old-fashioned type, such as were common in the earlier geologic periods, and this is one among many proofs that North America is the oldest of the continents.

Morris, Vincent, and the other hunters brought in to-day a large supply of game,—deer, turkeys, and ducks,—but sustained the loss of one of Morris’s deer-hounds, which they supposed to have been taken by an alligator while swimming a lake in pursuit of a deer. They were some miles south of the camp when this occurred. They did not see the alligator, but the dog suddenly disappeared, and was not to be found after a long search. Morris felt so much disgusted by the loss of this valuable dog that he wished to return to the yacht and go down towards the Keys. So we started the next morning, and arrived at the inlet on the 23d. The weather had been delightful, as is usually the case in Florida in winter, but the day we arrived at the inlet we encountered the beginning of the equinoctial storm, which lasted two days and was very violent.

IN THE MAMMOTH CAVE.

THÉRÈSE YELVERTON.

[Among the many marvels of nature in the United States the Mammoth Cave holds a prominent position, and we feel it incumbent on us to accompany some of our company of travellers into its depths. The “Teresina in America” of Thérèse Yelverton (Viscountess Avonmore) affords us the opportunity, of which we avail ourselves in the following selection.]

We arrived at the Mammoth Cave on one of those heavenly days which earthly words fail to depict. It was the second week in November, the “Indian summer,” the most charming season in America. If anything were necessary to convince me that a future beatitude is no fiction, it would be this foretaste of bliss in such days as these, when the whole being—mind and body—seems lapped in a state of peace and beatitude combined. Anxieties and worldly cares seem to float away into the dim distance; our love is free from feverish excitement, and hate has lost its gall and sting. The golden light which floats around mellows our soul to repose. There is that exhilarating, yet balmy nourishment in the atmosphere which lifts the weary spirit from its damp and earthly coil, and makes it glad, and light, and gleesome. The heavy “heart bowed down by weight of woe” suddenly imbibes some of the joyous elasticity which fills the insect tribe,—the bees and grasshoppers, the golden fly, glittering and humming in pure ecstasies, and the merry little beetles revelling in one continuous contra-dance. Rarely, indeed, can we overcharged human beings feel as blithesome as the insect world; we seek to taste the apples of delight which turn to ashes in our mouth, and neglect to sip with them the nectar in the breeze. What can we do? these breezes come so seldom. The insect sparkles to-day in the sunshine and to-morrow it dies. We of the superior race have to live and labor through sunshine and shade, and can only catch these rosy minutes as they fly.

Some of these halcyon moments we enjoyed on that fortunate day we arrived at the Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. The earth was covered with its autumn carpet of dry dark leaves,—brown and glossy on one side, deep violet on the other,—and crinkling and crushing beneath our tread, they kept up a staccato treble to the dulcet sighing of the wind through the yellow leaves still lingering on the trees. A delicious concert of sweet sounds, and one that Mozart and Mendelssohn must have studied well and carefully. The atmosphere was bright and clear as under a summer sun, but without the heat; the air as fine and bracing as winter, but without the cold. We lost sight entirely of the two great tormentors, heat and cold, and for the few days of our stay forgot their very existence.

I have heard of persons feeling, under the effect of laughter, as light and buoyant as if floating in ambient air. The atmosphere during their “Indian summer” must, doubtless, be strongly impregnated with oxygen, for we experienced a similar sensation; which was probably deepened by the fact of our having come from Louisville, where those hotel stairs had seemed a perfect toil to us.

The country around the caves, for eight or ten miles, was a series of deep ravines, studded with projecting cliffs and rocks, and covered with oak—principally the English oak—and another gigantic species, with leaves from a quarter to half a yard long, but of the same form as the ordinary oak-leaf. Up and down the ravines we scrambled and roamed, as happy as goats or wild chamois. These ravines, or glens, have no doubt been the beds of some ancient river, now, perhaps, flowing through the bowels of the earth; for this part of the country is intersected by underground rivers, a stream often suddenly appearing, which, after flowing on for a few miles, plunges rapidly into the earth and is lost to sight.

An anecdote is told of two millers who had their mills on two different rivers, thirty miles apart. There had been a long drought, and neither mill had been working; but one day miller No. 1 heard his wheel going round at a tremendous pace, and going to examine it perceived a quantity of water, although there had not been a drop of rain for some time. He went over to communicate his good luck to his neighbor.

“Oh!” exclaimed miller No. 2, “you’re gettin’ my water unbeknownst, for a cloud burst over us the other night and nearly drowned us all.”

It was evident the millers were working the same stream, which ran for thirty miles underground, similar to the lakes in Florida, called sinks (for Americans call everything by gross-sounding names), which suddenly disappear, leaving all the fish stranded. Sometimes the water returns, sometimes not....

Independent of the caves, the scenery around, to a lover of nature, is well worthy of a visit, and for a summer resort is unsurpassed; shady, romantic walks through the woods; a delicious air breathed from the gigantic mouth of the cavern, whence, in the hot months, it blows cool and refreshing; in the cold ones soft and warm; the actual temperature of the cave never varying. The sensations of heat and cold are produced by comparison with the outer air.

It occurred to a medical man some years ago that the uniform atmosphere of this cave might be a specific for consumption.

Possessed with this theory, the doctor had a dozen small houses constructed in the cavern, about a mile or two from its mouth, and to these he conveyed his patients. From the appearance of these places of abode, the only wonder is that the poor invalids did not expire after twenty-four hours of residence in them. They, however, contrived to exist there about three months, most of them being carried out in extremis. The houses consisted of a single room, built of the rough stone of the cavern,—which, in this part, bears all the appearance of a stone-quarry,—and without one particle of comfort beyond a boarded floor, the small dwelling being constructed entirely on the model of a lock-up, or “stone-jug.” The cells of a modern prison are quite palatial in comparison with them. The darkness is such as might be felt; and it is impossible to realize what darkness actually is until experienced in some place where a ray of sunlight has never penetrated.

From the mouth of the cavern to that part where the doctor’s houses were built was a continual, though gradual, descent, and at that spot there was a solid roof of a hundred and fifty feet of earth. The houses—or rather detached stone boxes—were so small that without vitiating the air only one person could remain in them at one time; so that, besides the darkness,—in case of any accident to their lamps,—these poor creatures must have endured utter solitude. Their food was brought from the hotel, two or three miles away, on the hill, and consequently must have been cold and comfortless. They were kept prisoners within their narrow cells, for the rough rocks and stones everywhere abounding rendered a promenade for invalids quite impracticable. The deprivation of sunlight, fresh air, and all the beauties of the earth must have been the direst punishment imaginable. No wonder these poor creatures were carried out one by one to die.

The last one having become so weak that it was deemed unsafe to move him, his friends resolved to stay with him in the cavern till the last. What transpired is now beyond investigation. Whether some effect of light, which in this cavern has a most mysterious and awful appearance, or whether the death-bed was one of terrors, owing to some imp of mischief having laid a plan to “scare” them, as they say in this country, is not known; but they rushed terror-stricken from the cave, and on reaching the hotel fell down insensible. Subsequently they declared they had seen spirits carrying away their friend. Mustering a strong force, the people from terra firma, with the guides and plenty of torches, sallied down to the lower and supposed infernal regions. The spirits, however, had fled, leaving nothing but the stiffening corpse of the poor consumptive. This ended all hope of the cavern as a cure for consumption.

The Mammoth Cave is perhaps the most extensively explored cavern known. It extends for nine continuous miles, so that it would be possible to walk fifty miles in and out by different roads. The cavern consists of various large chambers and lofty domes, averaging from twenty to one hundred feet in height. Some of the chambers exactly resemble the tombs of the kings of Egypt, and the narrow tortuous defiles through the rocks are also very like the roads into the Pyramids. Most of these chambers are merely natural excavations in the solid rock. One of the white-domed ceilings is covered with a thick scroll-pattern traced in black, and consists entirely of bats, which take up their winter quarters in these caverns, and fare better in them apparently than the consumptives. It is curious how these sightless creatures, from various parts of the country, find out the caves, so impervious to light and cold, and where, from the noise they make, they seem to have a merry time of it. Not so, however, the visitors passing through this part of the cave; for the bats are apt to fly right in one’s face, or stick against one’s clothes, and bite furiously at any attempt to dislodge them.

Still farther on there is a vast vault, upward of eighty feet high, formed of gypsum with some sort of crystals embedded in it. When you sit and gaze on it for some time, by the dim light of the lamps, the vault seems to recede into azure space. A bright sparkling veil hangs over it like the milky way, seen dimly between the shelving rocks, which bulge out in round soft layers, of a whitish-gray cast, and look exactly like petrified clouds. By a judicious movement of the light of the lamps a most beautiful phenomenon of cloud-scenery is effected, and by their gradual extinction a Stygian darkness seems to wrap all in perfect horror. This, the “Star Chamber,” is one of the finest effects in the Mammoth Cave, and it might be enhanced to the wildest magnificence by an artistic arrangement of variously colored lights. The cave would be a fine place in which to read Dante’s Inferno.

Here and there through the cave there are immense pits or chasms, only some few yards in circumference, but from two to three hundred feet in depth. A piece of paper saturated in oil is thrown down and displays the fearful gulf, the bottom of which appears to have the same formation of rock and clay as the top. Sometimes we ascended ten or twenty feet by ladders and occasionally descended. We traversed about a mile of passage where the ceiling, six feet high, was as smooth and white as plaster could have made it. It was literally covered with the names of former visitors. In some places there were hundreds of cards on the floor, left by guests,—so it is not only English people who have a mania for inscribing their names. Indeed, as to that, it is common to most nations, for I had a secretary named Van Kenkle, who wrote his name upon every article belonging to me.

For eight or nine miles we continued to traverse passages and chambers, sometimes over rough pieces of rock, sometimes through the thick dust of ages, sometimes through the tortuous gorges,—mere slits between the rocks through which we had to creep,—sometimes coming upon a well or spring of sweet water. At about three or four miles from the mouth we came to the chamber called “The Church,” from its resemblance to the ancient cathedral vault, frequently to be seen on the European continent under churches or monasteries, and called the crypt.

This church of the Mammoth Cave is a singular phenomenon. The roof, which is not lofty, is supported by a number of pillars, in many places forming Gothic arches, and running at somewhat regular distances, dividing the church into aisles. These columns are actually enormous stalactites, and the fresco of petrified water upon them has all the appearance of the most rich and elaborate carving. In some places the pillars of stone have not quite reached the ground, and remain suspended from the roof. Other and smaller condensed stalactites resembled the drooping rosettes which unite the spring of Gothic arches. In one portion of the church is an enormous stone, carved out exactly like the bishop’s chair, or throne, usually seen on the high altar. The altar itself is very like those primitive stone edifices sculptured by the early Christians, when driven to celebrate their worship in the catacombs of Rome.

This chamber is a marvellous freak of nature imitating art, for the hand of man has never touched it or worked it into shape; yet if any one were transported here unconsciously, he would, on looking round, imagine himself in the chancel crypt of some old cathedral of the ninth or tenth century. Some romantic lovers, evidently influenced by this idea, had actually, a few weeks before our visit, arrived at the cave, accompanied by their friends and the clergyman, and caused the marriage ceremony to be performed in that very church. It was a whimsical idea, and must have been a cold, comfortless, clammy affair; but the feelings and sentiment about weddings totally differ in America from our European notions on the subject,—rarely is it a joyous merry-making, rather the reverse, as I have mentioned in a former chapter.

A few miles farther on, we came to the great natural marvel, the subterranean river, with its buried water and eyeless fish, its beautiful parterres of stone flowers and shrubs, like a garden covered with morning hoar-frost. On this dismal river we were launched in a little skiff, not the most seaworthy in the world,—and I must confess to having experienced a feeling of dread of being upset on that mysterious stream, whose outlet might be, for all we knew, in a region we did not care to visit, or even to contemplate the possibility of visiting. The echo had a thrill of awe that made one’s flesh creep and hair stand on end. If one called spirits there from the vasty deep, and they did not come, yet they certainly answered from the dark shadows of the rocks falling around the lurid glare of the torches,—the only light on the river of Erebus. It was quite easy to believe there were myriads of spirits flitting around, and stretching out their weird arms to carry us down to bottomless Hades.

There is another very interesting cave, which is not so frequently visited by travellers, who when they have seen the big thing, are only anxious to rush away again. It is not so extensive as the Mammoth, but infinitely more beautiful and more inaccessible, the descent having to be accomplished by ladders; but once down, it is a fairy-land, a continuous scene of rapturous enchantment. The stalactites simulate the most exquisite parterre of flowers, the most magnificent forest of crystallized trees, the most wondrous marble carving, even to that perfection of art which shrouds the figure in transparent drapery, like “the statue of the Dead Christ” at Naples; nor was Apollo’s charm unknown there. Our guide tapped upon these magic crystals, and produced the sweetest harmony ear ever heard, or at least it sounded so.

The walls of the chambers and passages were encrusted with the stalactite flowers. They could be broken off their stems, and as so few visitors ventured down, the guide allowed me to take one. One chamber was absolutely curtained with this marvellous formation of petrified water, and when the guide held the light behind the scene, it produced the effect of being draped in the purest amber. These drooping curtains, some fifty feet in height, emitted the most musical tones when struck. If the physician had brought his patients to these fairy bowers, he might, I think, have succeeded in sending them home quite cured, but I believe the cave had not been discovered then.

With a brilliant light the spot was perfectly lovely, and the atmosphere was that of constant, unchanged temperature, which puts the human lungs in a state of beatitude. I should not in the least object to live in that paradise of crystal flowers and adamantine forms, the most beautiful that the imagination of man has ever conceived to be curtained in living amber, and pillowed—well, I must admit that—in dust; but it was such clean dust.... The texture of these stalactites, when examined by daylight, resembles alabaster, thus the leaves, flowers, sprigs, are perfectly beautiful. Nor are these caves without their incidents of life’s drama. The grave and the gay have been enacted here as elsewhere. The episode of the physician and his patients was sad enough, but a more terrible tragedy resulted from a wager.

The guides are particular on entering the caves with a large party to beg them to keep together, as it would be impossible for a person to find his own way out of the labyrinth of passages, chambers, etc. Two gentlemen of a party made a bet that they would accomplish the feat, and, taking their opportunity, slipped away from their party, without the guides being aware of their absence, and it was not until late in the evening that the other party to the wager remarked that those two foolhardy fellows had not found their way out of the cavern. This coming to the ears of the guide, he exclaimed, “Then they are dead men!” Nevertheless they went in full force to do everything that was possible to find them, but spent the night in vain searches. Sometimes they came upon their track in the soft dust, then lost it again.

On the following day the search was renewed by the guide who had escorted the party, and his description of the finding of one of the gentlemen was truly horrible: “It was the most tarnation cutting up job I ever had in my life,” said the guide. “We are not much of cowards, we guides,—we get accustomed to awfulness down in the bowels of the earth; but when that critter’s shrieks first came to my ear, I just shivered all over and my feet rooted to the ground,—not that I did not wish to save him, the poor devil, but I got an idea that that shriek came right straight from hell and no mistake, and I had no fancy to go there before I was sent for! Wall, when I had wiped my brow and taken a drink, I went on in the direction of the sound, for it came every now and again, the echoes making like fifty devils instead of one. I found him sooner than I expected; he was a sight to behold; he flew at me like a tiger; he clutched me, and pulled me, and wrestled with me, yelling and howling like a wild beast. I thought he would have torn me to pieces. I should not have known him again for the same gentleman. His eyes glared, his mouth was foaming, and his hair on end, his clothes all torn and covered with dust. He was a real raving maniac, and so he remained, as far as I know. The work I had to get him out of that cave! He would stand stock still and shake all over, then suddenly clutch at me again. I was the stronger man of the two, and he was weak from long fasting, or I never should have got him out. The doctor said he was fright-stricken.”

And this was the case, as they thought, with the other poor fellow, who was not found for weeks, it having been conjectured that he had fallen down a hole. One of the guides making some new exploration, discovered him sitting down, no sign of decomposition having taken place, and no sign of his having died of starvation, for a piece of biscuit was found in his pocket. He was supposed to have died of terror, the terrible darkness working upon the nervous system, and the hopelessness of penetrating it making the minutes appear hours. A guide who had once been lost there himself for some twenty hours, said he never could believe he had not been there for several days.

DOWN THE OHIO AND MISSISSIPPI.

THOMAS L. NICHOLS.

[“Forty Years of American Life,” by Dr. Thomas L. Nichols, is the source of the following selection, which gives a graphic and interesting picture of steamboat life on the great rivers of the West in the days before the war. It needs only one thing to complete the story, the race and the explosion, which was no uncommon incident at that period, but an example of which, fortunately for our author, was not among his experiences.]

We embarked on a little steamboat which drew twelve inches of water, and whose single wide paddle-wheel was at the stern, and extended the whole width of the hull. A succession of dams made the river navigable at that season of low water, and at each dam we were let down by a lock to a lower level. At the high stage of water dams and locks are all buried deep beneath the surface, and larger steamboats go careering over them.

What I best remember, in crossing the Alleghanies and descending this river, were the beds of coal. It seemed to be everywhere just below the surface. We saw it along the route, where the people dug the fuel for their fires out of a hole in the yard, ten feet from the door. Along the high perpendicular banks of the river there were strata of coal ten or twelve feet thick. Men were digging it down with picks and sliding it into flat-boats, which, when the river rose, would float down with the current to Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans. These frail boats—long boxes made of deal boards nailed together, and loaded nearly to the top—would many of them be lost. The swell of a passing steamboat, or a snag or a sawyer in the river, would sink them. They would ground on sand-bars. A sudden hurricane sometimes sinks a hundred of them. Perhaps a third of the whole number are lost, but the coal costs almost nothing—three halfpence a bushel—and brings a price proportional to the distance which it floats in safety.

At Pittsburg, a city of coal and iron, smoky and grimy as Newcastle or Birmingham, we took a larger boat, but still a small one, for Cincinnati. The Ohio was very low. We passed slowly down, getting pleasant glimpses of the towns upon its banks, and especially of the flourishing cities of Cincinnati and Louisville.

I was disappointed with the Ohio for a few hundred miles from its source, most unreasonable tourist that I was. I recall whatever I may have said to its disparagement. The Ohio, charming in all its course of a thousand miles, becomes grandly beautiful below Louisville for the lower half of its course. Were it but deep as well as broad and splendid in its great reaches and graceful curves and picturesque banks, nothing would be wanting to its pleasing souvenirs. But I have tried its current at an unfortunate period,—the river at its lowest point. At its highest it would be fifty feet deeper,—a great torrent pouring onward towards the sea.

We were all of us in high spirits on the “Fort Wayne.” The crew was firing up, and singing merrily below; and in the cabin we were sitting round our good coal-fire, chatting, reading, and some playing poker, calculating the next morning but one to wake upon the Mississippi. So passed we down merrily, until, sunk upon a bar, we saw the wreck of the steamboat “Plymouth,” which two nights before had been run into by another boat, which sunk her instantly, and her deck-passengers woke up under the waters of the Ohio. Twenty unfortunates were drowned; and our passengers, accustomed to the river, spoke of it with perfect indifference, as a very common affair.

We passed this bar safely, touching bottom indeed, as we often did; but in passing over the next we grounded firm and fast. The engines were worked at their greatest power, but in vain. Efforts were made all day to get the boat off, but without moving her, and older voyagers began to tell pleasant stories of boats lying for three weeks on a sand-bar, and getting out of provisions and wood. For us passengers there was but patience, but for captain and crew there was a hard night’s work in a cold November rain. They went at it heartily, and when we woke up in the morning the steamboat was afloat, and as soon as she had got in a fresh supply of wood we went merrily down the Ohio again, putting off by a day our arrival at the Father of Waters. So we went, talking on morals and politics, reading the “Wandering Jew,” and playing poker, until dinner came; and just after dinner we came to another bar, on which we ran as before, giving our crew a second night of hardship and toil, and us a more thorough disgust of low-water navigation. We got off by morning as before, by great exertion and the steady use of effective machinery, the boat being hoisted over the bar inch by inch by the aid of great spars, blocks, and windlass.

There was still, but a short distance below this spot, the worst bar of all to pass.... Having been twice aground and lost nearly two days, our captain determined to take every precaution. He hired a flat-boat, into which were discharged many tons of whiskey and butter, and which was lashed alongside. A boat was sent down to sound the channel and lay buoys. This done, just as breakfast was ready, all the male passengers were summoned to go on board the flat-boat, fastened alongside, with the butter and whiskey, so as to lighten the steamer as much as possible, and when we were all aboard we started down. As luck would have it, the current carried the boat a few feet out of her proper course, and she stuck fast again. The wheels could not move her, and we jumped on board again to eat our breakfast, now grown cold from waiting.

This despatched, we went out on the promenade deck, and to our chagrin saw the “Louis Philippe,” which left Louisville one day behind us, coming down, looking light and lofty, with a flat-boat alongside. She came down rapidly, and passed close by us, her passengers laughing in triumph at our predicament. The “Louis Philippe” had not got her length below us before she too stuck fast and swung round into a more difficult position, lying broadside upon the bar, with the strong current full against her. The laugh was now on our side, and the “Louis Philippe” gave rise to the more jokes, because her hurricane-deck was entirely covered with cabbages, with their stumps sticking up, giving her a droll appearance, while our hurricane-deck was filled with chicken-coops. It was time now to go to work in earnest. More freight was discharged into our lighter, and all the passengers, except the women and children, were sent on board her. We thickly covered the barrels of whiskey and kegs of butter, and the captain, to keep us off the steamer, cast us loose, and we floated off with the current, and were safely blown ashore on the Kentucky side, about a mile below, leaving the two steamers above to get off as soon as they were able.

When our flat-boat touched the Kentucky bank of the river, her ninety passengers jumped joyfully ashore, and with noisy hilarity scattered along the beach. The morning was beautiful. The clear sunlight glittered upon the river and lighted up the forest with golden radiance. The sky was blue, and the air cool and bracing. The land was high, well wooded, and fertile. Seeing a substantial-looking double log house a short distance from the river, about a dozen of us went up to warm our fingers at its fire....

In a few moments our lucky boat swung round and came down for us, leaving the less fortunate “Louis Philippe” to get off as she could, and her passengers to learn not to halloo before they got out of the wood. And now—now, by the first light of the morning for this grand, this terrible Mississippi!

It was a misty moonlight night when we came to the confluence of the Ohio with the Mississippi. We had come down a tedious, and in some degree a perilous, course of one thousand miles; we had still a thousand miles to go before arriving at New Orleans, which is the next stage of our Southern journey.

The Mississippi and the Ohio come together at an acute angle, and their waters flow down in unmingled currents, differing in color, for a long distance. Even at night we could distinguish the line which divides them. The Ohio water is filled with fine sand and loam; the Mississippi is discolored with clay besides, and the water looks like a tub of soapsuds after a hard day’s washing.

Whoever looks upon the map with a utilitarian eye sees at the confluence of these great rivers a favorable point for a great city. A few years since an English company took possession of or purchased this site, and, with a capital of nearly a million of pounds sterling, commenced operations. They lithographed plans of the city and views of the public buildings. There were domes, spires, and cupolas, hotels, warehouses, and lines of steamboats along both rivers. How fair, how magnificent it all looked on the India paper! You should see the result as I saw it in the misty miasma, by the pale moonlight. Cairo is a swamp, overflowed by every rise of either river. The large hotel, one of the two buildings erected, is slowly sinking beneath the surface. Piles will not stand up, and, however deep they are driven, sink still deeper. The present business of the place, consisting of selling supplies to steamboats, and transferring passengers from the down- to the up-river boats, is done on floating store-boats, made fast to the shore. Cairo has since been built into a considerable town by dyking out the rivers, and was an important naval and military point during the Civil War....

This is my thirteenth day of steamboating,—the usual time across the Atlantic,—and I have four days more at least. You may well suppose that a hundred passengers are put to their trumps for amusement. The “Wandering Jew” did very well as long as it lasted. Some keep on reading novels, having laid in a stock or exchanged with other passengers, but cards are the resource of the majority. The centre-tables, as soon as breakfast is over, are occupied with parties playing poker or loo, and are covered with bank-notes and silver. Many who do not play look on to see the frolics of fortune. Several of these players are professional gamesters, and quite cool, as men who hope to win by chance or skill ought to be. Others, in their flushing cheeks and trembling hands and voices, show how the passion is fastening upon them. These are driven by weariness and tempted by the smallness of the game to commence playing. The passion increases day by day, and so do the stakes, until, before reaching New Orleans, the verdant ones have lost all their money, and with it their self-respect and their confidence in the future. Depressed by shame, disheartened at being in a strange city without money, they are in a miserable condition, and ready to throw themselves away. They become dependent upon the blacklegs who have led them on, are instructed in their evil courses, made their tools and catspaws, and perhaps induced to enter upon courses of crime of a more dangerous character. All this comes of playing cards to kill time on the Mississippi.

While those who need the excitement of betting play at games of bluff and poker, some amuse themselves with whist, and old-fashioned fellows get into a corner and have a bout at old sledge; and now at eleven o’clock the great cabin of our boat presents a curious appearance. Playing around the tables, with noisy, joyous laughter, are half a dozen merry little boys and girls. These have all got well acquainted with each other, and seem to enjoy themselves thoroughly.

I can give you little idea of this portion of the Mississippi. The river is very low, and does not seem large enough to be the outlet of the thousand streams above; for the waters on which we float come not only from the melting snows of the Rocky Mountains, but there are mingled with them the bright springs of Western New York, a large part of Pennsylvania, part of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and a large portion of the Western States. Yet, with all the waters of this vast area, our boat can sometimes scarcely keep the channel. Last night, running at her full speed, she went crashing into a snag, with a concussion and scraping which woke us all up, and made the timid ones spring out of their berths. Our safety was in our going down-stream instead of up,—the difference of rubbing the back of a hedgehog the right and the wrong way. These snags are great trees which cave off and are washed down the current; the roots become embedded in the bottom; and the stem and branches, pointing down-stream, and half or wholly covered with water, form a terrible steamboat de frise, which tears an ascending steamboat to pieces, but generally allows those going with the current to pass over or through them with safety.

The river is full of islands, so that you often see but a small portion of its waters; it winds along in so many convolutions that you must steam a hundred miles often to make twenty in a straight line. Many of these bends may be avoided at high water by taking the cross cuts, called “running a chute” when the whole country for twenty miles on each side is submerged.

Usually, on one side or the other, there is a perpendicular bank of clay and loam some thirty feet high, and here and there are small plantations. The river gradually wears them off, carrying down whole acres in a season. From this bank the land descends back to the swamps which skirt nearly the whole length of the river. These in very low water are comparatively dry, but as the river rises they fill up, and the whole country is like a great lake, filled with a dense growth of timber. These curving banks, the rude and solitary huts of the wood-cutters, the vast bars of sand, covered gradually with cane-brake, and the range of impenetrable forest for hundreds of miles, comprise a vast gloomy landscape, which must be seen to be realized....

While the scene is fresh in my memory let me describe to you my last morning upon the Mississippi. But why do I speak thus of a scene which can never fade from my remembrance, but in all future years will glow the brightest picture which nature and civilization have daguerreotyped upon my heart?