A Son of the Middle Border Part 26

Gratefully sinking into a chair by the window, I fell into study of the people streaming by, and a chilling sense of helplessness fell upon me.

I realized my ignorance, my feebleness. As a minute bubble in this torrent of human life, with no friend in whom I could put trust, and with only a handful of silver between myself and the gray wolf, I lost confidence. The Boston trip seemed a foolish tempting of Providence and yet, scared as I was, I had no real intention of giving it up.

My brother's first words as he entered the door, were gayly derisive.

"Oh, see the whiskers!" he cried and his calm acceptance of my plan restored my own courage.

Together we planned our itinerary. We were to see Niagara Falls, of course, but to spend the fourth of July on Boston Common, was our true objective. "When our money is used up," I said, "we'll strike out into the country."

To all this my brother agreed. Neither of us had the slightest fear of hunger in the country. It was the city that gave us pause.

All the afternoon and evening we wandered about the streets (being very careful not to go too far from our hotel), counting the stories of the tall buildings, and absorbing the drama of the pavement. Returning now and again to our sanctuary in the hotel lobby we ruminated and rested our weary feet.

Everything interested us. The business section so sordid to others was grandly terrifying to us. The self-absorption of the men, the calm glances of the women humbled our simple souls. Nothing was commonplace, nothing was ugly to us.

We slept that night in a room at the extreme top of the hotel. It couldn't have been a first cla.s.s accommodation, for the frame of the bed fell in the moment we got into it, but we made no complaint--we would not have had the clerk know of our mishap for twice our bill. We merely spread the mattress on the floor and slept till morning.

Having secured our transportation we were eager to be off, but as our tickets were second cla.s.s, and good only on certain trains, we waited.

We did not even think of a sleeping car. We had never known anyone rich enough to occupy one. Grant and Edwin Booth probably did, and senators were ceremonially obliged to do so, but ordinary folks never looked forward to such luxury. Neither of us would have known what to do with a berth if it had been presented to us, and the thought of spending two dollars for a night's sleep made the cold chills run over us. We knew of no easier way to earn two dollars than to save them, therefore we rode in the smoker.

Late that night as we were sitting stoically in our places, a brakeman came along and having sized us up for the innocents we were, good-naturedly said, "Boys, if you'll get up I'll fix your seats so's you can lie down and catch a little sleep."

Silently, gratefully we watched him while he took up the cus.h.i.+ons and turned them lengthwise, thus making a couch. To be sure, it was a very short and very hard bed but with the health and strength of nineteen and twenty-two, we curled up and slept the remainder of the night like soldiers resting on their guns. Pain, we understood, was an unavoidable accompaniment of travel.

When morning dawned the train was running through Canada, and excitedly calling upon Franklin to rouse, I peered from the window, expecting to see a land entirely different from Wisconsin and Illinois. We were both somewhat disappointed to find nothing distinctive in either the land or its inhabitants. However, it was a foreign soil and we had seen it. So much of our exploration was accomplished.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon when we came in sight of the suspension bridge and Niagara Falls. I suppose it would be impossible for anyone now to feel the same profound interest in any natural phenomenon whatsoever. We believed that we were approaching the most stupendous natural wonder in all the world, and we could scarcely credit the marvel of our good fortune.

All our lives we had heard of this colossal cataract. Our school readers contained stately poems and philosophical dissertations concerning it.

Gough, the great orator, had pointed out the likeness of its resistless torrent to the habit of using spirituous liquors. The newspapers still printed descriptions of its splendor and no foreigner (so we understood) ever came to these sh.o.r.es without visiting and bowing humbly before the voice of its waters.--And to think that we, poor prairie boys, were soon to stand upon the ill.u.s.trious brink of that dread chasm and listen to its mighty song was wonderful, incredible, benumbing!

Alighting at the squalid little station on the American side, we went to the cheapest hotel our keen eyes could discover, and leaving our valises, we struck out immediately toward the towering white column of mist which could be seen rising like a ghostly banner behind the trees.

We were like those who first discover a continent.

As we crept nearer, the shuddering roar deepened, and our awe, our admiration, our patriotism deepened with it, and when at last we leaned against the rail and looked across the tossing spread of river swiftly sweeping to its fall, we held our breaths in wonder. It met our expectations.

Of course we went below and spent two of our hard-earned dollars in order to be taken behind the falls. We were smothered with spray and forced to cling frenziedly to the hands of our guide, but it was a part of our duty, and we did it. No one could rob us of the glory of having adventured so far.

That night we resumed our seats in the smoking car, and pushed on toward Boston in patiently-endured discomfort. Early the following morning we crossed the Hudson, and as the Berks.h.i.+re hills began to loom against the dawn, I asked the brakeman, with much emotion, "Have we reached the Ma.s.sachusetts line?" "We have," he said, and by pressing my nose against the gla.s.s and shading my face with my hands I was able to note the pa.s.sing landscape.

Little could be seen other than a tumbled, stormy sky with wooded heights dimly outlined against it, but I had all the emotions of a pilgrim entering upon some storied oriental vale. Ma.s.sachusetts to me meant Whittier and Hawthorne and Wendell Phillips and Daniel Webster. It was the cradle of our liberty, the home of literature, the province of art--and it contained Boston!

As the sun rose, both of us sat with eyes fixed upon the scenery, observant of every feature. It was all so strange, yet familiar! Barns with long, sloping roofs stood with their backs against the hillsides, precisely as in the ill.u.s.trations to Hawthorne's stories, and Whittier's poems. The farm-houses, old and weather-beaten and guarded by giant elms, looked as if they might have sheltered Emerson and Lowell. The little villages with narrow streets lined with queer brick-walled houses (their sides to the gutter) reminded us of the pictures in Ben Franklin's _Autobiography_.

Everything was old, delightfully old. Nothing was new.--Most of the people we saw were old. The men working in the fields were bent and gray, scarcely a child appeared, though elderly women abounded. (This was thirty-five years ago, before the Canadians and Italians had begun to swarm). Everywhere we detected signs of the historical, the traditional, the Yankee. The names of the stations rang in our ears like bells, _Lexington_, _Concord_, _Cambridge_, _Charlestown_, and--at last _Boston_!

What a strange, new world this ancient city was to us, as we issued from the old Hoosac Tunnel station! The intersection of every street was a bit of history. The houses standing sidewise to the gutter, the narrow, ledge-like pavements, the awkward two-wheeled drays and carts, the men selling lobsters on the corner, the newsboys with their "papahs," the faces of the women so thin and pale, the men, neat, dapper, small, many of them walking with finicky precision as though treading on eggs,--everything had a Yankee tang, a special quality, and then, the noise! We had thought Chicago noisy, and so it was, but here the clamor was high-keyed, deafening for the reason that the rain-washed streets were paved with cobble stones over which enormous carts b.u.mped and clattered with resounding riot.

Bewildered,--with eyes and ears alert, we toiled up Haymarket Square shoulder to shoulder, seeking the Common. Of course we carried our hand-bags--(the railway had no parcel rooms in those days, or if it had we didn't know it) clinging to them like ants to their eggs and so slowly explored Tremont Street. Cornhill entranced us with its amazing curve. We pa.s.sed the Granary Burying Ground and King's Chapel with awe, and so came to rest at last on the upper end of the Common! We had reached the goal of our long pilgrimage.

To tell the truth, we were a little disappointed in our first view of it. It was much smaller than we had imagined it to be and the pond was ONLY a pond, but the trees were all that father had declared them to be.

We had known broad prairies and splendid primitive woodlands--but these elms dated back to the days of Was.h.i.+ngton, and were to be reverenced along with the State House and Bunker Hill.

We spent considerable time there on that friendly bench, resting in the shadows of the elms, and while sitting there, we ate our lunch, and watched the traffic of Tremont Street, in perfect content till I remembered that the night was coming on, and that we had no place to sleep.

Approaching a policeman I inquired the way to a boarding house.

The officer who chanced to be a good-natured Irishman, with a courtesy almost oppressive, minutely pointed the way to a house on Ess.e.x Street.

Think of it--Ess.e.x Street! It sounded like Shakespeare and Merrie England!

Following his direction, we found ourselves in the door of a small house on a narrow alley at the left of the Common. The landlady, a kindly soul, took our measure at once and gave us a room just off her little parlor, and as we had not slept, normally, for three nights, we decided to go at once to bed. It was about five o'clock, one of the noisiest hours of a noisy street, but we fell almost instantly into the kind of slumber in which time and tumult do not count.

When I awoke, startled and bewildered, the sounds of screaming children, roaring, jarring drays, and the clatter of falling iron filled the room.

At first I imagined this to be the business of the morning, but as I looked out of the window I perceived that it was sunset! "Wake up!" I called to Franklin. "_It's the next day!_" "We've slept twenty-four hours!--What will the landlady think of us?"

Frank did not reply. He was still very sleepy, but he dressed, and with valise in hand dazedly followed me into the sitting room. The woman of the house was serving supper to her little family. To her I said, "You've been very kind to let us sleep all this time. We were very tired."

"All this time?" she exclaimed.

"Isn't it the next day?" I asked.

Then she laughed, and her husband laughed, doubling himself into a knot of merriment. "Oh, but that's rich!" said he. "You've been asleep exactly an hour and a quarter," he added. "How long did you _think_ you'd slept--two days?"

Sheepishly confessing that I thought we had, I turned back to bed, and claimed ten hours more of delicious rest.

All "the next day" we spent in seeing Bunker Hill, Faneuil Hall, the old North Church, King's Chapel, Longfellow's home, the Was.h.i.+ngton Elm, and the Navy Yard.--It was all glorious but a panic seized us as we found our money slipping away from us, and late in the afternoon we purchased tickets for Concord, and fled the roaring and turbulent capital.

We had seen the best of it anyway. We had tasted the ocean and found it really salt, and listened to "the sailors with bearded lips" on the wharves where the s.h.i.+ps rocked idly on the tide,--The tide! Yes, that most inexplicable wonder of all we had proved. We had watched it come in at the Charles River Bridge, mysterious as the winds. We knew it was so.

Why Concord, do you ask? Well, because Hawthorne had lived there, and because the region was redolent of Emerson and Th.o.r.eau, and I am glad to record that upon reaching it of a perfect summer evening, we found the lovely old village all that it had been pictured by the poets. The wide and beautiful meadows, the stone walls, the slow stream, the bridge and the statue of the "Minute Man" guarding the famous battlefield, the gray old Manse where Hawthorne lived, the cemetery of Sleepy Hollow, the grave of Emerson--all these historic and charming places enriched and inspired us. This land, so mellowed, so harmonious, so significant, seemed hardly real. It was a vision.

We rounded out our day by getting lodgings in the quaint old Wright's tavern which stood (and still stands) at the forks of the road, a building whose date painted on its chimney showed that it was nearly two hundred years old! I have since walked Carnarvan's famous walls, and sat in the circus at Nismes--but I have never had a deeper thrill of historic emotion than when I studied the beamed ceiling of that little dining room. Our pure joy in its age amused our landlord greatly.

Being down to our last dollar, we struck out into the country next morning, for the purpose of finding work upon a farm but met with very little encouragement. Most of the fields were harvested and those that were not were well supplied with "hands." Once we entered a beautiful country place where the proprietor himself (a man of leisure, a type we had never before seen) interrogated us with quizzical humor, and at last sent us to his foreman with honest desire to make use of us. But the foreman had nothing to give, and so we went on.

All day we loitered along beautiful wood roads, pa.s.sing wonderful old homesteads gray and mossy, sheltered by trees that were almost human in the clasp of their protecting arms. We paused beside bright streams, and drank at mossy wells operated by rude and ancient sweeps, contrivances which we had seen only in pictures. It was all beautiful, but we got no work. The next day, having spent our last cent in railway tickets, we rode to Ayer Junction, where we left our trunks in care of the baggage man and resumed our tramping.

CHAPTER XXIII

Coasting Down Mt. Was.h.i.+ngton

In spite of all our anxiety, we enjoyed this search for work. The farmers were all so comically inquisitive. A few of them took us for what we were, students out on a vacation. Others though kind enough, seemed lacking in hospitality, from the western point of view, and some were openly suspicious--but the roads, the roads! In the west thoroughfares ran on section lines and were defined by wire fences. Here they curved like Indian trails following bright streams, and the stone walls which bordered them were festooned with vines as in a garden.

That night we lodged in the home of an old farmer, an octogenarian who had never in all his life been twenty miles from his farm. He had never seen Boston, or Portland, but he had been twice to Nashua, returning, however, in time for supper. He, as well as his wife (dear simple soul), looked upon us as next door to educated Indians and entertained us in a flutter of excited hospitality.

We told them of Dakota, of the prairies, describing the wonderful farm machinery, and boasting of the marvellous crops our father had raised in Iowa, and the old people listened in delighted amaze.