Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals Part 5

"There are about seven hundred barrels of flour in town; it is admitted that fresh meat is getting scarce; the streets are almost impa.s.sable from the snow-drifts.

"K. and I have hit upon a plan for killing time. We are learning poetry--she takes twenty lines of Goldsmith's 'Traveller,' and I twenty lines of the 'Deserted Village.' It will take us twenty days to learn the whole, and we hope to be stopped in our course by the opening of the harbor. Considering that K. has a fiance from whom she cannot hear a word, she carries herself very amicably towards mankind. She is making herself a pair of shoes, which look very well; I have made myself a morning-dress since we were closed in.

"Last night I took my first lesson in whist-playing. I learned in one evening to know the king, queen, and jack apart, and to understand what my partner meant when she winked at me.

"The worst of this condition of things is that we shall bear the marks of it all our lives. We are now sixteen daily papers behind the rest of the world, and in those sixteen papers are items known to all the people in all the cities, which will never be known to us. How prices have fluctuated in that time we shall not know--what houses have burned down, what robberies have been committed. When the papers do come, each of us will rush for the latest dates; the news of two weeks ago is now history, and no one reads history, especially the history of one's own country.

"I bought a copy of 'Aurora Leigh' just before the freezing up, and I have been careful, as it is the only copy on the island, to circulate it freely. It must have been a pleasant visitor in the four or five households which it has entered. We have had Dr. Kane's book and now have the 'j.a.pan Expedition.'

"The intellectual suffering will, I think, be all. I have no fear of scarcity of provisions or fuel. There are old houses enough to burn.

Fresh meat is rather scarce because the English steamer required so much victualling. We have a barrel of pork and a barrel of flour in the house, and father has chickens enough to keep us a good while.

"There are said to be some families who are in a good deal of suffering, for whom the Howard Society is on the lookout. Mother gives very freely to Bridget, who has four children to support with only the labor of her hands.

"The Coffin School has been suspended one day on account of the heaviest storm, and the Unitarian church has had but one service. No great damage has been done by the gales. My observing-seat came thundering down the roof one evening, about ten o'clock, but all the world understood its cry of 'Stand from under,' and no one was hurt. Several windows were blown in at midnight, and houses shook so that vases fell from the mantelpieces.

"The last snow drifted so that the sleighing was difficult, and at present the storm is so smothering that few are out. A. has been out to school every day, and I have not failed to go out into the air once a day to take a short walk.

"January 24. We left the mercury one below zero when we went to bed last night, and it was at zero when we rose this morning. But it rises rapidly, and now, at eleven A.M., it is as high as fifteen. The weather is still and beautiful; the English steamer is still safe at her moorings.

"Our little club met last night, each with a sonnet. I did the best I could with a very bad subject. K. and E. rather carried the honors away, but Mr. J. M.'s was very taking. Our 'crambo' playing was rather dull, all of us having exhausted ourselves on the sonnets. We seem to have settled ourselves quietly into a tone of resignation in regard to the weather; we know that we cannot 'get out,' any more than Sterne's Starling, and we know that it is best not to fret.

"The subject which I have drawn for the next poem is 'Sunrise,' about which I know very little. K. and I continue to learn twenty lines of poetry a day, and I do not find it unpleasant, though the 'Deserted Village' is rather monotonous.

"We hear of no suffering in town for fuel or provisions, and I think we could stand a three months' siege without much inconvenience as far as the physicals are concerned.

"January 26. The ice continues, and the cold. The weather is beautiful, and with the thermometer at fourteen I swept with the telescope an hour and a half last night, comfortably. The English steamer will get off to-morrow. It is said that they burned their cabin doors last night to keep their water hot. Many people go out to see her; she lies off 'Sconset, about half a mile from sh.o.r.e. We have sent letters by her which, I hope, may relieve anxiety.

"K. bought a backgammon board to-day. Clifford [the little nephew] came in and spent the morning.

"January 29. We have had now two days of warm weather, but there is yet no hope of getting our steamboat off. Day before yesterday we went to 'Sconset to see the English steamer. She lay so near the sh.o.r.e that we could hear the orders given, and see the people on board. When we went down the bank the boats were just pus.h.i.+ng from the sh.o.r.e, with bags of coal. They could not go directly to the s.h.i.+p, but rowed some distance along sh.o.r.e to the north, and then falling into the ice drifted with it back to the s.h.i.+p. When they reached her a rope was thrown to them, and they made fast and the coal was raised. We watched them through a gla.s.s, and saw a woman leaning over the side of the s.h.i.+p. The steamer left at five o'clock that day.

"It was worth the trouble of a ride to 'Sconset to see the ma.s.ses of snow on the road. The road had been cleared for the coal-carts, and we drove through a narrow path, cut in deep snow-banks far above our heads, sometimes for the length of three or four sleighs. We could not, of course, turn out for other sleighs, and there was much waiting on this account. Then, too, the road was much gullied, and we rocked in the sleigh as we would on s.h.i.+pboard, with the bounding over hillocks of snow and ice.

"Now, all is changed: the roads are slushy, and the water stands in deep pools all over the streets. There is a dense fog, very little wind, and that from the east. The thermometer above thirty-six.

"[Mails arrived February 3, and our steamboat left February 5.]"

CHAPTER IV

1857

SOUTHERN TOUR

In 1857 Miss Mitch.e.l.l made a tour in the South, having under her charge the young daughter of a Western banker.

"March 2, 1857. I left Meadville this morning at six o'clock, in a stage-coach for Erie. I had, early in life, a love for staging, but it is fast dying out. Nine hours over a rough road are enough to root out the most pa.s.sionate love of that kind.

"Our stage was well filled, but in spite of the solid base we occasionally found ourselves b.u.mping up against the roof or falling forward upon our opposite neighbors.

"Stage-coaches are, I believe, always the arena for political debate.

To-day we were all on one side, all Buchanan men, and yet all anti-slavery. It seemed reasonable, as they said, that the South should cease to push the slave question in regard to Kansas, now that it has elected its President.

"When I took the stage out to Meadville on the 'mud-road,' it was filled with Fremont men, and they seemed to me more able men, though they were no younger and no more cultivated.

"March 5. I believe any one might travel from Maine to Georgia and be perfectly ignorant of the route, and yet be well taken care of, mainly from the good-nature in every one.

"I found from Nantucket to Chicago more attention than I desired. I had a short seat in one of the cars, through the night. I did not think it large enough for two, and so coiled myself up and went to sleep. There were men standing all around. Once one of them came along and said something about there being room for him on my seat. Another man said, 'She's asleep, don't disturb her.' I was too selfish to offer the half of a short seat, and too tired to reason about the man's being, possibly, more tired than I.

"I was invariably offered the seat near the window that I might lean against the side of the car, and one gentleman threw his shawl across my knees to keep me warm (I was suffering with heat at the time!). Another, seeing me going to Chicago alone, warned me to beware of the impositions of hack-drivers; telling me that I must pay two dollars if I did not make a bargain beforehand. I found it true, for I paid one dollar for going a few steps only.

"One peculiarity in travelling from East to West is, that you lose the old men. In the cars in New England you see white-headed men, and I kept one in the train up to New York, and one of grayish-tinted hair as far as Erie; but after Cleveland, no man was over forty years old.

"For hundreds of miles the prairie land stretches on the Illinois Central Railroad between Chicago and St. Louis. It may be pleasant in summer, but it is a dreary waste in winter. The s.p.a.ce is too broad and too uniform to have beauty. The girdle of trees would be pretty, doubtless, if seen near, but in the distance and in winter it is only a black border to a brown plain.

"The State of Illinois must be capitally adapted to railroads on account of this level, and but little danger can threaten a train from running off of the track, as it might run on the soil nearly as well as on the rails.

"Our engine was uncoupled, and had gone on for nearly half a mile without the cars before the conductor perceived it.

"The time from Chicago to St. Louis is called fifteen hours and a quarter; we made it twenty-three.

"If the prairie land is good farming-land, Illinois is destined to be a great State. If its people will think less of the dollar and more of the refinements of social life and the culture of the mind, it may become the great State of the Union yet.

"March 12. Planter's Hotel, St. Louis. We visited Mercantile Hall and the Library. The lecture-room is very s.p.a.cious and very pretty. No gallery hides the frescoed walls, and no painful economy has been made of the s.p.a.ce on the floor.

"13th. I begin to perceive the commerce of St. Louis. We went upon the levee this morning, and for miles the edge was bordered with the pipes of steamboats, standing like a picket-fence. Then we came to the wholesale streets, and saw the immense stores for dry-goods and crockery.

"To-day I have heard of a scientific a.s.sociation called the 'Scientific Academy of St. Louis,' which is about a year old, and which is about to publish a volume of transactions, containing an account of an artesian well, and of some inscriptions just sent home from Nineveh, which Mr.

Gust. Seyffarth has deciphered.

"Mr. Seyffarth must be a remarkable man; he has translated a great many inscriptions, and is said to surpa.s.s Champollion. He has published a work on Egyptian astronomy, but no copy is in this country.

"Dr. Pope, who called on me, and with whom I was much pleased, told me of all these things. Western men are so proud of their cities that they spare no pains to make a person from the Eastern States understand the resources, and hopes, and plans of their part of the land.

"Rev. Dr. Eliot I have not seen. He is about to establish a university here, for which he has already $100,000, and the academic part is already in a state of activity.

"Rev. Mr. Staples tells me that Dr. Eliot puts his hands into the pockets of his paris.h.i.+oners, who are rich, up to the elbows.

"Altogether, St. Louis is a growing place, and the West has a large hand and a strong grasp.

"Doctor Seyffarth is a man of more than sixty years, gray-haired, healthy-looking, and pleasant in manners. He has spent long years of labor in deciphering the inscriptions found upon ancient pillars, Egyptian and Arabic, dating five thousand years before Christ. I asked him if he found the observations continuous, and he said that he did not, but that they seem to be astrological pictures of the configuration of the planets, and to have been made at the birth of princes.

"He has just been reading the slabs sent from Nineveh by Mr. Marsh; their date is only about five hundred years B.C.

"Mr. Seyffarth's published works amount to seventy, and he was surprised to find a whole set of them in the Astor Library in New York.