Chapter VIII: Part 8

“‘At Baltimore,’ replied Mr. Irving. ‘Several of my company have brought their home-made Christmas puddings over with them, and are to carry them about, with the rest of the luggage, until the day arrives. I have determined to try the American Christmas puddings, which, I am told, are very good indeed,—like most things American.’

“‘Oh, our people manufacture them by thousands! After all, a Christmas pudding is only a mince-pie boiled.’

“Just so,’ said Mr. Irving, laughing in his silent, interior, Leatherstocking manner. ‘I am thinking,’ he exclaimed, ‘of the Christmas dinner I gave last year, in the room of the old Beefsteak Club, which, you know, is now part of the Lyceum Theatre. We had talked the matter over,—a few friends and myself,—and decided that we were tired of professional cooks and conventional bills of fare, and that the best stimulus for our jaded palates was a return to plain, homely dishes.

“‘You can fancy Stoker saying that. He said it over and over for at least a month, and kept humming, “There’s no place—or no dinner—like home,” in the most disquieting way, whenever the matter was mentioned. He also undertook to arrange the whole affair.

“‘Well, it was arranged. There were to be no professional caterers, no professional waiters, no luxuries of any kind,—except the wines, which I took under my own care, being cast for the part of the butler. Stoker was to buy the material. The property-man’s wife was to roast the beef and the turkey. The mistress of the wardrobe undertook to boil the pudding. An usher, born with a genius for cookery, who was discovered by Stoker, had charge of the soup, fish, and vegetables. We were to wait upon ourselves,—a genuine family party. A suggestion to order ices from Gunter’s, in case the pudding was a failure, was voted down indignantly.

“‘As Christmas approached I became quite interested in this home dinner,—hungry for it days in advance, as one may say. I began by inviting one friend who had a reputation as an epicure; then another asked to be allowed to share our homely feast. Presently our family party grew to thirty. I began to have forebodings. You see, a small family can wait upon themselves, but not a family of thirty.

“‘However, Stoker appeared cheerily satisfied and mysteriously complacent, and seemed to think that our motto should be “The more the merrier!” I imagined that he had secretly tested some of the home cooking beforehand, and rather envied him his position as taster.

“‘The guests were met; the table set. I had made sure that the wines were all right. As I looked along at the happy, friendly faces I felt that a home dinner was the most pleasant, after all. The soup tureen was before me, and I lifted the cover with the anxious pride of a Wellington firing the first gun at Waterloo.

“‘The chance simile of a battle holds good; for the soup was awfully smoky. Somebody said that it tasted like a chimney on fire. The fish was worse. The roast beef was uneatable. Persistent as I naturally am, I gave up the attempt to carve the turkey. The pudding was as hard as a stone. What little appetite remained to us was lost while carving the meats and passing the plates around. I had felt like Wellington before Waterloo; but, when the dinner was over, I could appreciate the despair of the defeated Napoleon.

“‘Had we been only a family party the fiasco would not have been so fatal; but, as I told you, I had invited epicures; I had dragged my friends from their comfortable homes on Christmas Day to partake of this terrible repast. Some of them have never quite forgiven me. Some have forgiven me, because I had a chance to take them aside and put all the blame upon Stoker. But nobody who was present can ever have forgotten it.

“‘Like Napoleon, I retreated to Fontainebleau,—I fell back upon the wines. One of the guests won my heart by loudly eulogizing the cheese and the crackers. They were not home-made. They had not been cooked in the theatre!

“‘Here comes Stoker,’ continued Mr. Irving, relapsing into his curious solemnity of manner; ‘let us ask him about it.

“‘I say, Stoker, do you remember the home dinner you gave us at the Lyceum last Christmas?’

“Mr. Stoker stopped on his way across the stage, and stood like a statue of amazement, of indignation, of outraged virtue. ‘The dinner _I_ gave you?’ he at last exclaimed. Then his loyalty to his chief triumphed, and he added, ‘Well, you may call it my dinner, if you like; but I have the original copy of the bill of fare in your own handwriting.’

“‘Ah!’ resumed Mr. Irving, quite placidly, as his acting manager dashed away, ‘I thought Stoker would remember that dinner!’

“‘This Christmas you will dine upon roast canvas-backs, instead of roast beef, and stewed terrapin, instead of smoked soup,’ I observed.

“‘Yes,’ replied the English actor; ‘I am told that Baltimore is the best place for those delicacies. But they will not seem strange to me; I have eaten canvas-backs at Christmas before.’

“‘In England?’

“‘Certainly. My first American manager—Papa Bateman you used to call him—had many good friends in this country, who kept him liberally supplied with almost all your American luxuries. Under his tuition I learned to like the oysters, the terrapin, and canvas-backs, upon which my generous hosts are feasting me now, long before I ever thought of coming to America.

“‘But perhaps the most remarkable Christmas dinner at which I have ever been present,’ continued Mr. Irving, after reflecting for a few moments, ‘was the one at which we dined upon under-clothing.’

“‘Do you mean upon your under-clothing or in your under-clothing?’ queried the astonished ‘Spirit,’ conjuring up visions of Christmas dinners on uninhabited islands, at which shipwrecked mariners had been known to devour their apparel, and of the tropical Christmas dinners in India and Australia, at which scanty costumes are appropriate to the climate.

“‘Both!’ replied Mr. Irving. ‘It is not a story of wonderful adventure; but I’ll tell it to you, if you have five minutes more to spare. Do you remember Joe Robins,—a nice, genial fellow who played small parts in provinces? Ah, no; that was before your time.

“‘Joe Robins was once in the gentleman’s furnishing business in London city. I think that he had a wholesale trade, and was doing well. However, he belonged to one of the semi-Bohemian clubs; associated a great deal with actors and journalists, and, when an amateur performance was organized for some charitable object, Joe was cast for the clown in a burlesque called “Guy Fawkes.”

“‘Perhaps he played the part capitally; perhaps his friends were making game of him when they loaded him with praises; perhaps the papers for which his Bohemian associates wrote went rather too far when they asserted that he was the artistic descendant and successor of Grimaldi. At any rate, Joe believed all that was said to him and written about him, and when some wit discovered that Grimaldi’s name was also Joe, the fate of Joe Robins was sealed. He determined to go upon the stage professionally and become a great actor.

“‘Fortunately Joe was able to dispose of his stock and good-will for a few hundred pounds, which he invested so as to give him an income sufficient to prevent the wolf from getting inside his door, in case he did not eclipse Garrick, Kean, and Kemble. He also packed up for himself a liberal supply of his wares, and started in the profession with enough shirts, collars, handkerchiefs, stockings, and under-clothing to equip him for several years.

“‘The amateur success of poor Joe was never repeated on the regular stage. He did not make an absolute failure; no manager would entrust him with parts big enough for him to fail in. But he drifted down to general utility, and then out of London, and when I met him he was engaged in a very small way, on a very small salary, at a Manchester theatre.

“‘His income eked out his salary; but Joe was a generous, great-hearted fellow, who liked everybody, and whom everybody liked, and when he had money he was always glad to spend it upon a friend or give it away to somebody more needy. So, piece by piece, as necessity demanded, his princely supply of haberdashery had diminished, and now only a few shirts and under-clothes remained to him.

“‘Christmas came in very bitter weather. Joe had a part in the Christmas pantomime. He dressed with other poor actors, and he saw how thinly some of them were clad when they stripped before him to put on their stage costumes. For one poor fellow in especial his heart ached. In the depth of a very cold winter he was shivering in a suit of very light summer under-clothing, and whenever Joe looked at him the warm flannel under-garments snugly packed away in an extra trunk weighed heavily upon his mind.

“‘Joe thought the matter over, and determined to give the actors who dressed with him a Christmas dinner. It was literally a dinner upon under-clothing; for the most of the shirts and drawers which Joe had cherished so long went to the pawnbroker’s, or the slop-shop, to provide the money for the meal.

“‘The guests assembled promptly, for nobody else is ever so hungry as a hungry actor. The dinner was to be served at Joe’s lodgings, and, before it was placed on the table, Joe beckoned his friend with the gauze under-clothes into a bedroom, and, pointing to a chair, silently withdrew.

“‘On that chair hung a suit of under-wear which had been Joe’s pride. It was of a comfortable scarlet color; it was thick, warm, and heavy; it fitted the poor actor as if it had been manufactured especially to his measure. He put it on, and, as the flaming flannels encased his limbs, he felt his heart glowing within him with gratitude to dear Joe Robins.

“‘That actor never knew—or, if he knew, he never could remember—what he had for dinner on that Christmas afternoon. He revelled in the luxury of warm garments. The roast beef was nothing to him in comparison with the comfort of his undervest; he appreciated the drawers more than the plum-pudding. Proud, happy, warm, and comfortable, he felt little inclination to eat, but sat quietly, and thanked Providence and Joe Robins with all his heart.’

“‘You seem to enter into that poor actor’s feelings very sympathetically,’ I observed, as Mr. Irving paused.

“‘I have good reason to do so,’ replied Mr. Irving, with his gentle, sunshiny smile; ‘for I was that poor actor!’”

XIII.

A WILD RAILWAY JOURNEY.

A Great American Railway Station—Platforms and Waiting-Rooms—A Queer Night—“Snow is as Bad as Fog”—A Farmer who Suggests Mathias in “The Bells”—A Romance of the Hudson—Looking for the “Maryland” and Finding “The Danites”—Fighting a Snow-storm—“A Ministering Angel”—The Publicity of Private Cars—Mysterious Proceedings—Strange Lights—Snowed up—Digging out the Railway Points—A Good Samaritan Locomotive—Trains Ahead of Us, Trains Behind Us—Railway Lights and Bells—“What’s Going On?”

I.

“THE Irving train is expected to arrive at Jersey City from Boston at about seven o’clock,” said a telegraphic dispatch which I received in New York on Sunday. I had left the great New England city two days before Irving’s special train, with the understanding that I should join him at Jersey City, _en route_ for Baltimore.

At half-past six I was on the great steam ferry-boat that plies from the bottom of Desbrosses street, New York, to the other side of the river. A wintry wind was blowing up from the sea. I preferred the open air to the artificial heat of the cabin. In ten minutes I was landed at the station of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

“Inquire for the steamer ‘Maryland,’” continued that dispatch which I have just quoted. “She conveys the train down the Harlem river to connect on the Pennsylvania Road.”

The general waiting-room of the station, or depot, as our American cousins call it, is a characteristic one. Seeing that I was allowed plenty of time to observe it, I propose to describe it. A large square hall, with a high-pitched roof, it has more of a Continental than an English or American appearance. As you enter you find a number of people waiting for the trains. They include a few colored people and Chinamen. The centre of the room is filled with benches, like the stalls of a London theatre. You wonder why two marble tombs have been erected here. They turn out to be heat-distributers. The hot air pours out from their grated sides. In case you should be in danger of suffocation a drinking fountain is in handy proximity to the blasts of heated air. The right-hand side of the hall is filled with booking-offices, and a clock bell tolls, indicating the times at which the various trains start. On the left is a _café_, and an entrance from Jersey City. Opposite to you as you enter from the ferry are two pairs of doors leading to the trains, and the space between the portals is filled in with a handsome book-stall. The door-ways here are jealously guarded by officials who announce the departure of trains and examine your tickets. One of these guards sits near a desk where a little library of city and State directories is placed for the use of passengers. Each volume is chained to the wall. Near the _café_ is a post-office box, and hanging hard by are the weather bulletins of the day. A ladies’ waiting-room occupies a portion of the hall on the booking-office side. The place is lighted with electric lamps, which occasionally fiz and splutter, and once in a while go out altogether. Nobody pays any attention to this. Everybody is used to the eccentricities of the new and beautiful light.

Obtaining permission to pass the ticket portals, I reach the platform, where I am to find the station-master. The outlook here reminds me of the high-level station of the Crystal Palace. A dim gas-light exhibits the outlines of a series of long cars, fenced in with gates, that are every now and then thrown open to receive batches of passengers from the waiting-room.

The Irving train has been delayed. She is reported “to arrive at the Harlem river at half-past eight.” In that case she may be here at a quarter to ten.

I return to the spluttering electric lamps and to the continually coming and going multitudes of passengers. “No Smoking” is one of the notices on the walls. Two men have lighted their cigars right under it. They remind one of the duellists in “Marion de Lorme,” who fight beneath the cardinal’s proclamation. The _café_ is bright and inviting, and its chocolate is as comforting as the literature of the book-stall. The novels of Howells and James and Braddon and Black are here, and the Christmas numbers of the “Illustrated London News” and the “Graphic”; so likewise are the Christmas and New Year’s cards of Marcus Ward, De la Rue, and Lowell. I purchase the latest novelty in books, “John Bull and His Island,” and try to read. I look up now and then to see the crowd file off through the ticket-doors to go to Bethlehem, Catasauqua, Lansdown, New Market, Bloomsbury, Waverly, Linden, Philadelphia, West Point, Catskill, Albans, New Scotland, Port Jackson, Schenectady, and other towns and cities, the names of which stir my thoughts into a strange jumble of reflections, biblical, topographical, and otherwise. Bethlehem and Bloomsbury! Were ever cues for fancy wider apart? “Over here,” I read in “John Bull and His Island,” the writer referring to London, “you are not locked up in a waiting-room until your train comes in. You roam where you like about the station, and your friends may see you off and give you a hand-shake as the train leaves the platform. The functionary is scarcely known. There are more of them at the station of _Fouilly les Epinards_ than in the most important station in London. You see placards everywhere: ‘Beware of Pick-pockets’; ‘Ascertain that your change is right before leaving the booking-desk.’ The Englishman does not like being taken in hand like a baby.” Curiously the American is treated on the railroads very much as in France. As to placard-notices you see cautions against pick-pockets, and the London warning as to change. Some of the other notifications in American stations are curious: “No Loafing allowed in this Depot”; “Don’t Spit on the Floor.” Douglas Jerrold’s joke about the two angry foreigners who exclaimed, “I spit upon you!” has more point here than in England; for no apartment is sacred enough in this free country to keep out the spittoon, which, in some places, is designed in such a way as to indicate a strong intention to make it ornamental as well as useful.

I seek the station-master again.

“Not sooner than a quarter to eleven,” he says.

“Does the weather obstruct the train?”

“Yes, it’s a queer night; snow falling very thickly; makes the river journey slower than usual; snow is as bad as fog.”

The entire train of eight enormous cars, containing the Lyceum company and their baggage, is transported by boat right down the Harlem river, a distance of several miles, the raft and train being attached to a tug-boat. The train is run upon the floating track at Harlem, and connected with the main line again at Jersey City.

“I was to ask for the steamer ‘Maryland.’”

“Yes, her quay is outside the depot. I will let you know when she is reported. You will hear her whistle.”

Trying to return to the waiting-room I find I am locked in. Presently a good-natured official lets me out. In the meantime the _café_ has closed, the book-stall has fastened its windows and put out its lights. The waiters on trains have thinned in numbers. Two poor Chinamen who have been here are talking pigeon English to a porter.

“You missed it at seven,” he says; “no more train till twelve.”

“Twelfy!” says John, calmly counting his fingers; “no morey go tilly twelf.”

“That’s so,” says the porter.

The two celestials sit down quietly to wait; the ferry-boats give out their hoarse signals, and presently a number of other people come in, covered with snow, a bitter wind accompanying them, as the doors open and shut. They stamp their feet and shake the snow from off their garments, and you hear the jingle of sleigh-bells without. A farmer whose dress suggests Mathias, in “The Bells,” comes in. He carries a bundle. There is a slip of green laurel in his button-hole. I avail myself of the supposed privilege of the country, and talk to him.

“Yes,” he says. “Christmas presents; I guess that’s what I’ve been to New York for. I live at Katskill. No, not much in the way of farming. My father had land in Yorkshire. Guess I am an Englishman, as one may say, though born on the Hudson. Did I ever hear of Rip Van Winkle at Katskill? I guess so. Live there now? No, sir; guess it’s a story, aint it? But there was a sort of a hermit feller lived on the Hudson till a year or two ago. He was English. A scholar, they said, and learned. His grandchild, a girl, lived with him. Did nothing but read. Built the hut hisself. Never seen except when he and the girl went to buy stores. It was in the papers, when he died, a year or two back. Broke his heart, ‘cause his girl skipped.”

“‘Skipped!’ I repeated.

“You are fresh, sir, green; as you say in England, run away,—that’s skipping. I bought one of his books when his things were sold, because I have a grandchild, and know what it is. Good-night! A merry Christmas to you!”

No other hint of Christmas in the depot, among the people, or on the walls, except the cards and illustrated English papers inside the book-stall windows. I turn to “John Bull and His Island,” and wonder if any English writer will respond with “Jean Crapeaud and His City.” No country is more open to satire than France; no people accept it with so little patience. There are some wholesome truths in Max O’Rell’s brochure. It is good to see ourselves as others see us.

A quarter to eleven. It is surely time to go forth in search of the “Maryland.”

“Better have a guide,” says a courteous official; “you can’t find it without; and, by thunder, how it snows! See ‘em?”

He points to several new-comers.

“Only a few feet from the ferry,—and they’re like walking snow-drifts. See ‘em!”

The guide, as sturdy as a Derbyshire ploughboy, comes along with his lantern.

“There are three ladies,” I tell him, “in the private waiting-room, who are to come with us.”

II.

I AM taking my wife and two girls to Baltimore for the Christmas week. Last year we had our Christmas dinner with Irving. This year he has said, “Let us all sup together. The theatres are open on Christmas day; we must, therefore, have our pudding for supper after we have seen the last of poor old Louis.”

“Awkward night for ladies getting to the ‘Maryland,’” says the guide.

They are well provided with cloaks and furs and snow-boots, or rubbers (an absolute necessity and a great comfort in America), and we all push along after the guide, across the departure platform, into the snowy night,—the flakes fall in blinding clouds; over railway tracks which men are clearing,—the white carpet soft and yielding; between freight-cars, through open sheds,—the girls enjoying it all, as only young people can enjoy a snow-storm.

The flickering light of our guide’s lantern is at length eclipsed by the radiance of a well-illuminated cabin.

“This is the office; you can wait here; they’ll tell you when the ‘Maryland’s’ reported.”

A snug room, with a great stove in the centre. The men who are sitting around it move to make way for us. They do not disguise their surprise at the arrivals: an English family (one of them very young, with her hair blowing about her face), with snow enough falling from their cloaks to supply material for a snow-balling match. We are evidently regarded as novel visitors. Track laborers and others follow us in. They carry lamps, and their general appearance recalls the mining scene in “The Danites,” at the London Olympic. Our entrance seems as much of a surprise to the others as the arrival of “the school-marm” was to the men in the Californian bar-room.

Presently a smart official (not unlike a guard of the Midland Railway in England as to his uniform) enters. There is a swing in his gait and a lamp in his hand, as a smart writer might put it.

“That gentleman will tell you all about the train,” says one of the Danites, speaking in the shadow of the stove.

“The ‘Maryland,’” I say, addressing the officer; “I want to get on board her special train from Boston.”

“Guess I can’t help that! I want to get some cars off her, that’s all I know,” is the response, the speaker eying me loftily, and then pushing his way towards a lookout window on the other side of the cabin.

“Oh, thank you very much!” I say. “You are really too good. Is there any other gentleman here who is anxious to tell me where I shall find the ‘Maryland’s’ quay, and explain how I am to get on board the special express, which takes a day to do a five hours’ journey?”

“I’ll show you,” says my surly friend, turning round upon me and looking me all over. “I am the guard.”

“Thank you.”

“Here she comes!” he exclaims.

I forgive him, at once, his brusqueness. He, too, has, of course, been waiting six hours for her.

A hoarse whistle is heard on the river. The guard opens the cabin-door. In rushes the snow and the wind. The guard’s lantern casts a gleam of light on the white way.

“Be careful here,” he says, assisting my girls over a rough plank road.

It is an open quay over which we are pushing along. The guard, now full of kind attention, holds up his lamp for us, and indicates the best paths, the snow filling our eyes and wetting our faces. Now we mount a gangway. Then we struggle down a plank. There are bustle and noise ahead of us, and the plash “of many waters.”

“Hatton!” shouts the familiar voice of Bram Stoker, through the darkness.

“Here we are!” is the prompt reply.

A stalwart figure pushes through the snow, and the next moment my wife is under the protection of a new guide. We feel our way along mazy passages,—now upwards, now downwards,—that might be mysterious corridors leading to “dungeons beneath the castle moat,” the darkness made visible by primitive lamps. Presently we are on the floating raft, and thence we mount the steps of a railway car.

What a change of scene it is!—from Arctic cold to summer heat; from snow and rough ways to a dainty parlor, with velvet-pile carpets, easy-chairs, and duplex lamps; and from the Danites to Irving, Abbey, Loveday, and Miss Terry. They welcome us cheerily and with Christmas greetings.

“Oh, don’t mind the snow; shake it off,—it will not hurt us! Come, let me help you. Of course, you all wear snow-boots,—Arctic rubbers, eh? That’s right; off with them first!” And before we have done shaking hands she is disrobing the girls, and helping them off with their wraps and shoes,—this heroine of the romantic and classic drama, this favorite of English play-goers, who is now conquering the New World as surely as she has conquered the Old.

Every one in the theatrical profession knows how kindly and natural and human, as a rule, are, and have ever been, the great women of the English stage. But the outside public has sometimes strange opinions concerning the people of this other side of the curtain, this world of art. Some of them would be surprised if they could see Ellen Terry attending upon my three fellow-travellers; giving them refreshment, and, later on, helping to put them to bed. They would be interested, also, to have seen her dispensing tea to the members of the company, or sitting chatting in their midst about the journey and its incidents. Just as womanly and tender as is her Desdemona, her Portia, her Ophelia; so is she off the stage,—full of sympathy, touched to the quick by a tale of sorrow, excited to the utmost by a heroic story. Hers is the true artistic temperament. She treads the path of the highest comedy as easily and with the same natural grace, as she manifests in helping these girls of mine, from New York, to remove their snowy clothes, and as naturally as she sails through these very practical American cars to make tea for her brother and sister players, who love her, and are proud of her art.

III.

HAVING spent an hour in vainly trying to couple Irving’s private car with another in the centre of the train, the guard decides to attach it to the last one. In this position, which eventually proved an interesting one, we trundle along through Jersey City, past rows of shops and stores, on a level with the sidewalks, the snow falling all the time. Here and there electric arcs are shedding weird illuminations upon the unfamiliar scenes. By the lights in many of the houses we can see that the window-panes are coated with a thick frost. Now and then we stop without any apparent warning, certainly without any explanation. During one of these intervals we take supper, those of us who have not retired to seek such repose as may be found in a railroad sleeping-car,—an institution which some American travellers prefer to a regular bedroom. Irving, Abbey, Stoker, Loveday, and myself, we sit down to a very excellent supper,—oyster-pie, cold beef, jelly, eggs, coffee, cigars.

“It is too late to tell you of our adventures prior to your coming upon the train,” says Irving. “We will have a long chat to-morrow. Good-night; I am going to try and get a little rest.”

He lies down upon a couch adjacent to the apartment in which we have supped. I draw a curtain over him, that shuts off his bunk from the room and the general corridor of the car. You hear a good deal of talk in America about “private cars.” Without disparaging the ingenuity and comfort of the private-car system of American railroad travelling let me say, once for all, that the term private applied to it in any sense is a misnomer. There is no privacy about it,—nothing like as much as you may have in an English carriage, to the sole occupancy of which you have bought the right for a railway journey. On an American train there is a conductor to each car. Then there are one or more guards to the train. Add to these officials, baggage-men, who are entitled to come on at various stations, and news-boys, who also appear to have special claims on the railway company; and you count up quite a number of extra passengers who may appear in your private room at any moment.

It is true that the guard of your car may exclude some of these persons; but, as a rule, he does not. If he should be so inhospitable to his fellow-man there are still left the conductors and guards, who have business all over the train at all hours. There is a passage-way, as you know, right through the train. On a special car there is a room at each end; one is a smoking-room. This apartment, with or without your permission, is occupied by the officials of the train; and on a cold night not even the most exacting traveller would think of objecting to the arrangement. But it is easy to see that this does away with all ideas of privacy.

At 1.30 the train comes to a long stand-still. I am reading. The colored waiter, a negro with a face given over to the permanent expression of wonder, has taken a seat near me, in the opposite corner of the car. The end of the car opens right upon the line; the door is half glass, so that we can see out into the night and away down the track. To keep the outlook clear I occasionally rub the frosty rime from the glass, and now and then open the door and clear it from snow. The negro contemplates me through his wide, staring eyes. He takes a similar interest in the guards and other officers of the train, who come through the cars at intervals, swinging, as they walk, lamps of singularly artistic patterns when compared with the English railway lanterns. These guardians of the train pass out of the door of the room upon the line, and rarely reappear except when they come back again right through the train, passing most of the would-be sleepers. Irving does not, however, appear to be disturbed.

It is 2.35 when the train once more begins to move. For nearly an hour both the colored servant and I have, off and on, been watching a number of curious demonstrations of lights away down the line behind us. First a white light would appear, then a red one, then a green light would be flashed wildly up and down. The negro guesses we must be snowed up. But he doesn’t know much of this line, he says, in a deprecatory tone; only been on it once before; doesn’t take much stock in it. Then he shakes his woolly head mysteriously; and what an air of mystery and amazement is possible on some dark faces of this African race! We move ahead for five minutes, and then we stop again. There is a clock on the inlaid panel of the car over the negro’s head. The time is steadily recorded on the dial. It is 2.45 when we advance once more. A hoarse whistle, like a foghorn at sea, breaks upon the solemnity of the night; then we pass a signal-box, and a patch of light falls upon our window. This is evidently the signal for another pause. “2.50” says the clock. The line behind us is now alive with lanterns. White lights are moving about with singular eccentricity. With my face close against the glass door-way I count six different lights. I also see dark forms moving about. All the lights are suddenly stationary. One comes on towards the train. Our guard frantically waves his light. Presently we stop with a jerk. The lights we have left in the distance now gyrate with the same inconsequential motion as the witch-fires of a fairy tale, or the fiends’ lights in the opera of _Robert le Diable_. Then they remain still again. I open the door. There is a foot of snow on the platform, and the feathery flakes are steadily falling. A solitary light comes towards us. The bearer of it gets upon the platform,—a solitary sentinel. The negro looks up at me, and asks me in a gentle kind of way, if I ever use sticking-plaster. “Yes,” I say, “sometimes.” A strange question. My reply appears to be a relief to him. Do I ever use sticking-plaster! There is a long pause outside and inside the car, as if some mysterious conference were going on. “Was you ever on the cars when they was robbed?” the negro asks. “No,” I say; “I was not.”—“Been on when there was shooting?” he asks. “No.”—“Has you ever heard of Jesse James and the book that was written about him?”—“Yes,” I answer, “but never saw the book.”—“Dark night, eh?”—“Yes, pretty dark.”—“They would stop de train, and get a shooting right away, would dem James boys, I tell you! Perfeck terror dey was. No car was safe. Ise believe dey was not killed at all, and is only waiting for nex’ chance.”—“You are not frightened?” I say. “Well, not zactly; but don’t know who dis man is standing dere on de platform, and nebber was on any train of cars dat stopped so much and in such lonely places; and don’t like to be snowed up eider. I spoke to de brakesman about an hour ago; but he don’t say much.” Thereupon he flattens his broad nose against the window, and I take up “John Bull and His Island” at the description of the Christmas pudding, which sets me thinking of all the gloomy things that may and do happen between one Christmas Day and another; and how once in most lifetimes some overwhelming calamity occurs that makes you feel Fate has done its worst, and cannot hurt you more. This thought is not _apropos_ of the present situation; for, of course, there is nothing to fear in the direction suggested by the negro, who has worked himself up into a condition of real alarm. At the same time the dangers of snow-drifts are not always confined to mere delays. The newspapers, on the day following our protracted journey for example, chronicled the blowing up of a locomotive, and the death of driver and stoker, through running into a snow-drift. The accident occurred not far from the scene of one of our longest stoppages.

2.55. The man on the platform cries “Go ahead!” and as the car moves he steps inside, literally covered with snow. He makes no apology, but shivers and shakes his coat.

“What is wrong?” I ask.

“Train stuck in the snow ahead of us. It is an awful night.”

“What were those lights in our rear?—one in particular.”

“That was me. I have been out there an hour and a half.”

“You are very cold?”

“Frightful.”

“Have a little brandy?”

“Think I’ll break up if I don’t.”

I gave him some brandy. From the other end of the car comes the guard.

“Think we’ll get round her all right now?” he asks.

“Oh, yes,” says the conductor shaking his snowy clothes.

The guard goes out. He, too, carries a weight of snow on his coat.

Says the officer (whom I have just saved from “breaking up”), “I am the conductor; but if anything went wrong they’d blame me, not him; am sent on to this train,—a special job.”

“What were you doing out there so long?”

“Digging the points out of the snow, to push these cars on to another track, and get round ahead of the train that’s broke down.”

“And have you done it?”

“Guess so.”

It is three o’clock as he steps once more upon the platform. At 3.5 the train stops suddenly. I look out into the black and white night. It still snows heavily. At 3.10 the conductor returns.

“When do you think we will get to Baltimore?”

“At about ten.”

“What is the difficulty?”

“Trains in front of us, trains behind us, too. You would be surprised at the depth of the snow. A gang of men clearing the track ahead.”

At 3.10 he goes out again into the wild night; this time the snow on the platform glows red under the light of his lamp, which exhibits the danger signal. A distant whistle is heard. The conductor is pushing the snow off the platform with his feet. He opens the door to tell me it is drifting in places to “any height.” At 3.15 he says we have taken _three_ hours to go _twenty_ miles. Looking back on the track the rails show a black, deep line in the snow. Not a house or a sign of life anywhere around us. “We are a heavy train, eight cars,” says the conductor. The negro stares at us through his wide, great eyes. “At Rahway we hope to get another engine,” says the guard. At 3.25 we are really moving along steadily. “About twelve miles an hour,” says the conductor. The negro smiles contentedly. “We have not met a single train since we left Jersey City,” says the conductor; “must be trains behind us,—not far away, either.” A signal station with green and red lights slips by us. The swinging bell of an approaching train is heard. The conductor stands on the platform and waves his lamp. Our train stops. There looms suddenly out of the darkness behind us a vast globe, white and glowing, like a sun. It comes on, growing larger, and accompanying it is the bang, bang, bang of the engine’s bell, a familiar, but uncanny, sound in America. A number of minor lights dance about on either side of the approaching monster. It does not stop until its great single blazing Cyclopean eye looks straight into our car. Then a voice says, “Don’t you want some assistance?” The monster is a good Samaritan. “A freight-train,” says the conductor, leaping down upon the line. “Yes, push us along.” I follow him into the snow, up to my knees, and the flakes are falling in blinding clouds. A man is altering our signal light. “Are you going to give us another engine?” I ask. “More than I can say,” he replies. “This buffer’s no good; can’t push against that,” says the guard of the other train. Then our conductor goes off with him into the rear. It is 3.40. I turn once more to “John Bull and His Island.” The negro is asleep. We move on again, and gradually leave the locomotive Cyclops behind, its great, sun-like eye getting smaller. A few minutes more, and it follows us. We pull up at a switch-station. There is some difficulty with the posts. I go out and lend a hand at getting them clear of snow. Return very cold and wet. Happily the car is kept at a standing heat of 80° to 90°. “This freight-train started an hour and a half behind us,” says the conductor. “What about the train ahead?”—“Just got clear of it at last,—switched us on to another line. Hope we’ll get on now.” At 3.50 we are really going ahead, quite at a brisk pace. Suddenly another light behind us; suddenly that ominous bell. It reminds me of the storm-bell off Whitby, that Irving and I sat listening to, one autumn night, a year or two ago. The conductor has passed through the cars. Is this new train going to run us down? It comes along swinging its bell. Just as the possibility of a collision seems ominous the new-comer veers to the left and passes us. We are evidently on a single line of rails, with switch-stations at intervals for trains to pass and repass. Our unhappy train stops once more. Another comes pounding along, with its one blazing light and its tolling bell. Passes us defiantly, as the other has done. The new-comer is, however, only an engine this time. “Assistance, no doubt,” I say to myself. I open the door. The snow beats in with a rush of wind. The glass is covered with ice. All else is quiet,—everybody asleep in the train. The negro is dreaming; he pulls ugly faces. I rub the ice off the window. The conductor is out in the snow with several lamps, searching for points. He is kicking at the rails with his boots. A man joins him, with a shovel. They work away. At four o’clock our train groans and screams; it moves very quietly. The conductor plods back through the snow. We stop. At 4.5 the conductor and several others are digging on the line. Clearing points, no doubt. There are switch-lights right and left of them. Now the conductor climbs once more upon the platform, leaving a red lamp away on the track behind him. Another train is heard bellowing; another bell following; another great lamp gleams along the track, smaller red lights showing upon its white beam, over which the snow falls. This other locomotive comes right into us, its great blinding eye blazing like a furnace. The negro wakes up with a cry. “Ah, you fool!” exclaims the conductor, “what’s the matter?”—“Got help now,” he says to me, “at last; this will push, and there is another one in front.” The rear engine pants and pushes, her cow-catcher literally covered with a snow-bank. There is a great fuss about coupling our car upon this panting assistant. “Is it only an engine, or has it cars to draw?”—“It had a train of cars; we have left them on a siding. We shall be all right now.”

“What’s going on?” is suddenly asked in words and tones not unlike a voice in “The Bells,”—“what’s going on?”—“We are, I hope, soon,” I reply to my friend, who has pushed aside his Astrachan cloak and the car curtains, and is looking curiously at us. The negro attendant wakes up and goes towards him. “What is it?”—“Oh, nothing, sah!” says the colored gentleman. “Only getting another engine,” says the conductor. “What for?” asks Irving (he has really been to sleep). “To check our speed,” I say; “we have been going too fast.”—“Oh, you astonish me!” says Irving. “Good-night, then!” The clock marks 4.30. “Good-night, indeed!” I reply. “So say we all of us,” murmurs Loveday, as I pass his bunk in search of my own; “what a time we are having!”

XIV.

CHRISTMAS, AND AN INCIDENT BY THE WAY.

At Baltimore—Street Scenes—Christmas Wares—Pretty Women in “Rubber Cloaks”—Contrasts—Street Hawkers—Southern Blondes—Furs and Diamonds—Rehearsing under Difficulties—Blacks and Whites—Negro Philosophy—Honest Work—“The Best Company on its Legs I have ever seen”—Our Christmas Supper—“Absent Friends”—Pictures in the Fire and Afterwards—An Intercepted Contribution to Magazine Literature—Correcting a Falsehood—Honesty and Fair Play.

I.

BALTIMORE street is the Broadway of the Monumental City. It also suggests Chestnut street in Philadelphia, more particularly in the matter of signboards. A city of stores and offices, it proclaims its various businesses in signs of every conceivable shape. They swing from ornamental brackets over door-ways, and hang right across the sidewalk. They are of many shapes, but as to color are invariably black and gold. The inscriptions upon them are characteristic; some of them are strange to the non-travelled Englishmen. I note a few of them: “Gent’s Neck Wear,” “Fine Jewelry,” “Men’s Furnishing.” This latter is the general sign of American hosiers and shirt-makers. “Diamonds,” “Fine Shoes,” “Dry Goods,” “Imported Goods,” “Books,” “Cheap Railroad Tickets,” “Cheap Tickets for Chicago,” “Saddlery,” “Adams’ Express.” To these are added the names of the dealers. The “Cheap Railroad Tickets” is a branch of the speculative operations in theatrical admissions. “Adams’ Express” is a familiar sign everywhere. It represents the great and universal system of baggage distribution. Adams and other firms will take charge of a traveller’s luggage, or any other kind of goods, and “check” it through to any part of the United States, possibly to any corner of the world. To-day, in honor of Christmas, the ordinary signs have been supplemented by such attractive proclamations as “Holiday Presents,” “Toys for the Season,” “For Christmas and New Year’s,” “Home-made Christmas Puddings.” At the doors of tobacco stores the figure of a North American Indian, in complete war-paint, offers you a bundle of the finest cigars, and his tomahawk is poised for action in case you decline his invitation to “Try them.” In New York this colored commercial statuary is varied with an occasional “Punch,” and by many buxom ballet-girls in short dresses and chignons. But the taste of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago runs in the direction of the Indian. Nowhere do you see the blackamoor, once popular at the door of English tobacconists; nor, except at Brooklyn, have I seen on the American side of the Atlantic the kilted Highlander, with his “mull” as a sign for the information or temptation of snuff-takers. At Chicago there is a Scotch sculptor, who has ornamented the exterior of more than one store with life-size realizations of the heroes of some of Burns’s most popular poems. Several of these are represented as snuff-takers; but the collection includes a few really admirable studies. The city architect, by the way, at Chicago, is a Scotchman, and he is responsible for the fine designs of the chief public buildings. Baltimore is not singular in its habit of pictorial signs, the origin of which may possibly be traced to old English custom. The saddler exhibits the gilded head of a horse; the watchmaker hangs out a clock; the glover a hand; the dry-goods stores display bright rugs and carpets. Now and then the cabinet-makers show their goods on the sidewalks. Many stores erect handsome outside glass-case stands for exhibiting knick-knacks at their door-ways. The fruit shops open their windows on the street. Itinerant dealers in oranges, bananas, and grapes rig up tent-like houses of business under the windows of established traders (for which heavy rents are paid, notably “down-town” in New York), and all this gives a pleasant variety of life and color to the street. One is everywhere reminded of the excellence of English Manufactures, “English Tanned Gloves,” “English Storm-coats,” “English Cloth”; and many other commercial compliments are paid to “Imported Goods.”

It is three o’clock in the day, and while Irving, his lieutenant, Loveday, and his able subalterns, Arnot and Allen, are getting the stage of the Academy of Music into some kind of shape for the Christmas-eve performance, I plod through the rain and slush to make my first acquaintance with this chief street of Baltimore. It is curiously picturesque, in spite of the weather and the dirty snow, which is melting and freezing almost simultaneously. Here and there the sidewalks are slabs of ice; here and there they are sloppy snow-drifts. But a surging crowd covers every foot of them. The roadway presents a continual block of tram-cars, buggies, wagons, carts, and carriages. Women leaving and getting upon the cars plunge in and out of snow-heaps and watery gutters. It is a very democratic institution, the American car. The people crowd it as they please. There is no limit to its capacity. It may carry as many persons as can get into it or stand upon its platforms. This afternoon the cars are human hives on wheels. One notices that the crowd chiefly consists of women. They fill the sidewalks. All of them are shopping. They are all talking, and all at the same time. This is a peculiarity of our charming cousins. Their costume on this wet afternoon is a very sensible one. It might almost be called a uniform. A black water-proof cloak and hood is all the costume you can see. Often it is a pretty, bright face that the hood encases. Now and then some woman, a trifle more vain or reckless than her sisters, wears a hat and feathers with her water-proof cloak. This incongruous arrangement, however, helps to give color to the crowd,—a desirable point on so dull, grey, and cloudy a day as this. The men who move about here are mostly smoking. They do not appear to have any hand in the shopping. The ladies are evidently doing all that, and they are very much in earnest. Not one of them but deigns to carry a parcel. The children are evidently coming in for precious gifts. In one shop window “Father Christmas” himself is busy showing his toys to a numerous audience. He is made up with white flowing locks and beard, and ruddy, though aged, features. His dress is an ermine tippet, scarlet frock trimmed with gold, and top-boots of patent leather,—quite the nursery ideal of his genial majesty. Another store has filled its window with a skating scene. A company of gay dolls are sliding for their very lives. They go through their lively work without any change of expression, and their gyrations never alter; but the spectators change, and the store within is full of bustle. I look around for the poor people we would see in a London group of this character. I seek in vain for the Smikes and Twists who would be feasting their sunken eyes on such a free show in London. I try to find the slipshod women, with infants huddled to their cold bosoms. They are not here. A boy of twelve, with a cigarette in his hand, asks me for a light. Another “guesses” his “papa” will buy “the whole concern” for him if he wants it. No poor people. The Irish are a small community here. How one’s mind goes wandering to the West End of London and to the Strand and Fleet street, to the Seven Dials and to Ratcliffe highway, where (it is five hours later there than here) Christmas eve is being celebrated with such contrasts of fortune and variations of wealth and poverty, of joy and sorrow, as make the heart ache to think upon! Not a single poor-looking person do I note in this long, busy street of Baltimore. Nobody begs from me; and the hawkers on the sidewalk offer me their wares with an air of almost aggressive independence. “Japanese silk, ten cents,” one cries, with a bundle of small handkerchiefs in his hand. “The magic mouse,” says another, vending a mechanical toy. “Now, then, one dime a packet,” is the proposal of a third, offering material for decorating Christmas trees. “Try ‘em!” almost commands a fourth, as I pause opposite his stand of peanuts. If you buy nobody thanks you, and if you thank the vendor he is surprised, and will probably stammer out, “You’re welcome.” Yet “this is the Cavalier city,” a friend reminds me, “and aristocratic to the core.”

The fruit-stores are bright with tropical fruits; but not with the roses, carnations, pinks, and smilax creeper, so plentiful in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. I pause to scan the faces of the crowd. It is a popular fiction in England that the women of the South are brunettes. The truth is, the further South you go, the fairer the women, and the more delicate their complexions. On Baltimore street I observe quite a number of ladies with red hair. Many of them are blondes, who might have been natives of Lincolnshire. They are all pretty; some are beautiful; and their charms certainly obtained no fictitious aid from their dress or surroundings. Water-proof cloaks and a muddy street could not help them. Baltimoreans may say I should look for beauty in North Charles street, or Mount Vernon place, if I expect to see it _en promenade_. But I am not looking for it. I find it in the great, busy, Christmas crowd, tramping through the snow, and buying toys and candies for the children. The “carriage ladies” wear furs, and those everlasting diamond ear-rings, without which expensive ornament few American women appear to consider themselves “real ladies.” New York and Boston modify the fashion in this respect, though you may still see women sitting down to breakfast at hotel restaurants in silks, satins, and diamonds.

II.

WHILE I have been studying Baltimore street darkness has fallen upon it. The gas-lamps and the electric arcs are beginning their nightly competition as I retrace my steps to the Academy of Music. Irving, who arrived in Baltimore at two, after a journey of forty-two hours, has just left the stage, I am told,—“gone to get a little rest.”

“Have you had a rehearsal?”