Chapter XVIII: Sheila's Strategem (2)

The tinge of regret with which we leave Harper's Ferry is mitigated by the hope that greater wonders may lie beyond. In two miles the railroad, as if willing to carve out a picture-frame in which the heroic river may be viewed, excavates the "Potomac Tunnel," as it is named, through which the water is seen like a design in _repoussé_ silver, with two or three emerald islands in it for jewel-work. The perforation is eighty feet through, but in contrast with its rocky breadth our picture-frame is not too deep: whenever we shift our position, the view seems to increase in art-beauty, and as a final comprehensive picture it recedes and crowds under the spandrels of the arch the whole mountain-pass, with the confluence of the two rivers in the finest imaginable aspect.

Poor Martinsburg! during the rebellion a mere sieve, through which the tide of war poured back and forth in the various fluctuations of our fortune! It is said to have been occupied by both armies, alternately, fifteen times. The passenger sees it as a mere foreground of big restaurant and platform, with a conglomeration of village houses in the rear--featureless as the sheep which the painter of Wakefield put in for nothing. One incident, however, supervenes. An old man, with positive voice and manners, and altogether a curious specimen in looks, gait and outfit, comes through the train with a pannier of apples and groundnuts. He is pointed out as one of the men of importance in Martinsburg, owning a row of flourishing houses. With the anxious servility which wealth always commands, we purchase an apple of this capitalist, blandly choosing a knotty and unsalable specimen.

Pretty soon, as we look over into Maryland, we have indicated for us the site of old Fort Frederick, until lately traceable, but now completely obliterated. It was an interesting relic of the old Indian wars. Shortly after Braddock's defeat on the Monongahela, when the Indians had become very bold, and had almost depopulated this part of Maryland, Fort Frederick was erected by Governor Sharpe as a menace, and garrisoned with two hundred men. It was an immediate moral victory, awing and restraining the savages, though no decided conflict is known to have occurred from its construction to its quiet rotting away within the present generation. Those were the days when Frederick in Maryland and Chambersburg in Pennsylvania were frontier points, the Alleghanies were Pillars of Hercules, and all beyond was a blank!

Still continuing our course on the Virginia side of the Potomac, through what is known in this State as the Virginia Valley, while in Pennsylvania the same intervale is called the Cumberland Valley, we admire the increasing sense of solitude, the bowery wildness of the river-banks, and the spirited freshness of the hastening water. At a station of delightful loneliness we alight.

Here Sir John's Run comes leaping from the hills to slide gurgling into the Potomac, and at this point we attain Berkeley Springs by a dragging ascent of two miles and a half in a comfortable country stage. Sir John's Run was called after Sir John Sinclair, a quartermaster in the doomed army of Braddock. The outlet into the Potomac is a scene of quiet country beauty, made dignified by the hills around the river. A hot, rustic station of two or three rooms, an abandoned factory building--tall, empty-windowed and haunted-looking--gone clean out for want of commerce, like a lamp for lack of oil. Opposite the station a pretty homespun tavern trellised with grapes, a portrait of General Lee in the sitting-room, and a fat, buxom Virginia matron for hostess. All this quiet scene was once the locality of the hot hopes and anxieties of genius, and it is for this reason we linger here.

When the little harbor at the mouth of Sir John's Run was still more wild and lonely than now, James Rumsey, a working bath-tender at Berkeley Springs, launched upon it a boat that he had invented of novel principle and propulsive force. The force was steam, and Rumsey had shown his model to Washington in 1780. First discoverers of steam-locomotion are turning up every few months in embarrassing numbers, but we cannot feel that we have a right to suppress the claims of honest Rumsey, the protégé of Washington. The dates are said to be as follows: Rumsey launched his steamboat here at Sir John's Run in 1784, before the general and a throng of visitors from the Springs; in 1788, John Fitch launched another first steamboat on the Delaware, and sent it successfully up to Burlington; in 1807, Robert Fulton set a third first steamboat on the Hudson, the Clermont. Rumsey's motion was obtained by the reaction of a current _squirted_ through the stern of the boat against the water of the river, the current being pumped by steam. This action, so primitive, so remote from the principle of the engine now used, seems hardly worthy to be connected with the great revolutionary invention of steam-travel; yet Washington certified his opinion that "the discovery is of vast importance, and may be of the greatest usefulness in our inland navigation." James Rumsey, with just a suspicion of the irritability of talent, accused Fitch of "coming pottering around" his Virginia work-bench and carrying off his ideas, to be afterward developed in Philadelphia. It is certain that the development was great. Rumsey died in England of apoplexy at a public lecture where he was explaining his contrivance.

A sun-burnt, dark-eyed young Virginian now guides us up the mountain-road to the Springs, where we find a full-blown Ems set in the midst of the wilderness. The Springs of Berkeley, originally included in the estates of Lord Fairfax, and by him presented to the colony, were the first fashionable baths opened in this country. One half shudders to think how primitive they were in the first ages, when the pools were used by the sexes alternately, and the skurrying nymphs hastened to retreat at the notification that their hour was out and that the gentlemen wanted to come in. They were populous and civilized in the pre-Revolutionary era when Washington began to frequent them and became part owner in the surrounding land. The general's will mentions his property in "Bath," as the settlement was then called. The Baroness de Reidesel (wife of the German general of that name taken with Burgoyne at Saratoga) spent with her invalid husband the summer of 1779 at Berkeley, making the acquaintance of Washington and his family; and whole pages of her memoirs are devoted to the quaint picture of watering-place life at that date.

Berkeley Springs are probably as enjoyable as any on the continent. There is none of that aspect of desolation and pity-my-sorrows so common at the faded resorts of the unhappy South, yet a pleasant rurality is impressed on the entertainment. The principal hotel is a vast building, curiously rambling in style: the dining-room, for instance, is a house in itself, planted in a garden. Here, when the family is somewhat small and select, will be presented the marvels of Old Dominion cooking--the marrowy flannel-cake, the cellular waffle, the chicken melting in a beatitude of cream gravy: when the house is pressed with its hundreds of midsummer guests these choice individualities of kitchen chemistry are not attainable; but even then the bread, the roast, the coffee--a great _chef_ is known by the quality of his simples--are of the true Fifth Avenue style of excellence. Captain Potts (we have come to the lands where the hotel-keepers are military officers), an old moustache of the Mexican war, broods over the large establishment like the father of a great family. With the men he is wise on a point of horseflesh or the quality of the brandy; with the matrons he is courtly, gallant, anecdotic: the young women appear to idolize him, and lean their pretty elbows on his desk half the day, for he is their protector, chevalier, entertainer, bonbon-holder, adviser and elder brother, all in one. Such is the landlord, as that rare expert is understood in the South. As for the regimen, it is the rarest kind of Pleasure made Medicinal, and that must be the reason of its efficacy. There is a superb pool of tepid water for the gentlemen to bathe in: a similar one, extremely discreet, for the ladies. Besides these, of which the larger is sixty feet long, there are individual baths, drinking fountains in arbors, sulphur and iron springs, all close to the hotel. The water, emerging all the year round at a temperature of about seventy-five degrees, remains unfrozen in winter to the distance of a mile or more along the rivulet by which it escapes. The flavor is so little nauseous that the pure issue of the spring is iced for ordinary table use; and this, coupled with the fact that we could not detect the slightest unusual taste, gave us the gravest doubts about the trustworthiness of this mineral fountain's old and unblemished reputation: another indication is, that they have never had the liquid analyzed. But the gouty, the rheumatic, the paralyzed, the dyspeptic, who draw themselves through the current, and let the current draw itself through them, are content with no such negative virtues for it, and assign

To Berkeley every virtue under heaven.

The mountain-village known to Washington as "Bath" is still a scene of fashionable revel: the over-dressed children romp, the old maids flirt, the youthful romancers spin in each other's arms to music from the band, and dowagers carefully drink at the well from the old-fashioned mug decorated with Poor Richard's maxims; but the festivities have a decorous and domestic look that would meet the pity of one of the regular ante-rebellion bloods. After the good people have retired at an early hour, we fancy the ghost of a lofty Virginia swell standing in the moonlight upon the piazza, which he decorates with gleams of phantom saliva. Attended by his teams of elegant horses, and surrounded by a general halo of gambling, racing, tourneying and cock-fighting, he seems to shake his lank hair sadly over the poor modern carnival, and say, "Their tameness is shocking to me."

There is a good deal of honest sport still to be had in the adjacent hills: the streams yield trout, and various larger prey, for which the favorite bait is a small ugly fish called helgamite. The woods contain turkeys, pheasants, quail and woodcock. The region has a valuable interpreter in the person of General David H. Strother, so agreeably known to the public as "Porte Crayon," whose father was lessee of the Springs, and who at one period himself conducted the hotel. He addicts himself now to pen and pencil solely. In the village, where he presides over a pretty cottage home, he has quite a circle of idolaters: the neighbors' houses display on their walls his sketches of the village eccentrics, attended by those accessories of dog or gun or nag which always stamp the likeness, and make the rustic critic cry out, "Them's his very features!" A large, boisterous painting in the hotel represents his impressions of the village arena in his youth; and ancient gamesters, gray-headed now, like to stroll in and contemplate their own portraits grouped around the cock-pit in all the hot blood of betting days and in the green dress-coats of 1840. Strother (now an active graybeard) was profoundly stirred by the outbreak of the rebellion. His friends were slaveholders and Confederates: he lived upon the mountain-line dividing the rich, proud, noble rebels of the eastern counties from the hungry and jealous loyalists of West Virginia. He himself loved the State as Bruce loved Scotland, but he loved country better. He shut himself up with his distracting problem for three days in utter privacy: he emerged with his mind made up, a Union soldier.

"It must have been awkward for a Virginian to cast his lot against Virginia," we observed to the stagedriver who bore us back to the station--an ex-Federal soldier and a faithful devotee of Crayon's.

"No awkwarder than for Virginia to go against her country: that's how _we_ looked at it," retorted the patriot.

Bidding adieu to Berkeley and its paternal landlord, we resume the steel road (that well-worn phrase of the "iron way" is a complete misnomer) with another glance of familiarity at the beautiful confluence of Sir John's Run with the Potomac, where the sunny waters still seem to murmur of the landing of Braddock's army and the novel disturbance of James Rumsey's steamer. The mountains extending from this point, the recesses of the Blue Ridge, in their general trend south-westerly through the State, are one great pharmacy of curative waters. Jordan and Capper Springs, in the neighborhood of Winchester, lie thirty or forty miles to the south; and beneath those are imbedded the White, Black, Yellow, and we know not how many other colors in the general spectrum of Sulphurs. It would perhaps be our duty to indicate more exactly the Bethesdas of this vast natural sanitarium, to which our present course gives us the key, but that task has already been performed, in a complete and very attractive manner, by Mr. Edward A. Pollard in his little work _The Virginia Tourist_. Our present task is to attain the main wall of the Alleghany Mountains, which we do at the town of Cumberland, after passing through the grand curved tunnel at Pawpaw Ridge, and crossing Little Cacapon Creek, and traversing the South Branch, which is the larger and true Potomac, and admiring the lofty precipices, with arched and vaulted strata, on South Branch Mountain and at Kelly's Rocks and Patterson Creek.

It is but a prosaic consideration, but the bracing air of the mountain-ride from Berkeley Springs down to the railway station, and the rapid career thence to Cumberland, have given us the appetites of ogres. We carry our pilgrim scrip into the town of Cumberland without much hope of having it generously filled, for this coaly capital, lost among its mountains, had formerly the saddest of reputations for hospitality. The three or four little taverns were rivals in the art of how not to diet. Accordingly, our surprise is equal to our satisfaction when we find every secret of a grand hotel perfectly understood and put in practice at the "Queen City," the large house built and conducted by the railway company. A competent Chicago purveyor, Mr. H.M. Kinsley, who has the office of general manager of the hotels belonging to the corporation, resides here as at the head-quarters of his department, and is blessed every day by the flying guests from the railway-trains, as well as the permanent boarders who use Cumberland as a mountain-resort. The choicest dainties from the markets of Baltimore, laid tenderly on ice in that city and brought as freight in the lightning trains of the road, are cooked for the tables, and the traveler "exercised in woes," who used to groan over salt pork and dreadful dodgers, now finds the "groaning" transferred to the overloaded board. The house is now in all the charm of freshness and cleanliness, hospitably furnished, with deep piazza, a pretty croquet-lawn with fountain, and other modern attractions, the whole surrounded with what is no small gain in a muddy Maryland town--a broad Schillinger cement pavement, which, like Mr. Wopsle's acting, may be praised as "massive and concrete."

By day, Cumberland is quite given over to carbon: drawing her supplies from the neighboring mining-town of Frostburg, she dedicates herself devoutly to coals. All day long she may be seen winding around her sooty neck, like an African queen, endless chains and trains and rosaries of black diamonds, which never tire of passing through the enumeration of her jeweled fingers. At night the scene is more beautiful. We clambered up the nearest hill at sunset, while the colored light was draining into the pass of Wills' Mountain as into a vase, and the lamps of the town sprang gradually into sight beneath us. The surrounding theatre of mountains had a singularly calm and noble air, recalling the most enchanted days of Rome and the Campagna. The curves of the hills are marvels of swaying grace, depending from point to point with the elegance of draperies, and seating the village like a gem in the midst of "great laps and folds of sculptor's work." The mechanics and miners, as twilight deepened, began to lead their sweethearts over these beautiful hills, so soft in outline that no paths are necessary. The clouds of fireflies made an effect, combining with the village lights below. Then as night deepened, as if they were the moving principle of all the enchantment, the company's rolling-mills, like witches' kettles, began to spirt enormous gouts of flame, which seemed to cause their heavy roofs to flutter like the lids of seething caldrons.

The commanding attraction of the western journey is necessarily the passage of the Alleghanies. The climb begins at Piedmont, and follows an ascent which in eleven consecutive miles presents the rare grade of one hundred and sixteen feet per mile. The first tableau of real sublimity, perhaps, occurs in following up a stream called Savage River. The railway, like a slender spider's thread, is seen hanging at an almost giddy height up the endless mountain-side, and curved hither and thither in such multiplied windings that enormous arcs of it can always be seen from the flying window of the car. The woods, green with June or crimson with November, clamber over each other's shoulders up the ascent; but as we attain the elevation of two hundred feet above the Savage, their tufted tops form a soft and mossy embroidery beneath us, diminishing in perspective far down the cleft of the ravine. As we turn the flank of the great and stolid Backbone Mountain we command the mouth of another stream, pouring in from the south-west: it is a steeply-enclosed, hill-cleaving torrent, which some lover of plays and cider, recollecting Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's slumber beneath the crabapple boughs, has named Crabtree Creek. There is a point where the woody gorges of both these streams can be commanded at once by the eye, and Nature gives us few landscape _pendants_ more primitively wild and magnificent than these.

This ascent was made by the engineers of the company in the early days of railroads, and when no one knew at what angle the friction of wheels upon rails would be overcome by gravity. On the trial-trip the railroad president kept close to the door, meaning, in the case of possible discomfiture and retrogression, to take to the woods! But all went well, and in due time was reached, as we now reach it, Altamont, the alpine village perched two thousand six hundred and twenty-six feet above the tide.

The interest of the staircase we have run up depends greatly on its pioneer character. No mountain-chain had been crossed by a locomotive before the Alleghanies were outraged, as we see them, here and by this track. As the railroad we follow was the first to take existence in this country, excepting some short mining roads, so the grade here used was the first of equal steepness, saving on some English roads of inferior length and no mountainous prestige. Here the engineer, like Van Arnburgh in the lion's den, first planted his conqueror's foot upon the mane of the wilderness; and 'in this spot modern science first claimed the right to reapply that grand word of a French monarch, "_Il n'y a plus de Pyrenées_!"

We are on the crest of the Alleghanies. On either side of the mountain-pass we have threaded rise the higher summits of the range; but, though we seem from the configuration of the land to be in a valley, we are met at every turn by the indications familiar to mountain-tops--indications that are not without a special desolation and pathos. Though all is green with summer, we can see that the vegetation has had a dolorous struggle for existence, and that the triumph of certain sparse trees here and there is but the survival of the strongest. They stand scattered and scraggy, like individual bristles on a bald pate. Their spring has been borrowed from summer, for the leafage here does not begin until late in June. The whole scenery seems to array itself for the tourist like a country wife, with many an incompleteness in its toilet, and with a kind of haggard apology for being late. Rough log-houses stand here and there among the laurels. The tanned gentlemen standing about look like California miners, as you see them in the illustrations to Bret Harte's stories. Through this landscape, roughly blocked out, and covered still with Nature's chips and shavings--and seeming for that very reason singularly fresh and close to her mighty hand--we fly for twenty miles. We are still ascending, and the true apex of our path is only reached at the twentieth. This was the climax which poet Willis came out to reach in a spirit of intense curiosity, intent to peer over and see what was on the other side of the mountains, and with some idea, as he says, of hanging his hat on the evening star. His disgust, as a bard, when he found that the highest point was only named "Cranberry Summit," was sublime.

"Willis was particularly struck," said the landlord of the Glades Hotel, "with a quality of whisky we had hereabouts at the time of his visit. In those days, before the 'revenue,' an article of rich corn whisky was made in small quantities by these Maryland farmers. Mr. Willis found it agree with him particularly well, for it's as pure as water, and slips through your teeth like flaxseed tea. I explained to him how it gained in quality by being kept a few years, becoming like noble old brandy. Mr. Willis was fired with the idea, and took a barrel along home with him, in the ambitious intention of ripening it. In less than six months," pursued the Boniface with a humorous twinkle in his eyes, "he sent for another barrel."

The region where we now find ourselves among these mountain-tops is known as the Glades--a range of elevated plateaux marked with all the signs of a high latitude, but flat enough to be spread with occasional patches of discouraged farms. The streams make their way into the Youghiogheny, and so into the Ohio and Gulf of Mexico, for we have mounted the great watershed, and have long ago crossed both branches of the sun-seeking Potomac! We are in a region that particularly justifies the claim of the locomotive to be the great discoverer of hidden retreats, for never will you come upon a place more obviously disconcerted at being found out. The screams of the whistle day by day have inserted no modern ideas into this mountain-cranium, which, like Lord John Russell's, must be trepanned before it can be enlightened. The Glades are sacred to deer, bears, trout. But the fatal rails guide to them an unceasing procession of staring citizens, and they are filled in the fine season with visitors from Cincinnati and Baltimore. For the comfort of these we find established in the Glades two dissimilar hotels.

The first hostelry is the Deer Park Hotel, just finished, and really admirable in accommodations. It is a large and very tasteful structure, with the general air of a watering-place sojourn of the highest type--a civilized-looking fountain playing, and the familiar thunder of the bowling-alley forming bass to the click of the billiard-room. Here, as in Cumberland, we find an artificial forwardness of the dinner-table in the midst of the most unpromising circumstances. The daintiest meats and cates are served by the deftest waiters. The fact is, the hotel is owned by the company, and the dinners are wafted over, in Arabian Nights fashion, from the opulent markets of Baltimore. To prepare a feast, in this desolation, fit for the nuptials of kings and emperors, would be a very simple matter of the telegraph. Altogether, the aspect of this ornate, audacious-looking summer palace is the strangest thing, just where it is, to be seen on the mountains. The supreme sweetness of the air, the breath of pine and hemlock, the coolness of midsummer nights, make the retreat a boon for July and August. In autumn, among the resplendent and tinted mountain-scenery, with first-rate sport in following the Alleghany deer, the charms are perhaps greater.

The other resting-place of which we spoke is at the Glades Hotel in the town of Oakland--the same in which Mr. Willis quenched his poetic thirst. Oakland, looking already old and quaint, though it is a creation of the railroad, sits immediately under the sky in its mountain, in a general dress and equipage of whitewashed wooden houses. A fine stone church, however, of aspiring Gothic, forms a contrast to the whole encampment, and seems to have been quickly caught up out of a wealthy city: it is a monumental tribute by the road-president, Mr. Garrett, to a deceased brother; the county, too, in its name of Garrett, bears testimony to the same powerful and intelligent family. As for the "Glades," it is kept by Mr. Dailey in the grand old Southern style, and the visitor, very likely for the first time in his life, feels that he is _at home_. It is a curious thing that the sentiment of the English inn, the priceless and matchless feeling of comfort, has now completely left the mother-country to take refuge with some fine old Maryland or Virginia landlord, whose ideas were formed before the war. We have at the "Glades" a specimen. In Captain Potts of Berkeley we found another. This kind of landlord, in fact, should be a captain, a general or a major, in order to fill his rôle perfectly. He is the patron and companion of his guests, looking to their amusement with all the solicitude of a private householder. His manners are filled with a beaming, sympathetic and exquisite courtesy. He is necessarily a gentleman in his manners, having all his life lived that sporting, playful, supervisory and white-handed existence proper at once to the master of a plantation and the owner of a hotel. His society is constantly sought, his table is pounced upon by ladies with backgammon in the morning, by gentlemen with decks of cards at night. Always handsome, sunburnt, and with unaffected good-breeding, he is the king of his delicious realm, the beloved despot of his domain. We have left ourselves, in sketching the general character, no space to descend to particulars on Mr. Dailey; but he was all the time before us as a sitter when we made the portrait. A stroll with him around his farm, and to his limpid little chalybeate spring, after one of his famously-cooked, breakfasts of trout and venison, leaves an impression of amity that you would not take away from many private country-houses.

The affluents of the Little and Great Yok (so the Youghiogheny is locally called) are still stocked with trout, while a gentleman of Oakland has abundance of the fish artificially breeding in his "ladders," and sells the privilege of netting them at a dollar the pound. As for the wild fish, we were informed by a sharp boy who volunteered to show us the chalybeate spring, and who guided us through the woods barefoot, making himself ill with "sarvice" berries as he went,--we were instructed by this naturalist that the trout were eaten away from the streams "by the alligators." This we regarded as a sun-myth, or some other form of aboriginal superstition, until we were informed by several of the gravest and most trustworthy gentlemen of several different localities on the mountains that there really is a creature infesting these streams supposed by them to be a young alligator, reaching a length of twelve inches, and doubtless subsisting on fish. An alligator as a mountain-reptile had not entered into our conception: can these voracious saurians, playing in the alpine affluents of the Mississippi, possibly be identical with the vast and ugly beasts of the lower bayous and the Gulf? We leave the identification for some reptile-loving philosopher.

Descending the western slope of the mountains, we prick up our attention, although the grade is gradual and easy. We know that we are coming to the crowning glory of the ride, the region celebrated for its more than Arcadian beauty, and consecrated by the earliest glories of our war--by the mountain Iliad of McClellan, the initial action at Philippi, and the prompt trampling out of West Virginia secession by the victories of Cheat River. This tameless, mountain-lapped, hemlock-tinted river had long been our fancied cynosure. "Each mortal has his Carcassonne," said, after a French poet, the late lamented John R. Thompson, using the term for what is long desired and never attained; and Mr. Matthew Arnold, in writing of a "French Eton," says, "Whatever you miss, do not miss seeing Carcassonne." As Carcassonne exists in French landscape, exists in the tourist's mind and desire, a standard of beauty and historic suggestion, such to us had become this swart and noble river. Now it happens that Thompson has left a description, in his most polished prose, of glorious Cheat River. As our own powers of description are very inferior, we make no scruple of borrowing, or, as Reade calls it, "jewel-setting:" "The grandest achievement of the engineer (whose name, Benjamin H. Latrobe, should always be stated in connection with the road) is to be found, however, in the region of Cheat River, where to the unscientific eye it would appear almost impossible that a road-bed could ever have been built. For two miles beyond Rowlesburg, where the Cheat River is crossed on a massive bridge of iron, there is a continuous succession of marvels in railway-work, of which the Tray Run viaduct is a dream of lightness and grace, yet so firm in its welded strength that thousands of tons of merchandise pass over it daily without causing, the slightest oscillation of its airy arches. Here, too, the wonders of mechanical skill are placed in striking juxtaposition with the wonders of Nature, whose obduracy has been so signally overcome. The sense of security was heightened in our case by a furious storm which burst upon us. We were seated on the fender or' cow-catcher,' watching the majestic marshaling of the thunder-clouds over the mountain-tops, and enjoying to the full the excitement of the moment, when suddenly the wind blew a terrific gust, filling the air with dust and dry leaves, and threatening to carry us individually over the precipice. The train was stopped, and we sought shelter in the comfortable car, which then moved on through the driving floods that continued to descend for half an hour, forming cataracts on every side of us. But the water ran off harmlessly from the solid track, and our engine bade defiance to the tempest, which hurled huge branches of the trees into the angry abyss beneath. The triumph of Science over Nature was complete; and as the sinking sun threw a glow over the Glades where the clouds had parted, I think my companions caught some inspirations of the 'Poetry of the Rail-way.'"

At Grafton we have choice of two routes: one, to Wheeling, leads us by the beautiful scenery of the Tygart, where the Valley River Falls are laughing and glistening all day and all night, and by the stupendous Bollman bridge at Bellaire, almost two miles long, to Wheeling. But we continue on a straight course to Cincinnati, having promised ourselves to see the contrast between the City of Monuments and the Metropolis of Pork. Grafton offers us the accommodations of another of the company's hotels, where, as at Cumberland, we are daintily and tenderly fed. At Parkersburg we find another superb bridge, over a mile in length; at Athens an imposing insane asylum, to take care of us if all these engineering wonders have deprived us of our senses; and finally in Cincinnati, just a day after our departure from Baltimore, the gleam of the Ohio River and the fulfillment of our intention.

AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A STRONG-MINDED WOMAN.

_Extracts from a Journal_.

November 1, 18----. It is just three years to-day since I began to keep this journal. I am so glad now that I persisted in doing so, in spite of the temptations that have often assailed me to throw it aside. How else could I realize, bring home to myself, these past three years, strong and vivid as my remembrance of them is? No effort of mere recollection could have preserved for me as this book has done a record of my struggles and failures, and of my victories. Yes, I write the word proudly, _victories_, for I have been beyond my hopes successful. How well I remember my dear mother's distress at my queer notions, as she called them--her entreaties, her tender illogical protests against my making myself "conspicuous"! Dear mother! I can see now that it was very natural she should have disliked and dreaded my becoming a "strong-minded woman," for anything narrower than her ideas of a woman's education and sphere one cannot imagine. She was an excellent specimen of the old-fashioned mother and wife, and I believe sincerely thought her whole duty in life and the intention of her creation was "to suckle fools and chronicle small beer."

Let me see: yes, here it is at the very beginning--November 1, 18----. How faded the ink looks! Let me read it: "To-day I told mother I meant to attend a course of medical lectures: we had a scene, and she called in Cousin Jane to reason with me. How I detest Cousin Jane! She is nothing but a mass of orthodox dogmatism. Of course we quarreled over it, and she ended by telling me I was disgracing the family, and was no true woman. Well, we shall see which of us has the truer comprehension of a woman's sphere."

It is three years since I wrote that. Those lectures were my first step, and, like all first steps, cost me more of a struggle than anything I have done since. As I look back over these three years, I see that every hope and aspiration I then cherished has been more than realized. I can trace the steady progress of my intellect. I can go back to the days when I started to earn my own living--when I thought it a great thing to have gained a few dollars by my own labor. Yes, I am very glad to have this record of the past: it makes me strong and hopeful of the future. I have never regretted my decision to make an independent life for myself. I have sought only to do that for which Nature had gifted me, and from which nothing but custom and prejudice debarred me; and in claiming my own position I am conscious of having helped other women, and of having led the way for those who may be less courageous than I am.

All this might sound very conceited and self-confident to any one who should read it, but I do not write to be read by other eyes than my own: my journal is the reflex of my thoughts and feelings; so I may be frank with myself. And why should I _not_ be proud of my independence, as well as any other human creature?

But I must prepare my speech for to-morrow. They say they can't do without me, and I really believe they mean it; for though some women besides myself have opinions, and can put them into words, they mostly lack the courage that I certainly possess. What a delicious sense of freedom and unfettered action I have in my life! I don't think I have laid down the special powers of my sex in asserting my freedom; but you must wait, little book, for the confession that is on the tip of my pen. Work first: that is my motto.

_Nov_. 10. Ten days since I opened my journal, and such busy days as they have been! Three speeches, and half a pamphlet written! I have done what people commonly term "a man's work" this week. How I despise all these time-honored phrases, which, dead letters as they are, act as links to strengthen the chain that binds women in a state of inferiority. Why not say "a _woman's_ work"? But that is a different sort of thing, I should be told: a woman should stay at home and take care of her house and children. Why so, say I, if she has no house, and does not wish for husband and children, feeling that they would impede her in her work? All women are not born to be wives and mothers: some have other work to do. But I need not argue with my journal: it is of my way of thinking; my ideas meet no opposition here. "But this is not at all womanly," my critic would say, had I one, which I have not: "you have not said a word of the really important event of the week." Dare I say that I had half forgotten it? A man has asked me to marry him! The great event of a woman's life has been within my reach, and I refused it. Mr. Whitaker is a very nice fellow, but too adoring by half. I want an equal, not a slave--a friend, a companion, not a man drawn to me by his imagination and desiring to put me on a pedestal before marriage, that he may reverse our position afterward. And then, too, marriage would hamper and restrict me. I must not give up to mankind what is meant for a party. But here I have a reflection to make, the result of my three years' experience since I became a "strong-minded woman." It is always maintained that a woman who chooses the life and holds the views that I do destroys her attraction and charm for the other sex, and that no man, however clever and successful she may be, will want to marry a woman who puts her intellect into trousers instead of petticoats. There was never a greater mistake. I have had four offers of marriage since I "unsexed" myself (that's the proper expression, I believe), and all from most respectable, well-to-do, worthy men; and I really think they all cared for me. I cannot help having a certain sense of gratified vanity about this, for, in spite of my critics, I am a woman still. I have earned a rest to-night, so I'll stop writing and go to bed.

_Nov_. 16. I feel lonely to-night. I am not often lonely: perhaps my little book will comfort me. Sometimes I have said to myself that my motto was that of a star: "Einsam bin ich, nicht allein." To-night it is not so. That Mr. Lawrence who was introduced to me to-night had a striking face, but there was a sort of masculine manner about him that I don't fancy. Manliness I like, but he seemed to be so sure that I was not his equal; and yet he treated me with perfect respect and courtesy. Some one whispered in my ear, "He is a great society swell." I have never seen anything of what is called society: I was not born with a title to admission within its circle, and I have always been too proud to seek it; yet I confess I have a curiosity to see what it is like. I suppose I should see the best result that the old way of looking at women can produce--the pink-cotton system, I call it. I don't believe that man would ever dream of contradicting me in a question of fact, or of using his strongest logical weapons against me in a discussion: he would only play with me mentally. How angry the very thought makes me! And yet he would defer to my opinion, and pay me all respect, and listen to everything I said, however silly, because I am a woman. What a strange, inconsistent mingling of discordant ideas! A toy and a divinity! His manners were, however, very agreeable: I suppose he is what is called a man of the world. Rather a poor thing to be: his manners are dearly bought. He said something about his cousin Mrs. Fordyce calling on me. Well, if she does, I shall perhaps have a glimpse at the _beau monde_. I wonder if all the men in society look as high-bred as he does? He is probably narrow-minded naturally, but he is one result of our scheme of civilization, which has its good as well as its bad points. Dear me! I certainly did not mean to make an analysis of Mr. Lawrence's character. Good-night, my little book!

_Nov_. 20. I cannot write to-night, and yet I must, I must. My head is bursting with thoughts and visions, my heart is swelling with new sensations. What an evening I have had! I shall never, never think myself courageous again. I, who have faced crowds with calmness, to quail before forty or fifty men and women, not one of whom was more intelligent or better educated than myself! But let me write it out if I can. I accepted Mrs. Fordyce's invitation to a little party. It was graciously given, and I, fool that I was, thought it was to do me honor that I was asked. I did not know then that these women of society will commit a baseness for a new sensation or to gratify an emotion of curiosity. I have been so admired, so looked up to by the men who have surrounded me, I never dreamed of being the object of mere curiosity or amusement. Well, I went. The room was half full of men and women, talking, laughing, moving about. I was alone, and from the moment of my entrance into that blaze of light I felt lonely and weak; but I crossed the room and spoke to my hostess. She greeted me graciously, and then some one else came up, and I stood aside. Suddenly the sense of eyes upon me came over me. How those women stared! Never before had I been among women and felt no bond of sisterhood. How was it? was I unsexed, or they? There seemed a gulf between us: I read it in their eyes, it came to me in the air, a subtle but keen conviction. And how exquisite they were!--so soft and smooth and white, with no lines on their foreheads or creases round their mouths. I had never had such a sense of beauty given me before by anything but pictures. I wondered the men did not kneel to them: I felt as if I could myself if they would let me. As I stood there, my heart beating quick, and something in my throat beginning to choke me, dazzled and bewildered by the scene, a voice said--oh how gently!--in my ear, "Miss Linton, will you let me take you into the other rooms? There are one or two pictures you will enjoy." I tried not to start, but I trembled in spite of myself, the relief was so great. There we stood--he, Henry Lawrence, taller and handsomer and prouder-looking than any man in the room, looking down upon me and offering me his arm! I think I felt as I should if a lifeboat came to take me off a wreck--in a modified degree, I mean. I took his arm with a few rather inarticulate words of thanks, and we strolled through the other rooms, he listening to me with such earnest attentiveness, bending his head at every word, seeming so absorbed in me, so forgetful of the women who gazed at me as if I were a pariah, and the men who smiled on them as they did so. I confess it, I felt as if he stood between me and the mocking, coldly scrutinizing glances about me. I felt guarded, protected, and I could not struggle against the feeling, weak though I knew it was: it seemed irresistible. I suppose, being a woman like other women, I inherit traditional weakness, and cannot break the bonds of former generations in a day. Be it as it may, he did not seem to know or notice that I was not myself: he only seemed interested and absorbed. I did not feel as if I were taxing his courtesy, and soon I recovered my self-possession and talked naturally: my spirits rose, and my natural self-assertion returned to me. I enjoyed looking at the women, watching their ways and listening to the sound of their voices. It was a revelation of a new world to me, and I said as much to him.

"What in particular is it," he said, "that strikes you so?"

"I think," I answered, "it is the harmony of the whole effect."

"A thorough-bred woman always produces an harmonious effect," he said.

Something in his tone jarred me, and I said hastily, "I don't think development should be sacrificed to harmony: incompleteness is better than perfection sometimes."

He smiled sweetly: "Yes, but I am afraid we should hardly agree about the development of women, though I should like to hear you talk of it."

"Why should we not discuss and disagree?"

"I do not like to disagree with a woman at all, especially with a woman whom I admire," he said, bending his blue eyes on me with a look such as I had never seen before in a man's eyes. It was what I suppose would be called a chivalric look; and yet chivalry was only an improved barbarism.

Mrs. Fordyce came up just then, and introduced some gentlemen to me; and while they were talking Mr. Lawrence turned away. In a few moments he was back again with a lovely-looking young girl on his arm, blushing and yet self-possessed, with the same exquisite simplicity of manner he has himself. "My cousin Alice Wilton asks me to introduce her to you, Miss Linton," he said.

I have always--shall I confess it?--patted young girls on the head: this one I could no more have patronized than I could a statue of Diana. She was very charming to look at as she stood beside her cousin, and yet--No, I will make no exception: she was charming in every way, and I felt more at my ease that a woman had been presented to me.

Mr. Lawrence put me in my carriage. As he closed the door he said, "Your maid is not with you?"

I replied that I had none; on which he said to the driver, "Drive slowly: I mean to walk as far as the hotel with the carriage."

"Won't you get in?" I cried from the window.

He seemed not to hear me, but started off at a rapid pace, and I gave up the attempt, wondering at what seemed to me an eccentric choice. It was unnecessary for him to go with me at all, but I thought, "He has been, I suppose, brought up to think no woman can take care of herself." He was ready to open the door as I got out, and I longed to ask him why he had not driven with me; but I hesitated: something tied my tongue, and in a moment he had said "Good-night," and was gone with hasty steps into the darkness. I must stop, I am so tired.

_December_ 3. It seems to me I am growing to be a dreadful egotist. I put nothing down now in this little book but just what concerns myself--nothing of the great subjects of universal interest which have always absorbed most of my thoughts, but just my own doings and sayings. At this very moment I desire only to write about my afternoon, and the way in which I spent it. I will indulge myself, and the record may serve me. How it had snowed all day! how it did snow this afternoon when I started out, wrapped in my waterproof, accoutred to encounter the storm, and rejoicing in the absence of long skirts and hooped petticoats! With my India-rubber boots I felt I could plod through any snow-drift, and I gained a pervading sense of exhilaration from the beating of the storm in my face. I chose a certain street I had come to know, which ran straight through the town and on into a more thinly-settled suburb. It was a good, clear path, and I should be able to have a splendid walk without meeting probably more than a dozen people in the course of it. Just as I passed the last square of closely-built town-houses, and began to come upon the stretching white landscape before me, as I trudged along, turning my head a little aside to escape the brunt of the driving snow, I heard an exclamation of surprise, and a man's voice said, "You _here_, Miss Linton?"

It was he, Mr. Lawrence. There he stood, his eyes brilliant with the excitement of the storm, his cheek aglow with exercise, looking, as the old women say, "the very picture of a man." I am very sensitive to beauty, and his seems to me very great: it draws me to him.

"Yes it is I," I said (we had both stopped). "I wanted exercise and air, and something to change my frame of mind; so I came out for a tramp."

He turned with me, and we walked on. In a moment more he said, "Will you take my arm? It will be easier to keep step and walk fast then."

I took it, and he looked down at me and said, with an inscrutable smile, which haunts me yet, I suppose because I can't make out its meaning, "Do you believe in fate?"

"If you mean by fate something which the will is powerless to resist, against which it is unavailing to struggle, I do not," I answered. "Do you, Mr. Lawrence?"

He laughed, not a pleasant laugh, albeit musical, but as if his smile had been one with some hidden meaning in it: "I hardly know what I believe. Certainly some power seems to lay traps for our wills at times, and waylay us when they are off duty. As, for instance," he went on, "I wanted to see you to-day, and I did not go to see you: my will acted perfectly well, and I seemed able to resist any temptation. I came out here to walk alone, thinking that I should be even farther away from you here than elsewhere, when, lo! you start up in my path, and here we are together. It is just as if some malicious spirit had mocked me with an idea of my own strength, only to betray me the better through my weakness." He spoke with an intensity which seemed out of place, and strangely unlike his usual calm manner. Somehow, a feeling of great delight had come over me as he spoke. I felt pleased--why I do not know--at his evident impatience and annoyance.

"But why," said I, "did you turn with me? _There_ would have been the moment for your will to act."

"You think so? That is hardly fair, Miss Linton. Does one brand a soldier as a coward and a laggard who has fought and won a battle, and has sunk exhausted upon his arms to sleep, if he is discomfited and dismayed when, just as slumber has him in its arms, a fresh foe sets upon him? No, I _could_ not turn back."

His eyes were bent on me again, and something in them stirred my soul to its depths. Such a delicious feeling seemed stealing over me--a feeling of mixed power and weakness. I felt my color rise, but I looked ahead over the snowfields and said, "I don't see why you should have turned back. Why should you want to be with me and not be with me? I wanted to see you too."

I started as he spoke again, for his voice and manner were both changed--all the quiver and intensity gone out of them. "The 'reason why' of a mood is hard to find sometimes, and when found one has a conviction that no one but one's self would see its reasonableness," he said with a laugh cold and musical. "Let us talk of something we can both be sure to understand."

He seemed far away again. For a moment he had seemed so near--nearer, I think, than I ever remember to have felt a man to be. Then he talked, and talked very well, and made me talk, though it was not as easy as it usually is to me, and though we spoke of things that are generally to me like the sound of a trumpet to the war-horse. My spirit did not rise: the words would hardly come. I wanted to be alone and think it over--think over his words, his manner, his voice, the look in his eyes, and see what they meant, and, if I could, why he had changed so suddenly to me.

When we had walked some distance farther he himself proposed turning back, and took me home. As we neared the hotel I could not resist asking him why he had not come home with me that night in the carriage instead of walking, or running rather, beside it.