Chapter VI: Part 6

The pilot has just come on board and brought us Canadian papers with copies of telegrams, and general vague rumours of terrible reverses for France. I always looked for them, as you know. This frightful reign of eighteen years, begun in perjury and bloodshed, and continued by constant pandering to the worst tendencies of France, must have taken the power and heart out of any nation. I pity the poor Canadians who still hold themselves more French than anything else, as indeed they are. They gather on deck and tell one another that the news is German, that it is all mere rumour. They will find it too true in another day or two. I am very glad to hear that the Orleans princes are now to go back. They are a family of very gallant and able gentlemen, and ought to be with France at this moment. Wrong as I think her, I hope she may soon be able to rally, shake off the charlatans whom she has allowed to misrule her, and conclude an honourable peace. The pilot-boat went back at once, and when she lands our safe arrival will be telegraphed at once, so that I hope you may see it before to-morrow evening--if you only know where to look in the newspaper. I often think how very different those short announcements at the head of the Shipping news will seem to me in the future.

“Allan Line. The _Peruvian_ arrived off Father Point yesterday. All well.”

Wednesday.

Events have been crowding us during the last thirty-six hours--bless me, I mean the last sixty hours--I had positively written Tuesday instead of Wednesday at the top of this. I let my watch run down on the _Peruvian_, as it was too provoking to have to put it back thirty-five minutes every morning. Since then time has gone all whiz! however, I shall pick up the time now and get to my bearings, at least I shall try. Well, all Sunday afternoon we ran up the glorious St. Lawrence, past the mouths of what we should call big rivers, past the Canadian watering-places, past one long straggling village except where the hills are too steep or the soil absolutely barren. The view is not unlike many Scotch ones, substituting scrub or stunted forest for heather. This of course is a great disadvantage in a picturesque point of view, but it is more than compensated by the great river. I am very glad I came to the new world up the St. Lawrence. Nothing could have brought the startling contrast of the old and new world so vividly home to me as this steaming literally day after day up the stream, and finding it still at 700 miles from the mouth two miles broad, with anchorage for the largest ships that float. We went the round of the ship with the Captain after dinner, to see the wonderful detail of the storerooms, and the huge fire-system which goes glowing on through all the voyage. The sight of the twenty-five great furnaces glowing, and consuming fifty-two tons of coal a day, quite scared several of the ladies, who seemed to think that the Peruvian was flying, I should say sailing, presumptuously in the face of Providence not to have caught fire during the voyage. Luckily we were within a few hours of port, so their anxiety was not of long duration. I went to bed for the last time in my crib on the top of the drawers, leaving word for the quartermaster to call me when we were getting near Quebec. Accordingly I was roused at about three from one of the sleeps without a turn even (by reason that there is no room to turn) which one gets on board ship, and scuffled up on deck in my trousers and fur coat to find myself in the most perfect moonlight rounding the last point below Quebec. Then up went three rockets, and as we slacked our speed at the side of the wharf right opposite the citadel, two guns were fired and the voyage of the Peruvian was over. My packing was all done, so while the vessel was being unladen I went quietly to bed again and slept for another two or three hours amid all the din. Between six and seven I turned out again and had a good breakfast on board, after which came leave-takings, and then those of us who were not going on by train and were ready to start, went on board a little tug ferry-boat and were paddled across to Quebec. I have sent a small map to show you how the land lies. Our ferry-boat took us over from Port Levi to the quay just under the Citadel along the line I have dotted, and we at once chartered two carriages to visit the falls of Montmorency, to which you will see a line drawn on the map and which is about six miles from Quebec. Oh, the air! You know what it is when we land at Dieppe, or at Brussels, or Aix. Well, all that air is fog, depressing wet blanket compared to this Canadian nectar. I really doubt whether it would not be almost worth while to emigrate merely for the exquisite pleasure of the act of living in this country.

Montreal, 19th August 1870.

I must get on with my journal or shall fall altogether astern--you have no idea how hard it is even to find time to write a few lines home; however if I can only make up the time to-day I hope to keep down the arrears more regularly hereafter. We had a long day of sightseeing in and about Quebec. First we drove down to the Montmorency Falls, 220 feet high and very beautiful, then back to the Citadel, which rises some 600 or 700 feet right above the river--a regular little Gibraltar; then we went off to the Heights of Abraham, at the back of the Citadel, where Wolfe fought his battle and was killed after scaling the cliffs in the early morning. Then we drove down into the town, and had lunch at a restaurant, and walked about to see the place. Well worth seeing it is; a quaint, old, thoroughly French town of the last century dropped down into the middle of the new world. In the evening we went on board the great river steamer, and came away all night up the St. Lawrence to Montreal. There were 1000 passengers on board, every one of whom had an excellent berth--mine was broader and lighter than that on the _Peruvian._ We were not the least crowded in the splendid saloon (some 150 feet long), and the open galleries running all round the ship in two tiers. I preferred the latter, though there was music, Yankee and Canadian, in the saloon, and spent my evening till bedtime out in the stern gallery looking at the most superb moonlight on the smooth water you can conceive. We had a small English party there, and there were half a dozen constantly changing groups round us. The girls have evidently much more freedom than at home, at least more than they had in our day--two or three would come out with as many young men, and sit round in a ring. The men lighted cigars, and then they would all set to work singing glees, songs, or what not, and chaffing and laughing away for half an hour perhaps, after which they would disappear into the saloon. There was a regular bar on board at which all manner of cool drinks were sold. We tried several, which I thought, I must say, very nasty, especially brandy-smash. After a most comfortable night I awoke between five and six as we were nearing Montreal. The city is very fine, the river still two miles broad, and ocean steamer drawing twenty feet and more of water able to lie right up against the quay. S------, a friend of Sir J. Rose’s, a great manufacturer here, whom I had taken to the “Cosmopolitan,” was in waiting on the landing-place, and took us at once up to his charming house on the hill (the mountain they call it) at the back of the city. He is a man of forty-three or forty-four; his wife, a very pleasant woman a little younger, and adopted daughter, Alice (a very sweet girl of nineteen, just home from an English school), form the whole family. I can’t tell you how kind they are and how perfectly at home they have made us. After breakfast we went down to see the city, got photographed with the rest of the above-named Peruvians, had a delicious lunch of fried oysters at a luncheon shop kept by a Yankee, washed it down with a drink called John Collins, a pleasant, cold, weak, scented kind of gin and water. Sir Geo. Carter and Sir Fras. Hinks, two of the present Government, both of whom I had met in England, came to dinner, also Holton the leading senator of the Opposition, and the two young Roses, one bringing his pretty young wife, and we had a long and very interesting political talk afterwards. Nothing could have suited me better, as there are many points of Canadian politics I am very anxious to get views on. We didn’t get to bed till 12.30, so I had no time to write. On Wednesday we saw more of the city which I shan’t attempt to describe till I can sit by you with photographs and explain, lunched at the Club, of which we have been made honorary members, with a large party of merchants and other big folk, and then at three were picked up by Mrs. S.---, who drove us up the river to a place called Lachine, past the rapids (see Canadian boat-song), “The rapids are near and the daylight’s past.” Lachine gets its queer name from the first French Missionaries who started up the St. Lawrence to get to China, and for some unaccountable reason thought they had reached the flowery land when they got to this place, so settled down and called it China. The air was still charming, but the sky was beginning to get less bright, and Mrs. S---- and A------agreed that there must be a forest burning somewhere. And so it proved, for in a few hours the whole sky was covered with a smoke-cloud, light but not depressing, like our fogs, but still so dense that we could scarcely see across the river. We got back in time for dinner, to which came Colonel Buller, now commanding the Rifles here; Hugh Allan, the head of the great firm of ship-owners to whom the _Peruvian_ and all the rest of the Allan line packets belong; and several young Canadians. It was very pleasant again, and again I got a heap of information on Canadian subjects from Allan, who is a longheaded able old Scotchman, the founder of the immense prosperity of himself and all his family. He has his private steam yacht and a great place on a lake near here, wherein is a private telegraph, so that he can wire all over the world from his own hall. Prince Arthur went to stay with him when he was out here in the late autumn and spring, and the Queen wired him every day while he was there. Early next morning S------,

Miss A------, I, and R------ were off by rail to a station ten or twelve miles up the river, where we waited till the Montreal market-boat came down and picked us up to shoot the rapids. We had a very pleasant run to Quebec, and the shooting the rapids is very interesting, but neither dangerous nor even exciting. The river widens out perhaps to two and a half miles in width, and for some mile or mile and a half breaks into these rapids, which boil and rush along at a great pace, and in quite a little boat would no doubt keep the steerer and oarsmen on the stretch. The approach to Montreal under the great Victoria Bridge, two miles long, is very noble. We got back to breakfast at ten, and afterwards went up the mountain at the back of the town, but the haze from the burning forest quite spoiled the view. The carriage is announced, so I must close.

Montreal, 20th August 1870.

I hurried up my letters yesterday, so as to bring my journal down to the day I was writing on, fearing lest otherwise I should never catch the thread again. I doubt whether I told you anything about this very fine city, in the suburbs of which we are stopping, and which we leave to-day. Well, I scarcely know how to begin to give you an idea of it. It isn’t the least like an English or indeed any European town, the reason being, I take it, that it has been built with the necessity of meeting extremes of heat and cold, which we never get. Except in the heart of the city, where the great business streets are, there are trees along the sides of all the thoroughfares--maples, which give real shade, and are in many places indeed too thick, and too near the houses for comfort I should say--as near as the plane-tree was to our drawing-room window at 33. This arrangement makes walking about very pleasant to me, even when the thermometer stands at 90° in the shade as it did yesterday. Then instead of a stone foot-pavement you have almost everywhere boards, timber being the most plentiful production of the country. Walking along the boards in the morning you see at every door a great lump of ice, twenty pounds weight or so, lying there for the maid to take in when she comes out to clean. This is supplied by the ice merchants for a few shillings a year. The houses are square, built generally of a fine limestone found all over the island (Montreal is an island thirty-six miles long by nine wide), and have all green open shutter-blinds, which they keep constantly shut all day, as in Greece, to keep out the heat, and double windows to keep out the cold. The roofs are generally covered with tin instead of tiles or slates, and all the church steeples, of which there are a very large number, are tinned, as you remember we saw them in parts of Austria and Hungary. There are magnificent stores of dry goods, groceries, etc., but scarcely any shops in our sense. No butcher, milkman, greengrocer, etc., calls at the door, and the ladies have all to go down to the market or send there. Nothing can be better than the living, but Mrs. S------ complains that it is very hard work for _hausfraus_, and I have heard Lady K------ say the same thing. This house is in one of the shaded avenues on the slopes of the mountain, two miles I should say from the market. Mrs. S------- drives down every marketday and buys provisions, market-days being twice a week, but the stalls are open on other days also, so that if a flood of company comes in on the intermediate days, the anxious housewife need not be absolutely done for. The living is as good as can be, not aspiring to first-rate French cookery, but equal to anything you find in good English houses. Prices are very reasonable except for fancy articles of clothing, etc. Furs, which you would expect to find cheap, are at least as high as in London, and R------made an investment in gloves for which he paid six shillings a pair. The city is the quietest and best-behaved I ever was in. We dined at the mess of the 60th Rifles last night, and walked home through the heart of the city at 10.30. Every one had gone to bed, apparently, for there wasn’t a light in fifty houses and we literally met no one--not half a dozen people certainly in the whole distance. Altogether I am very much impressed with the healthiness of the life, morally and physically, and can scarcely imagine any country I would sooner start in were I beginning life again.

Tuesday morning, 23rd August 1870.

Well, to continue, on Saturday we broke up from Montreal, having I think seen very thoroughly all the persons and things best worth seeing in the place. Our host had arranged that we should go and spend Sunday with Mr. Hugh Allan, the head of the family which has established the line of mail steamers to Liverpool and Glasgow. He has been forty years out here, and when he came Montreal had only 17,000 inhabitants, now it has 150,000; there was scarcely water for a 200 ton ship to lie at the wharf, now you can see steamers of 2000 tons and upwards always there. Hugh Allan is evidently a very rich man now. He has a big house on the mountain behind Montreal, and this place where I am now writing from, on Memphremagog Lake, which if you have a good map, you will find half in Canada and half in the New England state of Vermont. It is a lovely inland sea, about thirty-five miles long and varying from one to three miles broad. Mr. Allan’s house, where he entertained Prince Arthur in the spring, stands on the top of a high well-wooded promontory, about half-way up. It is a good, commodious, gentleman’s house, with deep verandahs, thoroughly comfortable, but without pretence or show of any kind. There is a large wooden out-building called the Hermitage, about one hundred yards off, divided entirely into bedrooms, so that there is room for lots of guests besides the family, seven or eight of whom are here. In another building there is an American bowling-alley, and an excellent croquet ground before the house. Mr. Allan keeps a nice steam yacht, which runs about the lake daily with any one who likes to go, and there are half a dozen rowing boats, so time need not hang heavily on the most restless hands. I accepted the invitation, as a few days at Memphremagog is evidently considered the thing to do by all Canadians, and the last twenty miles or so of the railway to Newport (Vermont), the place at the foot of the lake at which you embark, has only just been finished, right through the forest, so that it was a good chance of seeing the beginnings of colonial life in the bush. And I am very glad that I did come, for certainly if the journey (120 miles altogether) had been planned for the purpose, it couldn’t have been more interesting. After leaving Montreal we travelled I should say for from thirty to forty miles through reclaimed country, dotted with French villages and the homesteads of well-to-do farmers. Then we gradually slipped into half-cleared woods, and then into virgin forest. Presently we came across a great block of the forest on fire, but in broad daylight the sight is not the least grand, though unpleasant from the smoke, and melancholy from the waste and mischief which the fires do. I think I told you in my last that the forests about Ottawa, the capital of the Dominion, were on fire last week. The fire became so serious that great fears were entertained for the town, the militia and volunteers were called out, and a special train with fire-engines was sent up from Montreal. Scores of poor settlers were in the streets, having with difficulty escaped with their lives, and last of all several wretched bears trotted out of the burning woods into the town. The fire we passed through was not at all on this scale, and didn’t seem likely to get ahead. There were the marks of fires of former years on all sides in these forests. Tall stems by hundreds, standing up charred and gaunt out of the middle of the bright green maple underwood, which is fast growing up round them, and in a very short time makes the tangle as thick as ever. Before long we came to small clearings of from three to four acres, on each of which was a rough wooden shanty, with half a dozen wild, brown, healthy-looking children rolling and scrambling about it, and standing up in their single garments to cheer the train. On these plots the trees had all been felled about two feet from the ground, and the brushwood cleared away, and there were crops of Indian corn, oats, or buckwheat growing all round the stumps. Then we came to plots which had been occupied longer, where the shanty had grown into a nice-sized cottage, with a good-sized outhouse near. Here all the stumps had been cleared, and the plot divided by fences, and three or four cows would be poking about. Then we came to a fine river and ran along the bank, passing here and there sawmills of huge size, and stopping at one or two large primitive villages, gathered round a manufactory. In short, in the day’s run we saw Canadian life in all its phases, ending with a delicious twelve miles’ run up the lake in Mr. Allan’s steam yacht, with the whole sky flickering with Northern lights, which shot and played about for our special delight. Our railway party were Mr.

Allan; Mr. and Mrs. S------, and Miss B------, their adopted daughter; General Lindsay, whom I knew well in England and like very much; Colonel Eyre, his military secretary, and ourselves. Then there are eight children here. “We had a most luxurious car, with a little sitting-room in which we each had an easy chair, and there were two most enticing-looking little bedrooms, everything as clean and neat as you could have it, and we could walk out on to a platform at either end to look at the view. There was a boy also in attendance in a little sort of spare room where the luggage went, who ministered any amount of iced water to any one who called. This is decidedly the most luxurious travelling I ever had, but then the car was the private one of the manager of the Grand Trunk Railway; and the democratic cars in which every one else went, and in which indeed we had to travel for the last few miles, were very different affairs. Fancy my intense delight on Sunday morning, as I walked from the Hermitage up to the house to breakfast through some flower-beds, to see two humming-birds, poising themselves before flower after flower while probing and trying the blooms with their long bills, and then springing back with a stroke of their lovely little tails, and whisking off to the next bloom. They were green and brown, not so lovely in colour as many you have seen in collections, but exquisite as eye need ask to look at. The humming-birds have been certainly my greatest natural history treat as yet, not excepting the whales. I had seen a whale before, a small one, in the Hebrides, and I had never seen a hummingbird except stuffed; moreover I expected to see whales, but not humming-birds. We saw a fine great bald-headed eagle to-day, too, sailing over the lake, but his flight was not anything like so fine as those we saw soaring over the Iron Gates as we went spinning down the Danube nine years ago. We have a very charming visit here steaming about the lake, driving along the banks, playing croquet and bowls and billiards, and laughing, chaffing, and loafing to any extent. The family are very nice, and I hope he will soon be made a baronet and one of the first grandees of the Dominion. To-morrow morning at five we start for Boston in the steam yacht, which takes us down to Newport at the end of the lake. So by the evening I shall perhaps get a letter from you. How I do thirst for home news after three weeks’ absence.

Elmwood, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 25th August 1870.

I forget just where I left off, whether I had brought my journal up to our leaving Memphremagog or not. The last day there was as pleasant as the rest. The young folks played croquet and American bowls all the morning, while I lay on the grass watching for humming-birds and talking occasional politics to any one who would join me. At about twelve a retired judge, Day by name, who lives four or five miles off, drove over with a member of the Government (I forget his name) who was to start from the pier below the house in the lake steamer. Mr. Allan owns this steamer, which stops at his pier whenever he runs up a flag; so you see the privileged classes are not extinct by any means in the British dominion in the new world. Now the Judge, having a seat in his light sort of phaeton, proposed to drive me over to the post-office, about four miles off, where he was going, and to bring me back to luncheon. So I embarked behind his two strong little trotting nags and had a most interesting drive. The roads were not worse than many Devonshire lanes, and where the pitches were steepest, the stout little nags made nothing of them.

The views of the lake were exquisite, and the Judge one of the pleasantest of men. He had been employed in 1865 on a mission to Washington, and gave me very graphic accounts of his interviews with Lincoln and the other leading men there, and confirmed many of my own views as to the comparative chances of the two great sections of our race in the new world in the future. He is less apprehensive of Canada joining the United States than most men of his standing, and I think has good reason for his confidence. Material interest will perhaps for a time (or rather, after a time, for at present it is very doubtful on which side they weigh) sway in the direction of annexation to the United States, but the ablest and most energetic of the younger men of the cultivated classes are so strongly bent on developing a distinct national life, that I expect to see them carry their country for independence rather than annexation, when the time comes, if it ever should, of a final cutting of the ropes which bind them to us. After luncheon we went off in the steam yacht to a bay in the lake, and then in row boats four or five miles up the bay into the heart of the hills, where we saw bald-headed eagles, and black and white king-fishers five times the size of ours, and after a very interesting and pleasant excursion got back to dinner, finishing the evening with dancing. At five next morning we heard the steamer’s whistle calling us. The young ladies were up to give us a cup of coffee and parting good words, and then we-steamed down for Newport, where we were to take the rail through the Connecticut valley to Boston. On the Newport wharf which joins the station we said good-bye to Allan and Stephen, and shall carry away most charming memories of our stay in Canada. General Lindsay and Eyre went with us, and their companionship made the journey very agreeable, though it was as hot as the Lower Danube, and the dust more uncomfortable and dirtying than any we have at home. Most part of the way the soil is as light and sandy as that about Dorking, and the trains seem to raise greater clouds of it.

The greater part of the journey was along the banks of the Merrimac, a fine river with as much water as the Thames at Richmond, I should say, but spread over a bed generally twice as broad. We saw the White Mountains at a distance on our left, and passed through a number of flourishing towns. The thing that struck me most was the apparent fusion into one class of the whole community. As you know, every one goes into the same long carriages, holding from sixty to eighty people. Of these there were four or often five on our train, and I often passed through them (as you may do, up the middle, without disturbing the passengers, who sit in pairs with their faces to the engine on each side of the passage), as there was a great deal of local traffic, seventy people often getting out at a station, I thus saw really a very considerable number of people on this first day in the States, and certainly should have been exceedingly puzzled to sort them in the broadest way, either into rich and poor, gentlemen or ladies (in the conventional sense) and common people, or any other radical division. I certainly saw at some stations children running about without shoes, and workmen in as dirty blouses as those of Europe; but in the trains they were all well dressed, quiet, self-respecting people, without any pretence to polish, or any approach to vulgarity. The bad taste in women’s dress, which I am told to expect elsewhere, does not certainly prevail in New England. All the women wore neat short dresses, with moderate trimmings according to taste; but I did not see an extravagant garment or, I am bound to add, a really pretty one along the whole line. On the whole I thought the women as good looking as any I have ever travelled amongst, but paler and sadder, or at any rate quieter, than a like number of Englishwomen. Once or twice men in stove-pipe hats (the ordinary tile of so-called civilisation), and wearing perhaps better cloth and whiter linen than the average, got in, but not one whom you would have picked out as a person bred and brought up in a different way, and occupying a station above or apart from the rest, as you see in every train in England. It may have been chance, but certainly it was startling. Then another surprise. They are certainly the least demonstrative people so far as strangers are concerned that I have ever been amongst. I had the prevailing idea that a Yankee was a note of interrogation walking about the world, and besides craving for all sorts of information about you, was always ready to impart to you the particulars of his own birth, parentage, and education, and his opinion on everything, “from Adam’s fall to Huldy’s bonnet.” Well, I left our party purposely several times on the journey to try the experiment of sitting on one of the small seats carrying two only with a Yankee. In not one single case did either of those I sat by say a single word to me, and when I commenced they just answered my question very civilly and relapsed into total silence. I may add that this first experience has been confirmed since, both in street and railway cars.

We got to Boston at about seven, and then had our first experience of the price of things here. It is only four miles out to Lowell’s, who lives on the other side of Cambridge, but we were obliged to pay five dollars for a carriage to get out there. We could get nothing but a great handsome family coach with two horses, and in that, accordingly, out we lumbered. Cambridge is a very pretty suburb of Boston, the centre point of it being Harvard College, consisting of four or five large blocks of red brick building and a stone chapel, standing in the midst of some fine trees. Elmwood Avenue in which Lowell lives is about half a mile beyond the College--a broad road shaded on both sides by tows of trees planted as in the Boulevards, as indeed is done along all the roads. The Professor’s house is a good, roomy, wooden one standing in the midst of some thirty acres of his own land, on which stand many good trees, and especially some pre-revolutionary English elms of which he is very proud. He was sitting on the piazza of the house with his wife and Holmes’ brother, taking a pipe and not the least expecting us. The Irish maid told us to “_sit right down_” while she went to fetch him. In a minute he and his wife came and put us at our ease, explaining that no letter had ever come since we had landed. Mabel was away at the sea for a few days.

Elmwood Avenue, Cambridge, 31s£ August 1870.

I managed with some difficulty and scramble to get off a letter to you by yesterday’s post, which _ought_ to go by steamer from New York to-day, bringing my narrative up to our arrival here. We found Lowell on his verandah with his wife and friend, and sat there talking till ten. I am not the least disappointed with him, Henry Cowper notwithstanding. I have never met a more agreeable talker, and his kindness to me is quite unbounded. Then he has not a grain of vanity in his composition, but is as simple and truthful as the best kind of boy. The house is a wooden one, as four-fifths of the houses in New England are. It is roomy, airy, and furnished with quaint old heavy pieces, bureaus like ours, and solid heavy little mahogany tables, all dating from the last century. The plate in the same way is all of the Queen Anne shape, like your little tea-service and my grandmother’s milk jugs and tea-pots which George has. The plainness and simplicity of the living, too, is most attractive. We breakfast at 8.30, beginning with porridge, and following up with eggs, some hot dish, corn cakes, toast and fruit. Then there is no regular meal till six--a terribly late and fashionable dinner hour here, as the prevalent hour is two or three--and afterwards we have a cup of coffee and crackers (good plain biscuits) and a glass of toddy at ten. Miss Mabel and others have given us a desperate idea of the difficulties as to service, but they certainly do not exist in this establishment just now. The principal servant that we see is an Irish girl, Rose by name, who reminds me of one of Mrs. Cameron’s servants except that she is far more diligent. The ingenious way in which she hid away all my wardrobe in the ample cupboards and recesses of the bureau in my room was a perfect caution, and she whisks away my things and gets them beautifully washed, wholly refusing to allow me to pay for them. The parlour-maid is a little, slight, ladylike girl, who certainly is not a first-rate waiter, but then there is no need of one. The dinner is confined to one thing at a time--soup, sometimes fish, a joint, or chickens, and a sweet. The Professor opens his own wine at the table and passes it round, and very good it is, but one scarcely needs it in this climate. A cook whose acquaintance I have also made, and an Irishman who has been thirty years on the place in a roomy cottage, and attends to the cows, garden, and farm of thirty acres, complete the establishment. Mrs. Lowell, who is a very nice, quiet, and clever woman, is very fond of flowers, and manages to keep a few beds going about the house, and there are a number of very fine trees, so that though there is no pretence to the neatness and finish of English grounds and garden, the place has a thoroughly homely, cultivated atmosphere and look which is very attractive, and the whole town of Cambridge seems to be made up of just such houses. We have lost no time in lionising men and places. On Thursday we took the car into Boston and ascended the monument on Bunker’s Hill, 290 steps up a dark spiral staircase. Lowell had never been up it before, nor indeed has any native as far as I can find out. The view at the top repays you thoroughly for the grind with the thermometer at eighty in the shade. Boston Harbour, where the tea was thrown out of the English ships in 1775, and> the whole town and suburbs lie below you like a map, and are very striking. After descending we hunted up a number of people, including young Holmes, our Colonel, who was as charming as ever, absorbed in his law at which he is doing famously, and resolved in his first holiday to revisit England. He came out to dine, and fraternised immensely with R----, and with him a young Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, whom Conway had brought to our house years ago, and I had entirely forgotten. However he is a very nice fellow, and I don’t think I betrayed my obliviousness. Next day, Friday, we had a long country drive in the morning through broad avenues lined with three fascinating wooden houses, each standing with plenty of elbow-room in its own grounds, up to a wooded hill from which we got a splendid view of the city. Then I went into Boston and called on the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, who is one of the best talkers I ever met, and quite worthy to be the Colonel’s father. He is one of Motley’s oldest friends, and deeply grieved, as all good men here, at his recall. His chief talk was of his memories of his English visits, and the folk he met, and so I find it with all the best men and women here. Notwithstanding the bitterness which our press created during the war, I am convinced that with a very little tact and judicious handling on our side the international relations may be easily made all we can wish as far as New England is concerned. Afterwards I sauntered about the town, looking at some good statues in their park (Boston Common), and letting the place sink into me. The Common is about the size, I should say, of Green Park, but of a regular shape. It lies on the side of a hill at the top of which are the State House and other public buildings and private houses. It is well wooded with fine American and English elms (pre-revolutionary, they say, but I don’t believe it. They are not used to our elms, and I doubt whether any of these are 100 years old) on the upper part and along the sides; the middle is a great playground for the boys, who are diligent there all day at base-ball, our rounders, which I should think must spoil the enjoyment of the place for ladies and children. However they can always take to the pretty gardens at the lower end, in which is a very fine equestrian statue of Washington, and one of Everett by Story, by no means fine in my opinion. How should it be, when he insisted on being taken with his arm right up in the air, his favourite attitude in speaking, and stands up in that attitude in ordinary buttoned frock coat and trousers? Everett has not been a trustworthy public man to my mind, and is simply nothing unless it is an orator, and I can’t say I think it wise to put him up there on the palpable stump. But we have made so many mistakes in our public statues that I suppose it must run in the blood. The best houses in the town, really charming residences, line the two sides and top of the Common, and fine stores the bottom. I have never seen a place I would so soon live in out of England as in one of these houses looking on to Boston Common. The old business town is being rebuilt just as London--red brick two or three story houses giving way everywhere to five or six stories of granite or stone. The town has as old and settled a look and feeling about it as any I know; but they have few old buildings, and I am afraid are going to pull down the most characteristic, the old State House, because it has ceased to be used for public purposes, and its removal will make a fine broad place and relieve the traffic of several narrow streets in the heart of the town. It will be a sad pity, and so unnecessary here, for they might carry it off bodily to any other site. You know how we have often heard, and wondered, scarce believing, of the raising bodily of the great hotels, etc., at Chicago. Well, suddenly, in Boston I came across a great market, three stories high (the upper part being occupied as houses) and 150 or 200 feet long, as big, say, as three houses in Grosvenor Square, which they were moving bodily back on rollers so as to widen the street. There were the wooden ways and the rollers, and the great block with all its marketing and living inhabitants lying on them, and already some twelve feet on its journey. It did not look any the worse for its journey unless it were in the foundations, where there were a few places which had been filled up, I saw, with new brickwork. The long pit twelve feet deep which has been left between the market and the street will now be turned into cellars, over which the new pavement will pass. On the Saturday we dined with the Saturday Club at 2.30 P.M., where were all the New England notables now in town. I sat on the right of Sumner, the State Senator, who was in the chair, with Boutwell, the Secretary of the Treasury, on my right, and Emerson on the other side of Sumner. So you may fancy how I enjoyed the sitting. Emerson is perfectly delightful: simple, wise, and full of humour and sunshine. The number of good Yankee stories I shall bring back unless they burst me will be a caution. Forbes, a great Boston merchant who owns an island seventy-two miles long off the coast close to Nantucket and Cape Cod, which you will find in the map, came up and claimed to have seen me for five minutes when I had the small-pox in 1863.

He knows J------ well, and insisted on carrying us off to his island that night, that we might attend a huge campmeeting on a neighbouring island on Sunday. So he drove up here with us and we packed--the dear Professor agreeing that we ought to do it--went down sixty miles by rail, slept on his yacht, and found ourselves in the morning at his wharf on the island. Your second letter came to hand from Cromer when we returned here, and has as usual lighted up my life.

Cambridge, 2nd September 1870.

We are off this afternoon for Newport on our way to New York, and so south and west. The express man will be here directly for my luggage, which will be a little curtailed, as these dear kind people insist on our returning, and leaving all we don’t want in our rooms. So I shall drop my beaver, leaving it with the most serious admonitions in the charge of Rose, the Irish girl, who is a character. I will now take up the thread of my story, merely remarking that what you seem to think a dull catalogue of small doings at a small watering-place is quite unspeakably delightful to me away here. On the wharf at Nashont Island we found the two young F------s, the elder a colonel in the war, and five months a prisoner in the South, the younger, Malcolm, just left college. I never saw two finer young men, both of them models of strength. They had come down to meet us and bathe, so we stopped and had a splendid header off the wharf and a swim in the bay, after careful inquiries by R------ as to sharks, to which young F------ replied with a twinkle in his eye, that they didn’t lose _many_ friends that way. We walked up to the house after our dip, a large wooden building, with deep verandahs and sun-blinds, furnished quite plainly, even roughly, but capable of holding nearly any number of people. We were about eighteen at breakfast: Mrs. F------ a handsome, clever, elderly lady, born a Quaker, and with their charm of manner, who made tea for the party, and on whose right I sat. Opposite her was her husband with Mrs. L------, the young widow of Lowell’s nephew Charles, the famous soldier, on his left, and therefore opposite me. On my right, a young woman, a cousin of the F------s, a Mrs. P------, whose husband sat down towards the end of the table, the manager of a Western railway, who has given us free passes over his line. Colonel F------, the eldest son, was Lowell’s major, and served with distinction in the war, in which he was taken prisoner, and spent five months in Southern prisons; his wife, a buxom young woman with very good eyes, is Emerson’s daughter, and her brother, a bright boy of twenty-two or twenty-three, was near me. There were two daughters of the family, and two other girls and several boys, all pleasant and easy in hand; but the gem of the party was the young widow. She is not actually pretty, but with a face full of the nobleness of sorrow, which has done its work. I have seldom been more touched than in watching her gentle, cheerful ways, and her sympathy with all the bright life around her. Since the war, in which her husband and only brother R. S------(who commanded the first coloured regiment from Massachusetts, and was buried under his negroes at Fort Wagner) were killed, she has devoted herself to the Freedmen, and is Honorary Secretary to the Society for educating them. After breakfast we started in the yacht for the neighbouring island, on which the great Methodist camp-meeting was going on. This Sunday was the great day. They have occupied this island for some years, and have built there a whole town of pretty little wooden houses like big Chinese toys, dotted about amongst the trees. Most of them consist of only one long room, divided by curtains in the middle. The front half opens to the street, but raised one step above it is the sitting-room, and the inmates sleep in the back, behind the curtains. A few houses have a story above; but F------ bought a lot of photographs for us, which will show you the style of house better than a page of description. There were literally thousands of people on the island, upwards of two thousand collected in a huge circular tent in the middle of the houses, where a preacher was shouting to them. We sat on the skirts of the congregation and listened for some time, but as he was only talking wildly about Nebuddah, Positivism, Theodore Parker, and other heresies and heretics, I was not edified, and got no worship till he had done, when we all stood up and sang the doxology, which was very impressive. I was much disappointed at the gathering in a religious point of view. It was a rare chance for a man with a living word in him, those thousands of decent, sober, attentive New England men and women. They told me that in the evening it would be much more interesting, when there would be great singing of hymns, and many persons would tell how they came to experience religion as they call it; but we could not stay for this. The meeting lasts for weeks, and is in fact an excuse for the gathering at a pretty sea-place in the early autumn of a number of good folk who would think the ordinary watering-places ungodly, but have a longing for a break in their ordinary colourless lives. We sailed back in time for early dinner, meeting on the way huge steamers packed with passengers for the campmeeting, till they were top heavy. Next day we spent in, fishing off the rocks for blue-fish, and in a beautiful little lake of three-quarters of a mile long (one of several in the island) for bass. I caught a blue fish of nine lbs., the biggest and strongest I have ever caught, also the only bass which was taken; so I naturally crowed loudly. The island hours are: breakfast, eight o’clock or half past eight; dinner, two or three; tea, with cold meat, half-past six or seven. After tea on both evenings we got into full swing on the war. I found Mr. F------ and his wife deeply grieved and prejudiced as to our conduct, our feeling to them as a nation, etc., and set myself to work hard to remove all this as far as I could. As he is a very energetic and influential man it is worth taking any amount of trouble about, and I think I succeeded. In the evenings the young folk sang a number of the war songs, several composed by or for the negro soldiers, going to famous airs, and full of humour and pathos. The March through Georgia is very spirited, and a version of the “John Brown” March, which seems to have superseded “We’ll hang Jef Davies,” etc., exceedingly touching--at least I know it was so to me, as all the young folk sang--

He hath sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat,

He is sifting out the souls of men before His judgment seat:

Be swift, my soul, to welcome Him! be jubilant, my feet.

In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make them free.

Our God is marching on.

To think of what that sweet young woman had gone through (the news of her husband’s death at the head of his brigade, was read by her in a newspaper), and to see her sitting there calmly and trying to join in the chorus, was quite too much for me. However, nobody noticed my emotion. Our last morning, Tuesday, was spent in a famous wild ride over the island. After breakfast we found seven very excellent riding horses (three with sidesaddles) at the door. At home there would have been three grooms, here each horse has a leathern strap fixed to the bit, which you just buckle round his neck till you want to stop, and then fasten it to the nearest tree or lamp-post. The whole turn-out is of course rough, but I don’t wish to see nicer ladies’ hacks than the three which the two Miss F------s and Mrs. P------ rode. We sailed back in the yacht to another little port, a few miles north of New Bedford, F------ having provided us as a parting present with free passes over almost all the Western railways, which will save me at least £20 I should think. He is Chairman of several, and so can do it without any trouble. We found the dear Lowells expecting us, and my second letter also waiting, so you may think that I had a joyful evening. Next day, Wednesday, we drove to Concord to dine with Judge Hoar, the late Attorney-General of the United States, a very able, fine fellow. We passed over classic ground, the very road along which the English troops marched in April 1776 to destroy the stores, when the first collision of the War of Independence took place at Concord Bridge and in the village of Lexington. You may perhaps remember in the second series of the _Biglow Papers_ “Sumthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” in which old Concord Bridge and the monument which has been put up to commemorate the fight, talk together over the _Trent_ affair. The Judge’s two sons, very nice young fellows, pulled us up Concord River, which runs at the bottom of their garden, to the spot, and on the way (which is very pretty) we saw lots of tortoises sitting and basking on the stones, and popping in when we approached, and heard a lot of capital Yankee stories from the Judge. Dinner at three; Emerson came, and there were two Miss H------s, and a Miss S------, a handsome girl, sister of the best oar in the Harvard boat of last year. I enjoyed the dinner and smoke afterwards immensely, and am at last quite sure that I am doing some good with some of these men, all of whom are influential, and most of them sadly prejudiced against us still as a nation. For myself it is quite impossible to express their kindness. They seem as if they can never do enough for me. When we got back to Cambridge, we found Miss M------ and Dr. Lowell, brother to James, an English clergyman, and quite charming too in his way.

New York.