By-gone Tourist Days: Letters of Travel

BY-GONE TOURIST DAYS

By LAURA G. COLLINS Author of “Immortelles and Asphodels” ILLUSTRATED “I consider letters the most vital part of literature” — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
CINCINNATI THE ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY 1900
Copyright, 1899, By The Robert Clarke Company.
INSCRIPTION.
Respectfully inscribed to the dear friends to whom the letters were written, and by them preserved.

HERE to begin? That is the question. The ideas, thoughts, feelings, come, not in battalions, but like the hosts of Alexander, or our own, in “the late unpleasantness,” or like the bubbles in the foam on the crests of the waves “a moment here, then gone forever.” I am wishing for the arms of Briareus, with their hundred hands, to help catch and fix them on the page. Such a trip! The Atlantic was never known to exhibit such a peculiar turbulence of waves and water generally. The steamer Adriatic (in which we sailed April 6th) kept up such a lurching and pitching as I never had an idea of before. One day it was impossible for me to keep my feet, and after trying in vain to dress in the morning, I retired to my berth. But it was as much as the sailors could do to keep their feet, and three were badly hurt. How my friends would have laughed, could they have seen my frantic struggles to accomplish a toilette. The two “steamer trunks” and our hand satchels were chasing each other all around me, and knocking wildly from one side to the other, and I in the midst, shooting and slipping, clutching and grabbing, wildly, frantically, at doors, berth and washstand. But I was so glad not to be seasick, I didn’t mind anything else much.
One spectacle of this turbulence in the “r-r-r-rolling forties,” as the chambermaid called our bearing (I wish I could give that whirr of her r s), was of peculiar and extraordinary sublimity and uniqueness. It kept me at my porthole for I know not how long. The steamer was sweeping right along in an immense hollow, or crater as it were, in the ocean, and in which was comparative calm. Afar off the water rose in encircling ranges of vast mountains—“Alps upon Alps”—capped with white foam. From these snowy cones, like the eruptions of volcanoes, burst forth in swift succession great columns of the seething mass that shot upward apparently to the very heavens and exploded.