I.
There was a little crowd of friends at the railway station, to see us take our leave of Chicago, at noon on Sunday, January 20, 1884. The weather was cold, but there was a bright, sunny sky. Everybody was in good spirits. The “Edwin Forrest” car, in which we travelled, had now quite a familiar appearance. George, a colored attendant who had charge of it, was there, with a merry grin upon his broad, intelligent features. “A right good fellow, George,” said Irving. “Yes, that’s so,” was George’s response, as he relieved him of his coat and stick, and led the way to the pretty little suite of rooms on wheels allotted to Irving and his friends. The other cars were also admirably appointed. “This is something like a day for travelling,” said one member of the company to another. The sun blazed down upon them as they walked about, awaiting the signal for departure, but there appeared to be very little warmth in it. The sunbeams were bright, but they seemed to have contracted a chill as they fell. Every now and then a gust of icy wind would come along, as if to put truth into this conclusion. Terriss and Tyars, braving the weather without overcoats, as Englishmen delight to do, soon discovered that, after all, the winter was still with us. As the cry “All aboard,” followed by the clanging of the engine-bell, set the train in motion, we entered once more upon severely wintry scenes of ice and snow.
Within a very short time we found ourselves in the midst of snow-drifts, out of which preceding trains had had to cut their way. Gangs of men were clearing the track, flinging up the snow on both sides of the road in solid shovelfuls. The white débris was piled up six and eight feet high, where the snow had settled down in great drifts upon the line. “One train was stuck here five hours yesterday,” said the guard. “It is the heaviest snow in my experience.”
Moving onwards once more, we travelled through a world of snow: through prairie-lands, where the wind came tearing after us, waited upon by scudding clouds of snow, that rose like spray, to fall in its wake as if the prairie were a snow-sea; past forests of oak, with the brown leaves clinging to the tough branches, that moved with a sturdy kind of protest against the boisterous wind; across great rivers, that were closed to navigation. Now and then skating-parties flitted by us in sheltered bends of the great silent water-ways, and at intervals the sun would burst out upon the white world and fill it with icy diamonds.
We met a train with five engines. It came plunging along,—a veritable procession of locomotives. The foremost of them were mighty ploughs, to charge the growing snow-drifts we had left behind us. By and by the sun went down, and when our lamps were lighted, and it was night, as we thought, we looked out to see one of the magnificent sunsets which had been puzzling for many weeks the wise men of both worlds,—a wide red glare in the sky, stretching away as far as the eye could see, with a white foreground, the line of the horizon dotted with the dark configuration of farm buildings and forest trees.
At three o’clock in the morning we arrived at St. Louis, and on the next day I walked across the ice-locked Mississippi. In a street adjacent to the wharves, where steamers and boats of all kinds were frozen up, were the remains of an old hotel, that had been burnt out a short time previously. The thermometer stood at twenty degrees below zero. A first glance at the place, from a short distance, showed a house with what looked like packs of wool thrust out at the windows, and great bundles and entanglements of wool hanging down to the ground from eaves and window-sills. On examination these strange appearances turned out to be excrescences of ice,—part of the water that had been poured upon the flames by the fire-brigades, whose engines had literally been frozen up in the street. Inside the devastated buildings the ruins were hung with icicles many feet in length, with others rising to meet them, mimicking the stalactites and stalagmites of the Cheddar caverns, in England, not to mention the more famous caves of Kentucky.
A picturesque city, St. Louis, smoky and not overclean, but seated grandly upon the broad river which local enterprise has spanned with a roadway that is worthy of the engineering skill of the people whose locomotives climb the Rocky Mountains, and whose bridges are the admiration of the world. One of the picturesque memories of the tour, that will reappear at odd times in “the magic lantern of the mental vision,” will be the procession of carts and wagons drawn by teams of mules, driven by colored drivers, that is continually passing over the bridge, across the Mississippi, at St. Louis. The English government have obtained a great many mules from this part of the United States. There could be no finer breed of this useful animal than the examples one saw at St. Louis. The drivers, almost to a man, appeared to be wearing old army cloaks. The greyish-blue of the cloth and the red linings, toned down to rare “symphonies” of worn color, were in perfect harmony with the atmospheric and material surroundings. Smoke hanging like a pall over the city; a wintry mist creeping along the icy river; the approaches to the bridge lost in the local haze of smoke and snowy clouds; the great mercantile procession of mules, and carelessly laden wagons, bursting with cotton, corn, and hides, made a fine busy foreground to a very novel scene.
St. Louis accepted the plays, the acting, the scenery, and the stage management of the Lyceum with much of the earnest admiration that had characterized the Chicago audiences. The “Republican,” the “Globe-Democrat,” the “Post-Dispatch,” and the “Chronicle” had lengthy and appreciative notices of “The Lyons Mail,” “The Bells,” and “The Merchant of Venice.” The spirit of the criticism is crystallized in the following remarks, which appeared as an editorial in the “Post-Dispatch” of Jan. 22:—
To the delighted audience which hung with rapt attention last night on each word and look, each tone and motion, of Henry Irving, there was only one element of disappointment. This was that they had not been prepared at all for any such magnificent revelation of dramatic genius.... As far as the people of St. Louis are concerned we have only to say that those who miss seeing him will sustain a loss that can never be made good.