In the city of Portland I hired a horse and sleigh one morning, and resolved to drive a few miles into the country. It was snowing vigorously, but was not very cold; I had a spirited horse before me; a good light sleigh under me; and away I went, bounding over the road, neither knowing nor caring whither I went. By and by, when I had traveled five or six miles, and distanced a number of other travelers, in similar vehicles, on the way, I saw a town just ahead of me. The snow was still falling so briskly that I was almost in the town before I saw it. As I drove along, I asked a boy what place it was, and he said, “Westbrook.” I entered the village, and found it to be one of considerable extent. In fact, I drove half-a-mile, and still there was no end of houses. On the contrary, they became thicker and thicker; and I began to conclude that “Westbrook” must be quite a city. By and by I found myself on a street that reminded me forcibly of one I had seen in Portland; and, what made it more remarkable, I observed that it rejoiced in the same name. What a coincidence! But I marveled more still, as I followed this street a little way and passed an hotel that was the very image of the one I stayed at in Portland—and lo! there stood at the door a porter who was dark-skinned and cross-eyed, exactly like the porter of my hotel in that city! Was I dreaming? No, not exactly; but I must have been during my drive, for I had wandered around among the country roads in the snow-storm, lost my reckoning, and actually entered Portland again. I had come in through a little suburban village, north of the city, called “Westbrook;” and hence my delusion.
In Rutland, a beautiful little city nestling in a kind of basin high up among the Green Mountains of Vermont, I arrived one night at a late hour. I went to a good comfortable hotel—for they have such there—and asked for a “single room.” The host regretted that he had no single rooms unoccupied. Passengers from the earlier trains had taken them all. He could put me in a double-bedded room where another guest had just retired—one who appeared to be a “perfect gentleman:” that was the best he could do. It was the best I could do, too; so, I was shown to the room.
I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket, and, not being perfectly sure that the man in the other bed was a perfect angel, I thought there would be no harm in placing it in the watch-fob of my unimpeachables, and placing the same rolled up in a ball, under my neck. I did so. When morning came, the “other fellow” got up first, and I felt somewhat amused when I chanced to observe—for I was awake, and dreading to “turn out” on account of the sharp morning air—that he had done so too. We had both taken each other for rogues.
Well, that is the right way to view every stranger when you are traveling. Look on every man you meet, and especially if he speaks to you, as a deep-dyed villain, till you have had the most incontrovertible proof that he is not.
I made Boston my head-quarters, while visiting different portions of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts; and about the last of February, I departed for Philadelphia. I didn’t try the “dark-blue sea” again; but took the “Shore Line” railroad, stopping a short time in Providence, New Haven and New York.
I arrived in New York one March evening, and, allowing my baggage to go on to Philadelphia, resolved to remain in the city that night and go to the “Quaker City” next day. I wanted to go via the Camden and Amboy Railroad, and was told that the boat—for passengers on this road take the boat from New York to South Amboy, a distance of twenty-eight miles—would leave at six in the morning. That evening, while in the sitting-room of my old hotel, I observed two suspicious-looking fellows eyeing me rather sharply, and I felt that they were entitled to a little watching from me. So, I watched them. When I retired, I locked and bolted my door and even braced it with my crutch. [A handy thing to have in a house, sometimes.] I slept soundly till five o’clock, at which time the porter, according to instructions, knocked at my door and awoke me.
There was no one in the hotel below, when I went down but a sleepy porter, and I was wondering where my suspicious-looking friends (?) were, and where they stayed, and congratulating myself that I was escaping them nicely by going away at that early hour in the morning, when the street-door opened and the two identical gentlemen stepped in, and took a seat by the stove. Pretending not to notice them, I stepped out.
It was still far from daylight, and the snow was flying merrily. The wind was howling, and each blaze of gas in the street-lamps was fluttering and struggling as though it might go out at any moment. I wanted to go to Pier No. 1, North River, from which the boat was to start, and I walked as fast as I could—and that was not slow—toward Broadway, glancing back over my shoulder at intervals of two seconds, to see if my villains were coming. It was the quietest hour I ever saw in New York. Not a stage, carriage, cart or car was astir in that part of the city; and neither policeman nor “any other man” was to be seen. The snow and wind combined were fairly blinding, and it was very far from being a “fine morning.”
I had nearly reached Broadway, when I looked back and saw the two dears coming, a square distant. They were passing a lamp-post, and the glimpse I caught of their figures convinced me of their identity. Without exhibiting any haste or trepidation, I walked on to the corner of Broadway and Park Row and turned to the left; but instead of walking down Broadway, suddenly stepped aside and stood in the door-way of Barnum’s old Museum—which was still standing at that time, but over whose ashes Bennett’s majestic marble palace now stands—leaned my cane up in a corner, drew my revolver, cocked it, and awaited the attack.
I had just completed my preparations for a defence of my position, when the happy pair came. The light of a street-lamp at the corner shone full upon them, and I must have been blind indeed if I had not recognized them. Their hats were drawn down over their eyes, to shield those organs from the driving snow, and as I was in the shade, they failed to see me, and rushed by. They were running, their footsteps soon died away, and their “forms” faded down Broadway, which was then as quiet as a country lane. I was very well satisfied to escape an encounter with them, because I preferred not to shoot them, as I would certainly have found it necessary to do had they seen me.