I knew they would soon discover that I had dodged them, and return; so, replacing my revolver, taking my cane, and keeping an eye down Broadway, I glided across the silent thoroughfare, went down Vesey Street to North River, and thence down West Street to Pier No. 1, which was not really much out of my way.
I reached the boat in good time, and arrived in Philadelphia that day by twelve o’clock.
CHAPTER XI.
Narrow Escape in a Row at Baltimore.
ABOUT the middle of March I concluded to take a tour to Baltimore, Harper’s Ferry, Antietam Battle-field, Hagerstown and Harrisburg: at all of which places—and especially Antietam—I had been before. I intended to occupy three or four weeks, and made arrangements to act meantime as correspondent for a paper.
Nothing unusual happened to me on the way to Baltimore, except that on looking from a car window at Havre de Grace, a small particle of cinder from the engine flew into my eye; which kept it red and inflamed, and furnished me with first-class pain, at intervals, for the ensuing two weeks.
A bit of cinder from a locomotive, with all its “fine points,” is, I think, the severest thing that can work its way into a man’s optic organ. Had railroads been in vogue in the days of King John, what a point young Arthur might have made, when remonstrating with Hubert who had been authorized to burn his eyes out with a red-hot poker, and eloquently descanting on the sensitiveness of the eye, by reminding him how it felt even when a cinder from a locomotive got into it. For example, how would the passage read in this shape?——
“O, heaven! that there were but a mote in yours,
A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wand’ring hair,
Or the ten-thousandth part of a dead spark
From the smoke-stack of a lo-com’-o-tive;