“Very natural,” I observed.
After a good dinner, which I had the appetite to enjoy, this hospitable gentleman, despite my protestations, hitched up his horse and wagon, and took me to Hagerstown. I offered to pay him, but he regarded that idea as one of the best jokes he had heard lately. No, indeed; I mustn’t give a thought to such a thing!
“The idea of taking pay from you!” he said; and laughed till we both forgot about it.
I stayed at Hagerstown that night and next morning took an early train for Harrisburg, arriving there about noon. I only spent a couple of hours in Harrisburg, then took a train for Philadelphia, where I arrived that evening, and found my trunk awaiting me.
CHAPTER XIV.
The Hudson.
I SPENT the remainder of the spring and the first two months of the summer in New York, but as the extreme “caloric” of the “heated term” began to make the giant walls and solid streets of the metropolis next to intolerable, I determined to take a little tour up the Hudson, and out by the lakes into Ohio: and did.
But my grateful heart will not allow me to pass quietly by New York again without briefly acknowledging the sincere thanks I owe, for distinguished favors, to the following excellent gentlemen: Manton Marble, Editor of the World; Drexel, Winthrop & Co., Bankers, Wall street; Willy Wallach, Stationer, John street; Paschal S. Hughes. Merchant, Broadway; Henry S. Camblos, Broker, New street; and E. S. Jaffray, Merchant, Broadway. I can say no more.
Having made arrangements to correspond with a certain well-known journal, I started, about the first of August, on my projected tour, taking passage on the handsome steamer Daniel Drew for Albany.
They have on the Hudson river some of the finest boats in the world—low-pressure boats of immense size, that never think of bragging on speed that falls below twenty miles an hour. Some of them, by straining a muscle or two, have made twenty-five miles an hour, and felt none the worse for it next morning.
We started at eight o’clock one August morning; and what a change of atmosphere we experienced as we left the hot streets of the city far behind us, and glided up the Hudson—that most picturesque and romantic of rivers! The sky was bright and clear; and, however hot and close may have been the narrow and crowded streets of New York, the air with us was charming.