If the hotel tried to make us pleased with ourselves, we were not allowed to keep our self-complacence long. When we went to Niagara, we passed a sort of taxidermist’s museum; its windows at least were full of stuffed beasts. The proprietor, standing in front of it, tried his best to make us “step inside and see the mummied mermaid” and his museum of the greatest educational wonders of the world. When we showed no interest in his collection he burst out with:
“If you’re going to remain as ignorant about everything you come to, as you are about this wonderful museum, traveling won’t educate you any!”
Put a little differently, it might have hit a mark. We had ourselves been saying, only a little while before, that we were undoubtedly missing lots of interesting things because we did not quite know how or where to see them. Yet, though we are still ignorant about the “wonders” of that particular museum, we are not always so indifferent. We have tried to look out for points of historical value and we have found many things of great diversion to ourselves. In Utica, for instance, we hung for hours over the railings of an exhibit of china making by the Syracuse pottery manufacturers. There is an irresistible fascination in watching the potter shaping pitchers, and the decorators putting decalcomania on plates and drawing fine gilt lines. The facility with which experts in any branch of industry use their hands is a marvel and a delight to me. I could stand indefinitely and watch a glass-blower, or a potter, or a blacksmith, or a paper hanger—anyone doing anything superlatively well.
I am not thinking of describing the world’s wonder of wonders, Niagara Falls, because everyone knows they are less than an hour’s run from Buffalo, with a splendid wide motor road leading out to them, and because their stupendous beauty has been described too often.
There were four bridal couples with us in the elevator that took us down to go under the Falls. One of the brides was apparently concerned about the unbecomingness of the black rubber mackintosh and hood that everyone puts on, for her evidently Southern husband said aloud:
“Don’t you fret about it, Nelly, you look real sweet in it, ’deed you do!” Whereupon each of the other three patted around the edge of the hood where her hair ought to be, and glanced a little self-consciously at the arbiter of her own loveliness.
Later, the young Southerner linked his arm in that of his bride lest she go too close to that terrific torrent of drenching water. The other three pairs walked gingerly through the soaking rock galleries in three closely huddled units. And the rest of us looked at them with that smiling interest that one irresistibly feels for happy young couples on their honeymoon.
On Sunday evening in Buffalo a man who looked as though he had been lifted out of a yellow flour barrel had come into the lobby of the hotel. We could not tell whether he was black or white or even human. A clerk, seeing us staring, remarked casually: “Oh, he’s just a motorist who has come from Cleveland. Gives you some idea of the roads, doesn’t it?”
We started the next day therefore in a rather disturbed frame of mind, and soon saw how on a Sunday, when every motorist is out, he had looked as he did. Even on Monday the dust was so thick that the wind blew it in great yellow clouds, sometimes making it impossible to see ahead. But most of the way it blew to the left of us, leaving us fairly clean and not enveloping us unless we had to pass another car going our own way. As we had gone out to the Falls in the morning, we did not leave Buffalo until about two o’clock, but in spite of bumpy roads and dust so thick that it made us swerve a little, we reached Erie easily at a little after six.
We left Erie the next day at two o’clock and arrived in Cleveland at seven—which was as fast as the Ohio speed limit of twenty miles an hour would allow. The road was much the same as it had been the day before. Forty miles of the whole distance was rather rough and very dusty; the rest was good, a little of it splendid.