Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

One who has just come from the States may compare the manners and customs of the American travelling public with those of the Canadian. The former are very much in advance of the latter. The Canadian conductor, unlike his brother officer to the south, appears to make no attempt to keep things and persons in order for the general advantage. Anybody, however rough (and many Canadian travellers are in winter very rough indeed, perhaps because they are lumberers out for a holiday), is allowed to take his seat in the ladies’ carriage. The shaggiest and most unmannerly fellows, sometimes with short pipes in their mouths, and in their shirt sleeves, are permitted to perambulate the train, staring everybody in the face; I suppose merely to show that they are lords of the situation. But what I found the most annoying of all was, that I hardly ever left my seat for a few moments without finding on my return that some one had pushed my luggage and rug on one side, and taken possession of my place. This I believe to be a practice quite unheard of in the United States; at all events, I never noticed an instance of it. The only case of drunkenness I ever saw in any railway car was on the Grand Trunk line of Canada: it was that of a dirty, uncombed rough, who was uproariously tipsy; but neither conductor nor anyone else took any notice of him.

Again; the worst carriages in the States are better than those on the great Canadian lines. All the former have good springs; but the Canadians are too strongly protectionist to tolerate American cars on their lines, and their own native cars have, as far as my experience goes, no springs at all. A Canadian assured me that there had once been a time when they had had springs, but that they had now stiffened or worn out, or in some way or other gone to the bad. The effect is that there is an incessant short, sharp, rattling jar, which becomes very distressing. Their home-made carriages must also be very deficient in strength, or else their rails must be most alarmingly out of order; for in one day I counted about a dozen wrecks of trains lying by the side of the road. This is not encouraging as one goes along and sees (the ground being everywhere covered with snow) nothing else but overturned and smashed-up cars.

Still, we must remember that in the great bridge over the St. Lawrence, at Montreal, they have one of the grandest railway works in the world. It seems to be about a mile and a half long, and carries the train over the rapids of the St. Lawrence through a series of tubes supported by massive stone piers.

On crossing this bridge, on my return to the States, I left behind me on the west bank more than two feet of snow. In some places the fences were entirely buried. On the eastern side, however, of the river the snow was much thinner, and in less than two hours we were passing over a country from which it had almost disappeared. This was not lost on a voluble little Irishwoman, the chief talker in a party of Irish whom she had been endeavouring to persuade to leave Canada and settle in the States. ‘You see for yourselves,’ she said, pointing out to them how much less snow there was than what they had left two hours ago in Canada, ‘you see for yourselves that this is the land of freedom; for here, if a body has no shoes, she can go without them: but in Canada it is entirely too cold: faith, then, this is the land of freedom.’

American Railway Travelling.

For the first sixty miles of this journey we remained in the execrable carriages of the Grand Trunk of Canada Company, and in the hands of their officials, whose way of doing things leaves on the mind the feeling that their object is to show how what ought to be done may be neglected. The instant the Yankees took charge of the train everything changed, as if by magic. You could feel at any moment that the train was being driven against time, and not allowed to go anyhow. The smartness with which the driver brought it into the stations, and took it out, never waiting one instant longer than was necessary for giving up the mail-bags, or whatever it might be the conductor had to do, showed the value he attached to the passengers’ time, and to his own reputation for punctuality. I believe there were times when we were not stopped for more than thirty seconds. In a long day’s journey, to feel that the train is handled in this way has quite an exhilirating effect.

All day long we were winding our way among the hills of Vermont, which rose above the valleys to a height of six or seven hundred feet. Every valley had its stream. The land appeared generally to be poor; but, as is usual in such cases, it was very picturesque.

I tried sometimes to make out why it is that five hundred miles by railway in America do not fatigue one so much as fifty in this country. More than once in America I travelled upwards of a thousand miles at a single stretch, but never on any occasion, in a tour of eight thousand miles by railway, did I feel, either during a journey or after it, anything like fatigue or discomfort, or have any sensation to remind me that I had travelled a single mile. The only explanation I could hit upon was that on English and European railways you are shut up in a little box, in which you cannot move about, and in which there are incessant draughts from a door and window on each side of you. The result is, that your feet instantly get cold, and cold feet affect the whole system disagreeably. In American cars, however, from the way in which the floors are fastened, and from there being no side doors at all, one’s feet, with rare exceptions, even when the thermometer outside is below zero, are as far from being chilled as they would be in one’s own house. Of course the American cars have also a stove at each end.

CHAPTER XXI.

BOSTON IS THE HUB OF AMERICA—MR. TICKNOR—PROFESSOR ROGERS AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL—MR. NORTON—PROFESSOR AGASSIZ—MR. APPLETON AND MR. LONGFELLOW—MR. PHILBRICK—A GRAMMAR SCHOOL COMMEMORATION—HUMILITY OF THE BETTER LITERARY MEN OF BOSTON—REGRET AT LEAVING BOSTON.