THE JOURNEY.
CHAPTER I.
Did you ever go a journey with your mother? No? Little Nelly did; it was great fun for her to see her mother pack the trunk. She had no idea before how much may be got into a trunk by squeezing. She thought it full half a dozen times, and laughed merrily when her mother pressed down the things with her hands, and piled as many more on top of them. Nelly and her mother were going to Niagara; that is a long way from New York. They went to bed very early the night before, for they knew that they must be up and off by daylight, breakfast, or no breakfast; for the cars do not wait for hungry people, as you may have found out. Long before daylight Nelly put her hand on her mother’s face, and said, It is time to get up, mother, and sure enough it was; so they both sprang out of bed, washed their eyes open, hurried on their clothes, and, I wish I could say, eat their breakfast, but unfortunately Nelly and her mother were boarding at a hotel. Now, perhaps you do not know that the servants in the New York hotels set up nearly all night, to wait upon people who stay out late at theaters, and like a nice dainty supper when they get home; and to take care of strangers, too, who arrive late at night; so you can imagine how tired they are, and how soundly they sleep, poor fellows, in the morning. Many of them are most excellent people, who bear without complaint all the hard words they get from those, whose chairs they stand behind, and who consider themselves privileged for that reason to insult and abuse them. No matter how weary they are, they must dart like a flash of lightning wherever they are sent, and get sworn at and abused even then for not going quicker. I remember well a middle-aged man who was waiter in a hotel where I once lived. He was as truly a gentleman as your own father. I could not bear that he should answer the bell when I rang it; it seemed to me that I should rather wait upon him. I could not bear that he should bow his head so deferentially every time he spoke to me, or be so troubled if my tea or coffee was not just as I was accustomed to have it. I could not bear that he should beg my pardon for every little omission or accident, so seldom occurring, too. I almost wished he would say something impudent or saucy; it made me so uncomfortable to see such a fine, dignified, gentlemanly man waiting upon my table, waiting upon people in the house, too, who were not fit to wipe his shoes; running hither and thither at the call of capricious, ill-bred children, whose wealthy parents had never taught them that servants have hearts to feel, and that they should be humanely treated. Ah, you should have seen our John; his manners would not have disgraced the White House. In fact I should not be surprised any day to hear that he was its master; for he who fills an inferior position faithfully and well, is he who oftenest rises to the highest. Remember that!
Well, as I was telling you, before I began about John, when Nelly and her mother got up, the poor, sleepy servants, who had not been in bed more than an hour or so, were not up, so Nelly nibbled a cracker and drank a glass of water, and she and her mother jumped into the carriage and were driven to the dépôt. How odd Broadway looked by early daylight! No gayly dressed ladies swept the pavements with their silken robes; no dandies thumped it with their high-heeled boots and dapper canes; no little girls, dressed as old as their mammas, glided languidly up and down, with their hands folded over their belts and an embroidered handkerchief between their kidded fingers. No—none but the useful class of the community were stirring: market-men, from the country, with their carts laden with lettuce, parsnips, cabbages, radishes, and strawberries, covered over with a layer of fresh, green grass, the very sight and odor of which made one long to be where it grew. Then there were milkmen, driving enough to tear up the pavement; then there were rag-pickers, gray with dirt, raking the gutters; then there were shop-boys and office-boys by the score, who had crossed the ferries to their work, for board in New York is expensive business; then there were tailoresses and sempstresses, more than I could count, with their shawls drawn round their thin shoulders, and their faces shrouded in their barege vails; then there were poor, tired news-boys asleep in entries and on steps, while others of their number rushed past with their bundles of damp papers. Little Nelly saw it all, for her eyes were sharp and bright; and now she is at the dépôt. All is hurry, skurry; carriages, cab-men, passengers, and baggage. Nelly’s eyes look wonderingly about her, and she keeps close to her mother, for the loud shouts of the men frighten her; now she is safe in the cars—how pale, sleepy, and cross every body looks! They hang up their traveling-bags on pegs over their heads, they fold up their shawls for cushions, they examine their pockets to see if their purses and checks are all right, they shrug their shoulders and pull down the windows to keep out the steam from the car boiler, for we are not yet out of the dépôt, they put their feet upon the seat, coil themselves up into a ball, and wonder why the cars don’t start. Siz—z—z, off we go—good-by New York, with your dust, and din, and racket—good-by to your sleepy belles, who are dreaming of last night’s ball, and getting strength to go to another; good-by to the gray old men who toil so hard to find them in dresses and jewels; good-by to their thoughtless sons, who spend so freely what they never earn; good-by to the squalid poor of whom they never think, though they may some day keep them wretched company; good-by to the poor old omnibus horses, who trot and stumble, stumble and trot, till one’s bones ache to look at them; good-by to the merry, sun-burned drivers, who so courteously rein up their horses, when ladies want to trip across the slippery streets; good-by to the little flower-girls, who manufacture those tempting little baskets of pinks, geraniums, and roses; good-by to the pretty parks, with their fountains and trees, nurses and children; good-by to the prisons, which often shut up better people than many whom the judges suffer to go unpunished at large; good-by to the hospitals with their groaning patients, watchful nurses, and skillful doctors. Good-by, we shall not be missed, no more than the pebble which some idle school-boy tosses into the pond, and which disappears and is thought of no more. Good-by, busy, dirty, noisy, crowded, yet delightful New York, for we are off to Niagara.
CHAPTER II.
How hot it is, how dusty—how hungry we all are. I hope we shall soon stop to dinner, for our stock of crackers and patience is exhausted, and nothing is left of the oranges but the peel. Ah, here we are! Only ten minutes to eat; what can the conductor be thinking about; does he take us for boa-constrictors? or does he think that, like the cows, we can store in our food and chew it whenever we get a chance? The fact is, he does not think any thing about it; all he cares for is to pack us all in the cars again and start at the last of the ten minutes. So I suppose we must elbow our way into the dining-room with the rest and scramble for a seat! “Beef, pork, mutton, veal, chicken, what’ll you have, ma’am?” “What’ll I have? oh, any thing, something, only be quick about it, please, for this little girl looks paler than I like to see her. Lamb and green peas, that will do; but, oh, dear, where’s our knife and fork? Turn round, Nelly, take that spoon and begin on the peas, we can’t stop for trifles. There’s that horrid fizzing of the car boiler, which warns us that we must swallow something or go hungry till bedtime. And here’s a custard, but no spoon; next time I travel I will carry a knife, fork, and spoon in my pocket. I wonder if the people who keep this eating-place forget these things on purpose, so that we need not eat our ten minutes’ worth of food? and we so hungry, too.” “Have an orange, ma’am?” “Of course I will: I have not had any thing else.” “Passengers ready—passengers please settle.” Poor Nelly swallows the last bit of custard and looks wistfully at those we leave behind, and we pay for our comfortless dinner, and scramble back into the cars. “All aboard.” Off we go again. The fat old lady in front of us goes to sleep; the gentlemen get out their newspapers. I wonder do they know how many people have ruined their eyesight trying to read in the cars? It is a losing way of gaining time, Mr. Editor; take my advice and put your papers in your pockets to read when you get to the next stopping-place. There is a woman taking out a needle and thread to sew—that is worse yet—but every body imagines they know best about such things, so I’ll not interfere. Here comes a boy into the cars with some books to sell. Little Nelly pinches my arm slily and looks very wise; she has spelt out, with her bright eyes, among the other books. “Fern Leaves.” Nelly is a bit of a rogue, so she says to the boy, “Have you Fern Leaves?” “Yes, miss, and Second Series and Little Ferns, too.” And he hands them to me. Nelly touches my foot under the seat, and looks as grave as a judge, while I turn over the pages, and when I ask the little boy who wrote Fern Leaves, she does not laugh, but looks straight out of the window at a cow munching grass by the road side, as if it were a matter of no concern at all to her. The little bookseller repeats my question after me, “Who wrote Fern Leaves?” and looks bewildered, then, after scratching his head, he answers, with the air of one who has hit it, “Fanny’s Portfolio, ma’am.” We did not buy the books, we had seen them before. But not till the last rag of the little bookseller’s torn jacket had fluttered through the door, did Nelly’s gravity relax: you should have seen, then, the comical look she gave me behind her pocket handkerchief, and heard her ringing laugh, well worth writing a book for, and which nobody understood but we two, and that was the best part of the joke.
By-and-by there was a quarrel in the cars about seats, for selfish people travel as well as the good-natured. A cross-looking man, with a wife to match, had monopolized two entire seats, in one of which they sat, and on the other placed their feet and their carpet-bags. It was not long before a large, well-dressed gentleman, with his wife, requested leave to sit on the seat occupied by the cross gentleman’s carpet-bags; to which the cross man replied, with a growl, and without taking down his feet, that that seat was engaged to some persons who had just stepped out. This was a fib; but the gentleman supposing it to be true, led the lady back to the sunny seat which she had just left, and which had given her a bad headache. An hour after, the big gentleman stepped up to the cross man and says, “Your friends are a long time coming, sir.” You should have seen the cross man then; how he sprang to his feet like a little bristly terrier dog, which he strikingly resembled; how he tauntingly asked the big, well-dressed man, how it happened that such an aristocrat as he did not hire an entire car for his lordship and her ladyship (meaning his wife). “I should have done so,” replied the gentleman, in a very low tone, as he turned on his heel, “had I known that pigs were allowed to travel in this car.” The laugh and the whisper, “Good enough for him!” which followed, might have abashed any body but our terrier, who stepped up to the principal laugher, who sat next me, and putting his face close to his, hissed between his shut teeth, “Shut up!” Nelly did not know what “shut up” meant, but she knew the meaning of the doubled-up fist which the terrier thrust into our neighbor’s face, and looked up at me to see whether there was any danger of our being thumped or not. Seeing only a smothered smile on my face, and the conductor approaching to set matters to rights, she soon became quiet.
On we flew, past houses, fences, trees, cows, sheep, and horses, some of whom pricked up their ears for a minute, then went lazily on munching grass, as much as to say, “That’s an old story;” others, finding an excuse in it for a frolic, raced over the meadows, and kicked up their heels, as if to say, “Just as if nobody could run but you!”
Hark! what’s that? Nobody answers; but the cars tip half-way over, we are all thrown in a heap on the floor, the window-glass comes smashing in, and the hot steam rushes in. A great fat man doubles me up over a seat, trying, like a great coward as he is, to climb over me to get out the window. We don’t know yet what has happened; but, “Get out of the cars!” says the conductor, “quick!” The window is too small to let out the fat man, so he kindly allows me the use of my ribs again, which must have been made of good material, or they would have been broken as he bent me over that seat. I snatch Nelly, poor pale Nelly! who never screams or speaks, for she is a real little Spartan—and we all clamber out into the tall, wet meadow-grass. Then, the danger over, great big tears roll out of Nelly’s eyes, and with an hysterical laugh, as she looks at the broken cars, she sobs out, in a half sorrowful, half droll way, this nursery snatch—“All of a sudden, the old thing bursted!”