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Mr. —— killed us with laughing with an account he gave us of some of Byron's sayings and doings, which were just as whimsical and eccentric as unamiable, but very funny. To-morrow we start for Utica: Mr. —— comes with us: I am glad of it—I like him.
Wednesday, 10th.
Just as we were getting into the railroad coach for Schenectady, a parcel was put into my hand: it was a letter from ——, and Pellico's "Mie Prigioni:" I was glad of it. At Schenectady we dined. By the by, I must not forget to mention the civility we met with from the people who kept the house. There have been so many instances given of the discomfort and discourteousness which travellers encounter in America, that it is but justice to record the reverse when one meets with it. For my own part, with very few exceptions, I have hitherto met with nothing but civility and attention of every description. We have almost always commanded private sitting, and single sleeping, rooms; have had our meals served in tolerable comfort and decency; and even on board the steam-boats, where every thing is done by shoal, I have found that, in spite of being an inveterate dawdle, and never ready at any of the bell-ringings, I have always had a place reserved for me, and enough to eat without fighting for it. But to return to our Schenectady hosts. The house was very full; and, while waiting for the canal boat, to avoid the gaping crowds with which all the rooms were filled, D—— and I walked out into the verandah, when a pretty lassie, the daughter, I conclude, of the house, invited us into a very nice private parlour, belonging to the family, where I found a fine piano, books, music, and all civilisation as well as civility. We proceeded by canal to Utica, which distance we performed in a day and a night, starting at two from Schenectady, and reaching Utica the next day at about noon. I like travelling by the canal boats very much. Ours was not crowded; and the country through which we passed being delightful, the placid moderate gliding through it, at about four miles and a half an hour, seemed to me infinitely preferable to the noise of wheels, the rumble of a coach, and the jerking of bad roads, for the gain of a mile an hour. The only nuisances are the bridges over the canal, which are so very low, that one is obliged to prostrate one's self on the deck of the boat, to avoid being scraped off it; and this humiliation occurs, upon an average, once every quarter of an hour. Mr. —— read Don Quixote to us: he reads very peculiarly; slowly, and with very marked emphasis. He has a strong feeling of humour, as well as of poetry: in fact, they belong to each other; for humour is but fancy laughing, and poetry but fancy sad. The valley of the Mohawk, through which we crept the whole sunshining day, is beautiful from beginning to end; fertile, soft, rich, and occasionally approaching sublimity and grandeur in its rocks and hanging woods. We had a lovely day, and a soft blessed sunset, which, just as we came to a point where the canal crosses the river, and where the curved and wooded shores on either side recede, leaving a broad smooth basin, threw one of the most exquisite effects of light and colour I ever remember to have seen over the water and through the sky. The sun had scarce been down ten minutes from the horizon, when the deck was perfectly wet with the heaviest dew possible, which drove us down to the cabin. Here I fell fast asleep, till awakened by the cabin girl's putting her arms affectionately round me, and telling me that I might come and have the first choice of a berth for the night, in the horrible hen-coop allotted to the female passengers. I was too sleepy to acknowledge or avail myself of the courtesy; but the girl's manner was singularly gentle and kind. We sat in the men's cabin until they began making preparations for bed, and then withdrew into a room about twelve feet square, where a whole tribe of women were getting to their beds. Some half undressed, some brushing, some curling, some washing, some already asleep in their narrow cribs, but all within a quarter of an inch of each other: it made one shudder. As I stood cowering in a corner, half asleep, half crying, the cabin girl came to me again, and entreated me to let her make a bed for me. However, upon my refusing to undress before so much good company, or lie down in such narrow neighbourhood, she put D—— and myself in a small closet, where were four empty berths, where I presently fell fast asleep, where she established herself for the night, and where D——, wrapped up in a shawl, sat till morning under the half-open hatchway, breathing damp starlight.
Thursday, 11th.
D——'s exclamations woke me in the morning: the day was breaking brightly, and the dewy earth was beginning to smile in the red dawn, when we approached Little Falls, a place where the placid gentle character of the Mohawk becomes wild and romantic, and beautifully picturesque. The canal is for some space cut through the solid rock, and the banks, high and bold, were crowned with tangled woods, and gemmed with wild flowers, and the delicate vivid tufts of fern. It was exceedingly beautiful; and though I believe I missed some part of the scenery immediately surrounding Little Falls, the approach to it, which is of the same nature, enchanted me extremely. When we arrived at Utica, I gave the nice cabin-girl my silver needle-case: her tenderness and care of me the night before made it impossible for me to offer her money. She took my gift, and, throwing her arms round my neck, kissed me very fervently for it. I was struck with her manner, which had appeared to me, in discharge of her common duties, reserved, and rather dignified. This exhibition of feeling surprised me therefore; and together with her dark eyes, hair, and complexion, made me think she must have foreign blood in her veins. I asked her, but she said no: American by birth, English by descent: certainly she had neither the face nor bearing of the one or the other. She was a very singular and striking looking person. As for Mr. ——, he fell in love with her forthwith, and, I think, had half a mind to settle on the Mohawk, and make her his fellow farmer. At Utica we dined; and after dinner I slept profoundly. The gentlemen, I believe, went out to view the town, which twenty years ago was not, and now is a flourishing place, with fine-looking shops, two or three hotels, good broad streets, and a body of lawyers, who had a supper at the house where we were staying, and kept the night awake with champagne, shouting, toasts, and clapping of hands: so much for the strides of civilisation through the savage lands of this new world. The house was full, and we could not get a room to ourselves; so we sat in a corner of the large dining-room. Passed the evening in writing journal. Mr. —— showed me his of Sunday last.
Friday, 12th.
We all breakfasted early together, and immediately after breakfast got into an open carriage and set off for Trenton. D—— and my father sat beside each other, and I opposite them; Mr. —— on the box; and so we progressed. The day was bright and breezy: the country was all smiling round us in rich beauty; the ripening sheets of waving grain; the sloping fields, with here and there the grey tomb-stone of a forest tree; the vivid thickets bounding the pale harvest plots; the silvery-looking fences, with their irregular lines relieved against the dark woods; the clear sky above; all was lovely. About seven miles from Utica, we stopped to water the horses at a lonely road-side house: we alighted, and without ceremony strolled into the garden,—a mere wilderness of overgrown sweet briar, faint breathing dog-roses, and flaunting red poppies, overshadowed by some orchard trees, from which we stole sundry half-ripe cherries. The place was desolate, I believe; yet we lingered in it, and did not think it so. We got into the carriage again: the remaining eight miles of our journey were as beautiful and as bad as the preceding ones had been. I thought of our dark drive back through these miry and uneven ways. At last we reached the house at which visiters to the Falls put up; a large comfortable dwelling enough, kept by a couple of nice young people, who live in this solitude all the year round, and maintain themselves and a beautiful big baby by the profits they derive from the pilgrims to Trenton. We ordered dinner, and set forth to the Falls, with our host for guide. We crossed a small wood immediately adjoining the house, and, descending several flights of steps connected by paths in the rocky bank, we presently stood on the brink of the channel, where the water was boiling along, deep, and black, and passing away like time. We followed along the rocky edge: the path is not more than a foot wide, and is worn into all manner of unevenness and cavities, and slippery with the eternal falling of the spray. —— walked before me: we dared not turn our heads, for fear of tumbling into the black whirlpool below. We walked on steadily, warning each other at every step, and presently we arrived at the first fall, where the rest of our party were halting. I can't describe it: I don't know either its height or width; I only know it was extremely beautiful, and came pouring down like a great rolling heap of amber. The rocks around are high to the heavens, scooped, and singularly regular; and the sides of the torrent are every now and then paved with large smooth layers of rock, as even and regular in their proportions as if the fairies had done the work. After standing before the tumbling mass of water for a length of time, we climbed to the brink above, and went on. Mr. —— flung himself down under a roof of rock by the waterfall. My father, D——, and the guide, went on out of sight, and —— and I loitered by the rapid waters, flinging light branches and flowers upon the blood-coloured torrent, that whirled, and dragged, and tossed them down to the plunge beneath. When we came to the beautiful circular fall, we crept down to a narrow ridge, and sat with our feet hanging over the black caldron, just opposite a vivid rainbow that was clasping the waterfall. We sat here till I began to grow dizzy with the sound and motion of the churning darkness beneath us, and begged to move, which we did very cautiously. I was in an agony lest we should slip from the narrow dripping ledges along which we crawled. We wandered on, and stopped again at another fall, upon a rocky shelf overhanging the torrent, beside the blasted and prostrate trunk of a large tree. I was tired with walking, and —— was lifting me up to seat me on the fallen tree, when we saw Mr. —— coming slowly towards us. He stopped and spoke to us, and presently passed on; we remained behind, talking, and dipping our hands into the fresh water. At length we rejoined the whole party, sitting by a narrow channel, where the water looked like ink. Beyond this our guide said it was impossible to go: I was for ascertaining this by myself, but my father forbade me to attempt the passage further. I was thirsty; and the guide having given me a beautiful strawberry and a pale blue-bell, that he had found, like a couple of jewels in some dark crevice of the rocks, I devoured the one, and then going down to the black water's edge, we dipped the fairy cup in, and drank the cold clear water, with which abundant draught I relieved my father's thirst also.[103] Around the place where we were resting, the rocks rose like circular walls up to the very sky. From their overhanging edges, tiny threads of water fell upon the rocky pavement beneath, with a silver glancing, and a clear plashing tone, that sounded even amid the hoarse talking of the dark waters below. In some mould among these cliffs, at their very highest edge, a tree had struck its roots, and, growing upside down, stretched its drooping green arms to the hurrying stream below, that would not tarry. We had walked, I suppose, a mile and a half along the water's side, and in this distance its course is broken by six beautiful cataracts. The variety of the colour of the water, occasioned by the various depths of its channel, and the different tints of the rocks over which it flows, is singular. Where the river expands, its rapid broken waves were of the darkest red-brown, like coffee; or rather, indeed, redder than that, like a deep blood colour: reaching the walls of rock, over which they fall into a lower bed, they became pouring masses of amber and diamonds, or soft thick heaps of whitest foam; and then again, in the deep narrow channels which received their headlong leaping, all was black as blackest night, and the waters were sucked away under the hollow rocks in inky eddies, that made me think of drowning with double horror. The several falls are very various in their height and forms, but they are all beautiful, most beautiful; not a place to visit for a day, but to live the summer away in.
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