And of all beautiful things that could have been thought of or hoped for, what should come to crown our queen of days but a thunder-storm, a most real and vivid thunder-storm, marshalling up from the west its grand, cumulose clouds; black, jagged, bulging with impatient, prisoned thunder biding their time, sharp and fierce against the brilliant sky, spreading swiftly over the heavens, fusing into one great gray pall, dropping a dim curtain of rain between us and the land, closing down upon us a hollow hemisphere pierced with shafts of fire and deafening with unseen thunders, wresting us off from the friendly skies and shores, wrapping us into an awful solitude. O Princess Rohan, come to me! come from the hidden caves, where you revel in magical glories, come up from your coralline caves in the mysterious sea, come from those Eastern lands of nightingale, roses, and bulbuls, where your tropical soul was born and rocked in the lap of the lotus! O sunny Southern beauty, lost amongst Northern snows, flush forth in your mystical splendor from the ruby wine of Hafiz, float down from your clouds of the sunset with shining garments of light, open the golden door of your palace domed in a lily, glide over these inky waves, O my queen of all waters, come to me wherever you are, with your pencil dipped in darkness, starry with diamond dews and spanned with the softness of rainbows, and set on this land-locked Neptune your cross of the Legion of Honor, assure to the angry god his bowl in Valhalla, that the thunder-vexed lake may be soothed with its immortality!
But the storm passes on, the clouds sweep magnificently away, and the glowing sky flings up its arch of promise. The lucent waters catch its gleam and spread in their depths a second arch as beautiful and bright. So, haloed with magnificence, an earth-born bark on fairy waters, completely circled by this glory of the skies and seas, we pass through our triumphal gateway "deep into the dying day," and are presently doused in the mud at Rouse's Point. Rouse's Point is undoubtedly a very good place, and they were good women there, and took good care of us; but Rouse's Point is a dreadful place to wake up in when you have been in Dream-Land,—especially when a circus is there, singing and shouting under your windows all night long. I wonder when circus-people sleep, or do they not sleep at all, but keep up a perpetual ground and lofty tumbling? From Rouse's Point through Northern New York, through endless woods and leagues of brilliant fire-weed, the spirit of the dead flames that raved through the woods, past corn-fields that looked rather "skimpy," certainly not to be compared to a corn-field I wot of, whose owner has a mono-mania on the subject of corn and potatoes, and fertilizes his fields with his own blood and brain,—a snort, a rush, a shriek, and the hundred miles is accomplished, and we are at Ogdensburg, a smart little town, like all American towns, with handsome residences up, and handsomer ones going up, with haberdashers' shops, and lawyers' offices, and judges' robes, and most hospitable citizens,—one at least,—and all the implements and machinery of government and self-direction, not excepting a huge tent for political speaking and many political speeches, and everybody alert, public-spirited, and keyed up to the highest pitch. All this is interesting, but we have seen it ever since we were born, and we look away with wistful eyes to the north; for this broad, majestic river stretching sky-ward like the ocean, is the Lawrence. Up this river, on the day of St. Lawrence, three hundred years ago, came the mariner of St. Malo,—turning in from the sea till his straining eyes beheld on both sides land, and planted the lilies of France. Now it is the boundary line of empires. Those green banks on the other side are a foreign country, and for the first time I am not monarch of all I survey. That fine little city, with stately trees towering from the midst of its steeples and gray roofs, is Prescott. At the right rise the ramparts of Fort Wellington, whence cannon-balls came hissing over to Ogdensburg some fifty years ago. We stand within a pretty range, suppose they should try it again! Farther on still is a plain, gray tower, where a handful of "patriots" intrenched and destroyed themselves with perverse martyrophobia in a foolish and fruitless endeavor. The afternoon is before us; suppose we row over; here is a boat, and doubtless a boatman, or the ferry-steamer will be here directly. By no means; a ferry-steamer is thoroughly commonplace; you can ferry-steam anywhere. Row, brothers, row, perhaps you will never have the chance again. Lightly, lightly row through the green waters of the great St. Lawrence, through the sedge and rank grass that wave still in his middle depths, over the mile and a half of great rushing billows that rock our little boat somewhat roughly: but I am not afraid,—for I can swim.
"You can, can you?" says the Anakim, incredulously.
"Indeed I can, can't I, Halicarnassus?" appealingly.
"Like a brick!" ejaculates that worthy, pulling away at the oars, and on we shoot, steadily nearing the rustic stone city that looks so attractive, so different from our hasty, brittle, shingly American half-minute houses,—massive, permanent, full of character and solid worth. And now our tiny craft butts against the pier, and we ascend from the Jesuit river and stand on British soil. No stars and stripes here, but Saint George and his dragon fight out their never-ending brawl. No war, no volunteering, no Congress here; but peace and a Parliament and a Queen, God bless her! and this is her realm, a kingdom. Now if it had been a year ago I do not know that I should not, like Columbus, have knelt to kiss these dingy stones, so much did I love and reverence England, and whatever bore the dear English name. But we—they, rather—have changed all that. Among the great gains of this memorable year,—among the devotions, the sacrifices, the heroisms,—all the mighty, noble, and ennobling deeds by which we stand enriched forevermore,—there broods the shadow of one irreparable loss,—the loss of England. Success or failure can make no difference there. English gold, English steel, English pluck, stand today as always; but English integrity, English staunchness, English love, where are they? Just where Prescott is, now that we have come to it; for the substantial stone city a mile and a half away turns out to be a miserable little dirty, butty, smutty, stagnant owl-cote when you get into it. What we took for stone is stolidity. It is old, but its age is squalid, not picturesque. We stumble through the alleys that answer for streets, and come to the "Dog and Duck," a dark, dingy ale-room, famous for its fine ale, we are told, or perhaps it was beer: I don't remember. It is not in male nature to go by on the other side of such a thing, and we enter,—they to test the beverage, Grande and I to make observation of the surroundings. We take position in the passage between the bar-room and parlor. A yellow-haired Saxon child, with bare legs and fair face, crawls out from some inner hollow to the door, and impends dangerous on the sill, throwing numerous scared backward glances over his shoulder. The parlor is taken bodily out of old English novels, a direct descendant, slightly furbished up and modernized, of the Village inn parlor of Goldsmith,—homely, clean, and comfortless. A cotton tidy over the rocking-chair bewrays, wrought into its crocheted gorgeousness, the name of Uncle Tom. This I cannot stand. Time may bring healing, but now the wound is still fresh. "O, you did Uncle-Tom it famously," I hurl out, doubling my fist at the British lion which glares at me from that cotton tidy. "I remember those days. O yes! you were rampant on Uncle Tom. You are a famous friend of Uncle Tom, with your Exeter Halls, and your Lord Shaftesburys, and your Duchess of Sutherlands! Cry your pretty eyes out over Uncle Tom, dear, tender-hearted British women. Write appealing letters to your sisters over the waters, affectionate, conscientious kindred; canonize your saint, our sin, in tidies, and chair-covers, and Christmas slippers,—we know how to take you now; we have found out what all that is worth we can appraise your tears by the bottle—in pounds, shillings, and pence." But the beer-men curtail my harangue, so I shake my departing fist at the cowering lion, and, leaving this British institution, proceed to investigate another British institution,—the undaunted English army, in its development in Fort Wellington. A wall shuts the world out from those sacred premises; a stile lets the world in,—over which stile we step and stand on the fort grounds. A party of soldiers are making good cheer in a corner of the pasture,—perhaps I ought to say parade-ground. As no sentinel accosts us, we hunt up one, and inquire if the fort is accessible. He does not know, but inclines to the opinion that it is. We go up the hill, walk round the wall, and mark well her bulwarks, till we come to a great gate, but it refuses to turn. The walls are too high to scale, besides possible pickets on the other side. I have no doubt in the world that we could creep under, for the gate has shrunk since it was made, and needs to have a tuck let down; but what would become of dignity? Grande and the Anakim make a reconnaissance in force, to see if some unwary postern-gate may not permit entrance. Halicarnassus fumbles in his pockets for edge-tools, as if Queen Victoria, who rules the waves, on whose dominions the sun never sets, whose morning drum-beat encircles the world, would leave the main gate of her main fort on one of the frontiers of her empire so insecurely defended that a single American can carry it with his fruit-knife. Such ideas I energetically enforce, till I am cut short by the slow retrogression of the massive gate on ponderous hinges turning.
"What about the fruit-knife?" inquires Halicarnassus as I pass in. The reconnoitering party return to report a bootless search, and are electrified to find the victory already gained.
"See the good of having been through college," exults Halicarnassus.
"How did you do it?" asks Grande, admiringly.
"By genius and assiduity," answers Halicarnassus.
"And lifting the latch," I append, for I have been examining the mechanism of the gate since I came in, and have made a discovery which dislodges my savant from his pinnacle; namely, that the only fastening on the gate is a huge wooden latch, which not one of us had sense enough to lift; but then who thinks of taking a fort by assault and battery on the latch? Halicarnassus hit upon it by mere accident, and I therefore remorselessly expose him. Then we saunter about the place, and, seeing a woman eying us suspiciously from an elevated window, we show the white feather and ask her if we may come in, which, seeing we have been in for some ten minutes, we undoubtedly may; and then we mount the ramparts and peer into Labrador and Hudson's Bay and the North Pole, and, turning to a softer sky, gaze from a "foreign clime" upon our own dear land, home of freedom, hope of the nations, eye-sore of the Devil, rent by one set of his minions, and ridiculed by another, but coming out of her furnace-fires, if God please and man will, heartier and holier, because freer and truer, than ever before. O my country, beautiful and beloved, my hope, my desire, my joy, and my crown of rejoicing, immeasurably dearer in the agony of your bloody sweat than in the high noon of your proud prosperity! standing for the first time beyond your borders, and looking upon you from afar, now and forevermore out of a full heart I breathe to you benedictions.