Three miles west of Dayton is the Soldiers’ Home, and as I rode through the entrance to the grounds, a big Dutchman stopped me, but finding my object was simply to ride about the grounds and out again, he said: “Vell, when you get up into the crowd be very careful, for some are blind and some deaf, and if you run into one h—l will be to pay.” There was quite a crowd, four or five thousand of them, some fishing, some watching the alligator, all seemingly enjoying themselves about the grounds—grounds that are laid out in beautiful shape, and that contain everything almost that would make life happy. All enjoying themselves? No, not all, for over on the farther side of the grounds several hundred were laying away, with military honors, one who had gone over to the silent majority, and as they filled his grave another grave was being dug.
Mr. T. J. Kirkpatrick of Springfield, is of medium size, middle aged, light complexioned, with light-colored side-whiskers and mustache, and from my ten minutes’ talk with him I am satisfied that if there had been no other route from Cleveland to Columbus than the one the local consul at Cleveland gave me, Kirkpatrick would have started out and made one for the occasion. He is one of those men who can’t do enough to help you along, and is an honor to the L. A. W.
The “pike” from Columbus to Indianapolis is a road that originally must have been built at great expense, for it is raised fifteen feet or more along some of the low lands, and now is kept in excellent repair,—a broad, level, and very straight highway, so straight that in forty-four miles there are only two slight bends in it, and so level in places that for twelve miles there is not the slightest rise or depression. In the western part of Ohio the land is just rolling enough to make some very fine coasting, and at times you can look straight ahead eight or ten miles, to the top of an apparently very high hill where the telegraph poles seem to come together, they are so far off, and the task of climbing that hill makes you faint in anticipation, but long before you get there the hill has faded away (another illustration of the maxim never to climb a hill until you get to it), the grade up it has been so gradual, and then, at last, you can look back and see another hill just as high that you have come down without knowing it. The very numerous toll-gate keepers along this pike charge two cents a mile for a horse, so if I had had one of flesh and blood, the expense one day would have been $1.52, but it being of steel and rubber, and only part of a rubber tire on the little wheel at that, the cost for toll was nothing. The road from Buffalo to Cleveland I thought was high water-mark, but this pike is so uniformly good for 180 miles that it must have first place.
The appetite such a journey as this gives one is no small part of the pleasure of the trip, everything tastes so good. The truth was never more plainly stated than by a Spartan waiter. Dionysius was taking a “hasty plate of soup,” at one of those free lunches they gave there in Greece so often, when, pushing back from the table, he complained that the black broth was not highly seasoned enough for him. The waiter roared it through the hall “Seasoned! We season it by running, sweating, and getting tired, hungry, and thirsty.” It is truly wonderful how such exercise does increase a person’s digestive ability. I can imagine to a certain degree just how Milo, a Grecian athlete, must have enjoyed himself. Twenty pounds was the amount of his daily bread, and the same quantity of meat, besides fifteen quarts of wine, taken afterwards, no doubt, for his stomach’s ache. One day, feeling somewhat faint from lack of nourishment, he knocked a four-year-old in the head with his fist, and devoured the whole “beef critter” during the day. To some this may at first appear incredible, but there is one explanation, at least, that is plausible: Milo must undoubtedly have been a wheelman.
The first night out from Columbus I stopped at a farm-house. I walked around to the side door and was just going into the dining-room, when a man, with black hair, wild eyes, and thin pale face came out. He took one sharp look at me, and turning suddenly, slammed the glass door in my face, rushed through the dining-room, and pulling a spread from the table in his flight, and covering himself up with it, disappeared. But not for a great while. As I was eating supper he came back through the room, slamming the doors in his wild rush, and ran out into the yard, as if the very devil was after him. Then I could see him out in the dark, his eyes glaring in at me through the window, and after a while, when everything was still, bang! would go some door, and away he would run through the room into the bed-room again. Still he said nothing, had not spoken for years, they told me. Once or twice during the evening he came slowly into the room, sidling along with his face averted, and his hands apparently warding off some blow coming from where I sat, and during the night I heard an occasional crash as if the side of the house had fallen in. It was that lunatic trying to get out of the cage in which they confined him, while the inmates of the house were asleep.
Distance traveled in four weeks, 1,257 miles.
