in my own girlhood, but could not command. I may or may not some day show her Dr. South’s letter. That shall be as my judgment dictates. I shall not consent now or hereafter, while my authority or influence lasts, to Dorothy’s marriage to anybody except some man of her own choosing, who shall seem to me fit to make her happy. If you want Jefferson to marry her, I notify you now that he must fairly win her. And my advice to you is very earnest that he set to work at once to render himself worthy of her; to repair his character; to cultivate himself, if he can, up to her moral and intellectual level; to make of himself a man to whom she can look up, as you say, and not down. There, that is all I have to say.”

Madison Peyton saw this to be good advice, and he decided to act upon it. But, as so often happens with good advice, he “took it wrong end first,” in the phrase of that time and country. He decided that his son should also go north and to Europe, following the party to which Dorothy belonged as closely as possible, seeing as much as he could of her, and paying court to her upon every opportunity.

XXVII
DIANA’S EXALTATION

IT was the middle of January, 1860, when Dorothy bade Arthur good-by and went away upon her mission of enjoyment and education.

It is not easy for us now to picture to ourselves what travel in this country was in that year which seems to the older ones among us so recent. In 1860 there was not such a thing as a sleeping car in all the world. The nearest approach to that necessity of modern life which then existed, was a car with high backed seats, which was used on a few of the longer lines of railroad. For another thing there were no such things in existence as through trains. Every railroad in the country was an independent line, whose trains ran only between its own termini. The traveller must “change cars” at every terminus, and usually the process involved a delay of several hours and a long omnibus ride—perhaps at midnight—through the streets of some city which had thriftily provided that its several railroads should place their stations as far apart as possible in order that their passengers might “leave money in the town.” The passenger from a south side county of Virginia intending to go to New York, for example, must take a train to Richmond; thence after crossing the town in an omnibus and waiting for an hour or two, take another train to Acquia Creek, near Fredericksburg; there transfer to a steamboat for Washington; there cross town in an omnibus, and, after another long wait, take a train for the Relay House; there wait four hours and then change cars for Baltimore, nine miles away; then take another omnibus ride to another station; thence a train to Havre de Grace, where he must cross a river on a ferry boat; thence by another train to Philadelphia, where, after still another omnibus transfer and another delay, one had a choice of routes to New York, the preferred one being by way of Camden and Amboy, and thence up the bay twenty miles or so, to the battery in New York. There was no such thing as a dining car, a buffet car or a drawing room car in all the land. There were none but hand brakes on the trains, and the cars were held together by loose coupling links. The rails were not fastened together at their badly laminated ends, and it was the fashion to call trains that reached a maximum speed of twenty miles an hour, “lightning expresses,” and to stop them at every little wayside station. The engines were fed upon wood, and it was a common thing for trains to stop their intolerable jolting for full twenty minutes to take fresh supplies of wood and water.

There was immeasurably more of weariness then, in a journey from Richmond or Cincinnati or Buffalo to New York, than would be tolerated now in a trip across the continent. As a consequence few people travelled except for short distances and a journey which we now think nothing of making comfortably in a single night, was then a matter of grave consequence, to be undertaken only after much deliberation and with much of preparation. New York seemed more distant to the dweller in the West or South than Hong Kong and Yokohama do in our time, and the number of people who had journeyed beyond the borders of our own country was so small that those who had done so were regarded as persons of interestingly adventurous experience.

Quite necessarily all parts of the country were markedly provincial in speech, manner, habits and even in dress. New England had a nasal dialect of its own, so firmly rooted in use that it has required two or three generations of exacting Yankee school marms to eradicate it from the speech even of the educated class. New York state had another, and the Southerner was known everywhere by a speech which “bewrayed” him.

And as it was with speech, so also was it with manners, customs, ideas. Prejudice was everywhere rampant, opinion intolerant, and usage merciless in its narrow illiberality. Only in what was then the West—the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi—was there anything of cosmopolitan liberality and tolerance. They were found in that region because the population of the West had been drawn from all parts of the country. Attrition of mind with mind, and the mingling of men of various origin had there in a large degree worn off the angles of provincial prejudice and bred a liberality of mind elsewhere uncommon in our country.

Edmonia and Dorothy were to make their formidable journey to New York in easy stages. They remained for several days with friends in Richmond, while completing those preliminary preparations which were necessary before setting out for the national capital. They were to stay in Washington for a fortnight, in Baltimore for three weeks, in Philadelphia for a week or two, and in New York for nearly two months before sailing for Europe in May.

The time was a very troubled one, on the subject of slavery. Not only was it true that if the owner of a slave took the negro with him into any one of the free states he by that act legally set him free, but it was also true that the most devoted and loyal servant thus taken from the South into a Northern state was subjected to every form of persuasive solicitation to claim and assert his freedom. It was nevertheless the custom of Southern men, and still more of Southern women, to take with them on their travels one or more of their personal servants, trusting to their loyalty alone for continued allegiance. For the attitude of such personal servants in Virginia at that time was rather that of proud and voluntary allegiance to loved masters and mistresses who belonged to them as a cherished possession, than that of men and women held in unwilling bondage.