There was little encouragement for stopping in this city of straight streets and tame houses, and heat and dust, so they jumped at Lyell’s suggestion to get on land as soon as possible. Lyell knew some folks, he said, that would “show them a thing or two.”
A long journey first in a comfortless train, through a country as level and lonesome as mid-ocean itself. Hot! it was indeed hot, and they were glad when the sun went down; for the carriages in which they rode were over-upholstered, and the paint stood up in soft boiling blisters on the wood-work.
Now the journey is changed to one by river. Not much of a boat, to be sure; but then it is comparatively cool, and the scenery is sylvan and delightful. On once more next day, this time by diligence. This conveyance had none of the comfort of the Hyde Park canoe-landau. It was just what Lyell called it in pardonable slang, “a rubbly old concern—a sort of breed betwixt an orange-box, a leathern portmanteau, and a venerable clothes-basket. They paid a hawser out from its bows, and bent the nags on to that.” Frank thought of his elephant ride.
But the country grew more hilly and romantic as they proceeded, and the inns, sad to say, worse and worse. Their beds were inhabited—strangely so; our heroes did not turn in to study natural history, or they might have done so. Indeed they had to rough it. The country grew wilder still; they had left the diligence with nearly broken bones; bought hones, hired guides, and now they found themselves on the very boundaries of a savage land. Ha! the fort at last, where Lyell’s friends lived. Their welcome was a regal one. Half a dozen Scotchmen lived here, four of them married and with grown-up families—quite a little colony.
They shook hands with Lyell a dozen times. “Oh, man!” they cried, “but you’re welcome.” Then they killed the fatted calf.
These good people were farmers; their houses all rough, but well furnished; their flocks and herds numerous as the sands by the sea-shore. A wild, lonely kind of a life they led with their wives and their little ones, but they were content. There were fish in the streams and deer in the forest. You had but to tickle the earth with a toasting-fork, and it smilingly yielded up pommes de terre which would grace the table of a prince.
Every soul in the colony was a McSomebody or other; so no wonder Chisholm was in his glory, no wonder—
“The nicht drive on wi’ sangs and clatter.”
When our heroes heard their principal host call out, “Send auld Lawrie McMillan here (his real name was Lorenzo Maximilian) to give us a tune,” they had expected to see some tall old Highlander stride in with the bagpipes, not an ancient, wiry Spaniard, guitar-armed. Is it any wonder Chisholm burst out laughing when this venerable ghost began to sing—