It was a somewhat varied as well as extensive crowd of passengers that disembarked from the cars of the White Mountain Railroad at Littleton, in sight of the head-waters of the Connecticut, about five o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, the 29th of July. The dog-days had begun; New York, Philadelphia and Boston were steaming furnaces, though partially emptied as we have before had occasion to notice; and those who had already visited them during the month, declared that neither Saratoga, the Cattskills, or even Lake George or Niagara, had the power to impart any coolness to suffering humanity. The sea-shore or the northern mountains offered the only alternative; and a very heavy list of passengers had come up that day by the Norwich and Worcester line from New York, the Boston lines falling in at Nashua Junction, and the Vermont Central throwing in its reinforcement at Wells River.
Every portion of the loyal States (and no doubt a portion of the disloyal, if the truth could have been known!) had seemed to be represented in the crowd that thronged the platforms while fighting for a mouthful of lunch at Nashua Junction or crowding in to a hurried dinner at the poor substitute for the burned Pemigawasset House at Plymouth. There were even half a dozen resident Europeans—English, Scotch, with one Frenchman who snuffed continually, and one Spaniard who smoked in season and out of season—people who had no doubt rushed over to see the "American war," but very soon found the South too hot for comfort, in one sense or the other,—among the number destined to add variety to the overfilled caravanserais of the Franconia and White ranges. A few had dropped away at Weir's Landing, for a day or two on Lake Winnipiseogee, enticed by the pleasant loom of Centre Harbor down the bright blue water and the romantic figure of the Lady of the Lake on the prow of her namesake steamer; and a few more had left the train at Plymouth for the long coach-ride of thirty miles through the mountains to the Glen House, or by the southern approach to the Profile or the Crawford. Two or three stage-loads, too, who had but one thought in their pilgrimage—Mount Washington,—were bustling in for the immediate ride from Littleton to the Crawford; but there were still four heavy stage-loads—not less than forty to fifty persons—going on to the crowded Profile House that evening.
Some of the occupants of one of those heavy stages, rolling away towards the Profile, require, for the purposes of this narration, a somewhat closer view than was probably taken of them by many of their fellow-passengers; and that view cannot be more appropriately taken than at this moment.
On the back seat of that vehicle sat two ladies, with a troublesome boy of ten years wedged in between them as if to come the nearest possible to getting him out of the way. Neither paid the youngster that attention which would have indicated that he belonged to them or was travelling in their company; and indeed they had every right as well as every inclination to wash their hands of his relationship if they could not wash from their travelling-dresses the marks of his taffy-smeared fingers. The two ladies were evidently mother and daughter; and at least one person in the coach had remarked them as they came up from Concord, and seen that their sole chaperon and protector seemed to be a son of the one and brother of the other, some eighteen or twenty years of age. As he saw them then and as he afterwards better knew them, they may be briefly described.
The Vanderlyns were Baltimoreans—the widow and children of a man of large wealth and considerable distinction, who had died three or four years before in that city, after having amassed a fortune by property speculations and subsequently filled more than one responsible office under the State government. They had the true Southern pride in wealth and position; and the hand of the daughter had already been sought, however ineffectually, by scions of the best families in and about the Monumental city. Let it be added that they belonged, whatever may have been their pride and arrogance as a family, to the not-too-extensive class of loyal Marylanders,—and then a better title of nobility will have been enrolled than any that Clayton Vanderlyn's money and former public employments had power to supply. The widowed mother and her children were among the few residents below Mason and Dixon's line who had not forgotten the pleasant summer days of old in the North, when Puritan and Cavalier met as friends and brothers; and this summer tour, which was to include Saratoga and Newport before it closed, was a result of the old recollection.
Mrs. Vanderlyn, the mother, seemed forty-five, but was fine-looking and had evidently been handsome in her youth—with those splendid brown eyes that must then have sparkled so much more brilliantly than at this period, and that perfect wealth of chestnut hair, not yet in the least sprinkled with gray, which must then have been a charm and a glory. Her travelling-dress was very plain, but of the best materials; and every thing in her appearance—especially pride of look and action,—spoke of wealth, the habit of mingling in that indefinable but actual thing, good society, and a perfect consciousness of what she was and what she possessed. Those who looked twice upon Mrs. Vanderlyn, with keen eyes, had no difficulty in deciding that she might be a very pleasant acquaintance for those in her own "set" and whom she considered her equals,—but that she would be any thing but a pleasant acquaintance for those whom she despised or with whom she chanced to fall into feud.
Clara Vanderlyn, the daughter, was a yet more interesting study than her mother; and it seemed altogether probable that the same observer before mentioned, and who will be hereafter more particularly introduced, coming up in the same car from Nashua and again thrown into near proximity in the coach, had read and was reading that second page of the Vanderlyn genealogy with peculiar care and attention. She was of middle height; slight, but well-rounded and evidently elastic in figure, with a clearly cut but very pleasant face, eyes a shade darker than Mrs. Vanderlyn's, and hair what that lady's had probably been twenty years before. A wonderful feature, indeed, was that head of hair—fine, silken, but perfectly massive in profusion, with more of a tendency to the wave than the curl, and of that rich golden chestnut or true auburn so seldom seen though so often lauded. At the first observation, it seemed that Clara Vanderlyn's hair was the great charm of her presence; but those who had the good fortune to be many hours in her company, learned that a still stronger and more abiding charm lay in the affability of her manners, the expression of thorough goodness in her whole demeanor, and the purity and sweetness of her smile. That face was certainly worthy of the fixed gaze which had rested upon it quite as often during the afternoon as delicacy permitted; and it might even have furnished excuse for glancing at it a moment too long, and planting blushes on those cheeks that the lip could have no hope of gathering.
The third and youngest of the family, Frank Vanderlyn, did not enter into the group under observation, as he was at that time on the top of the coach with half a dozen others, enjoying the cigar which had been impossible in the passenger-car. But the glimpses caught of him before disembarking, may suffice to complete the family triad. He seemed a well-grown stripling, verging upon manhood, with a face distantly reminding the observer of his sister's, but with darker hair than either Mrs. Vanderlyn or Clara, and with an expression of settled hauteur upon his well-cut features, which very much detracted from the charm of a face that would otherwise have been singularly handsome. He was dressed a little too well for dusty travel, and wore more wealth in a single diamond in his cravat and a cluster-ring on the little finger of his right hand, than most young men would have been either able or willing to devote to such purposes of mere ornament.
This description of the occupants of that singularly-fortunate coach may have very little interest beyond that of a mere catalogue; yet it must be continued, for Fate, that grim old auctioneer who sometimes knocks us down at very low prices and to odd owners, may have some necessity for a mercantile list of his chattels.
The occupants of the middle seat were three in number, and they could have furnished any needed information as to the personality of the troublesome boy with the taffied fingers, who had been wedged between Clara Vanderlyn and her mother. All of one family—that second triad: Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, and Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame. The first, a squat man of fifty-five, with a broad, coarse, beardless face, bad teeth and bristly gray hair just suffering under its first infliction of slaty-brown hair-dye. His large hands had been all day cased in kid gloves, spite of the heat of the weather; and his gray suit, of really fine material, had a sort of new look, and did not seem to be worn easily. There was an impression carried about by the man and disseminated at every movement, that another and a much shabbier suit hung immediately behind his bed-room door at home, and that in that he would have been easy and comfortable, while in the fashionable garb he was laboring under a sort of Sunday-clothes restraint. The second, a stout woman of fifty, with reddish hair, a coarse pink face, high cheek bones and pert nose, corresponding well with her lord in conformation, while it wore an expression of dignity and self-satisfaction to which the countenance of that poor man could not have made the least pretension. She was only a little overdressed, for travelling—her bonnet of fine straw too much of a flower-garden for her years, a heavy gold watch-chain with the watch prominent, a diamond breastpin flashing hotly, and her voluminous blue lawn of costly fabric partially covered by a long gray mantle which must have been recommended to her by some mantua-maker with a "spasm of sense." But if there was any restraint in the make-up of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that restraint was fully compensated by the gorgeousness of the general arrangement of Miss Marianna. That young lady of thirty, with a large mouth, sandy hair, bluish gray eyes and freckles, a dumpy figure and no eye-brows whatever, was arrayed—shade of Madame La Modiste forgive us while we pen the record—arrayed for that hot and dusty day of railroad and coach riding, in a rich pink silk flounced and braided to the extreme of the current fashion; with a jockey leghorn and white feather which—well, we may say with truth that they relieved her face; with a braided mantle of white merino that might have been originally designed for an opera-cloak; white kid gloves in a transition state; and such a profusion of gold watch, gold chain, enamelled bracelet, diamond cluster-breastpin, costly lace, and other feminine means of attracting admiration and envy, that the brain of a masculine relator reels among the chaos of finery and he desists in despair. The fourth of this family was Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, ætat ten, wedged in between the two aristocratic representatives of the Vanderlyn exclusiveness, and the freckles on his coarse little face and hands about equally balanced by the dauby debris of more or less hardened taffy to which allusion has before been unavoidably made.