When the women and my girls had been escorted to their carriages, and sent home to their hotel, with flowers and bon-bons on their laps, we three men of the little party sat round the fire and talked of old times. Irving had ordered the biggest logs the hotel’s wood-yard afforded to be heaped into the grate. The fire cracked and spluttered and blazed, and had in the lower bars of the grate a solid, steady glow of white ash that was truly English; and I think we each looked into it for a time, busy with our own individual thoughts and reflections. Presently, under the more cheerful influences of the season, we talked of many things, and finally drifted into “shop.” The chief subject was started by Irving himself, and it dealt with the novel treatment of the next Shakespeare play which he intends to produce at the Lyceum. Irving looked into the fire and saw it there, scene by scene, act by act. As he saw it, he described it.
It was in the glamour of his rosiest pictures that I said good-night, to have the witchery of the fire-light dispelled by the outer bitterness of the weather, and the lonely, desolate appearance of the city. The streets were now as hard as they had been soft; the pools were ice, the snow adamant; and icicles hung down from the eaves of every house. The roadways glistened in the lamp-light. Not a soul was abroad. It might have been a city of the dead. A strain of Christmas music would have redeemed the situation. Even a London “waits” band at its worst, such as one awakens to with a growl on cold nights at home, would have been a God-send. Not a sound; not a footstep; no distant jangle of car-bells; not even a policeman; only the winter night itself, with a few chilly-looking stars above, and the cold, hard, icy streets below.
IV.
It is a long way from Baltimore to Brooklyn,—five or six hundred miles,—still from Brooklyn to Chicago is over a thousand; yet these were the journeys that followed each other. The company, as you already know, travelled from Boston to Baltimore, close upon a thousand miles; from Baltimore it went to Brooklyn; and from the city of churches its next trip was to the great city on Lake Michigan. But, not to get ahead of events, we will pause at Brooklyn[33]: first, to say that the theatre was crowded there all the week; secondly, for Irving to relate an incident by the way; and, thirdly, to introduce the succeeding chapter, which will describe our departure therefrom.
Irving was a little ruffled during his journey from Baltimore by the sting of one of those vagrant gadflies of the press that are not confined to the American continent; but, as a matter of course, exist in that broader field in large numbers, and are of greater variety than in the narrower limits of Great Britain.
“I promised to write a little gossip of my experiences in America for the—— magazine, and I think the Baltimore incident is a very good subject, told as an episode of the trip, with just a few lines about my reception. What do you think?”
“Very good, indeed,” I said.
“Ah! I’m glad you like the notion, because I have written it. Here it is; I’ll read it to you.”
“The Baltimore man will feel flattered when he learns how much you have taken his ‘Tribune’ despatch to heart,” I said.