I.
Nothing in America is so unlike England as the desolate appearance of the meadows in the fall and early winter months. From New York to Boston, a journey of six hours, in the second week of December, not a blade of green grass was to be seen. The train ran through a wilderness of brown, burnt-up meadows. With a tinge of yellow in the color of them, they would have resembled the late corn-stubbles of an English landscape. But all were a dead, sombre brown, except once in a way, where a clump of oaks still waved their russet leaves. Another noticeable contrast to England is the wooden houses, that look so temporary as compared with the brick and stone of the old country. The absence of the trim gardens of English rural districts also strikes a stranger, as do the curious and ragged fences that take the place of the English hedge-rows. The New England homesteads are, however, more like those of old England than are the farms of other States in the Union.
The habit of letting out walls and buildings, roofs of barns, and sides of houses, for the black and white advertisements of quack-medicine venders and others, is a disfigurement of the land which every English visitor notices with regret; and lovers of the picturesque, Americans and English, grow positively angry over the disfigurement of the Hudson by these money-making Goths and vandals.
A change of scene was promised for the Irving travellers on their return to New York, over the same line. A cold wave from the West was predicted. “We shall have snow before long,” said an American friend, “and not unlikely a hard winter. I judge so from the fact that all the great weather prophets say it will be a mild one. Your Canadian seer, for instance, is dead on an exceptionally calm and warm winter. So let us look out.”
Boston delighted the members of Irving’s company; all of them, except Loveday, who contracted, on the way thither, an attack of malarial fever. With true British pluck he fought his assailant until his first spell of important work was over, and then he retreated. Medical assistance, rest, and plenty of quinine, pulled him through. But the company were destined later to sustain other climatic shocks; and they all, more or less, had a dread of the threatened winter. Until Loveday broke down everybody had stood the change of climate well. Reports came from England that Miss Ellen Terry was ill in New York. On the contrary, she had never been better than during these first weeks of the tour. She suffered, as all English women do, from heated rooms. “That is my only fear,” she said to me. “The climate!—I don’t object to it. If they would only be content with it, I would. Some of the days are gorgeous. The snap of cold, as they call it, was delightful to me. But when I would be driving out in open carriages New York ladies would be muffled up in close broughams. And, oh, the getting home again!—to the hotel, I mean. An English hot-house, where they grow pine-apples,—that is the only comparison I can think of. And their private houses! How the dear people can stand the overwhelming heat of them, I don’t know!”
The railway journey from Philadelphia to Boston was Irving’s first experience of American travel.
“It is splendid,” he said, when I met him at his hotel, on the night of his arrival. “Am I not tired? Not a bit. It has been a delightful rest. I slept nearly the whole way, except once when going to the platform and looking out. At a station a man asked me which was Irving, and I pointed to Mead, who had been walking along the track, and was just then getting into his car. No; I enjoyed the ride all the way; never slept better; feel quite refreshed.”
Said Miss Terry, the next morning, when I saw her at the Tremont House, “Oh, yes, I like the travelling! It did not tire me. Then we had such lovely cars! But how different the stations are compared with ours! No platforms!—you get down really upon the line. And how unfinished it all looks,—except the cars, and they are perfect. Oh, yes! the parlor-car beats our first-class carriage. I shall like Boston very much,—though I never expect to like any place as well as New York.”
II.
The Boston Theatre is the largest of the houses in which Irving has played on this side of the Atlantic. It is claimed that it is the largest in the Union, though many persons say that the Opera House at the Rocky Mountain city of Denver is the handsomest of all the American theatres. The main entrance to the Boston house is on Washington street. It has not an imposing exterior. The front entrance is all that is visible, the rest being filled up with stores; but the hall is very spacious, and the vestibule, foyer, lobbies, and grand staircase beyond, are worthy of the broad and well-appointed auditorium. The promenade saloon is paved with marble, and is forty-six feet by twenty-six feet, and proportionately high. Upon the walls, and here and there on easels, are portraits of Irving, Booth, McCullough, Salvini, and other notable persons. The promenade and entrance hall cover one hundred feet from the doors to the auditorium, which, in its turn, is ninety feet from the back row to the foot-lights. The stage is one hundred feet wide and ninety feet deep; and the interior of the house from front to back covers three hundred feet, the average width being about one hundred feet. In addition to the parquette, which occupies the entire floor (as the stalls do at the English Opera Comique, and, by a recent change, also at the Haymarket), there are three balconies, severally known as the dress circle, the family circle, and the gallery. The house will seat three thousand people. It is built on a series of arches, or supporting columns, leaving the basement quite open, giving, so far as the stage is concerned, great facilities for the manipulation of scenery and for storage, and allowing space for offices, drill-rooms for supers, and other purposes.