Her husband stirred his coffee meditatively for a moment before saying, without looking up:
“I am not sure that I have not a touch of that same fever myself.”
With the inconsequence of infancy, I did not connect the speech with our breaking up the Lunenburg home the next autumn and setting out for what was explained to us girls as a round of visits to friends in Richmond and Powhatan.
We call ours a restless age, and the modern American man a predatory animal, with an abnormal craving for adventure. Change and Progress are the genii who claim his allegiance and sway his destiny. In sighing for the peace and rest of the “former times” we think were “better than these,” we forget (if we ever knew) that our sires were possessed by, and yielded to, unrest as intense and dreams as golden as those that animate the explorer and inventor of the twentieth century. My father was in no sense a dreamer of day dreams of the dazzling impossible. He was making a fair living in the heart of what was, even then, “Old Virginia.” He had recouped his shattered fortunes by judicious business enterprise, and the neat share of her father’s estate that had fallen to my mother at his demise in 1829, placed her and her children beyond the reach of poverty. The merchant was respected here as he had been in Amelia, for his intelligence, probity, courtesy, and energy. His place in society and in church was assured. Yet he had caught the Western fever. And—a mightier marvel—“Uncle Carus,” the clerical Connecticut Yankee, the soul of conservatism, who had settled in the downiest of nests as the incumbent of Mount Carmel, a Presbyterian church built upon the outskirts of the Montrose plantation, and virtually maintained by that family—sober, ease-loving Uncle Carus—had joined hands with his wife’s brother-in-law in the purchase of Western lands and the scheme of emigration.
The two men had travelled hundreds of miles on horseback during the last year in quest of a location for the new home. My father’s letters—worn by many readings, and showing all over the odd and unaccountable brown thumbmarks of time—bear dates of wayside post-offices as well as of towns—Lynchburg, Staunton, and Charlottesville. Finally they crossed the Ohio line, and after due deliberation, bought a farm in partnership. The letters are interesting reading, but too many and too long to be copied in full.
Every detail of business and each variation of plans were communicated as freely as if the wife were associated with him in commercial as in domestic life.
Once, when he is doubtful what step to take next, he writes, playfully: “Some men need a propelling power. It might be well for you to exert a little of the ‘government’ with which some of our friends accredit you, and move me in the right direction.”
When, the long journey accomplished and the purchase of the farm completed, he returned home, he encountered no opposition from his wife, but much from neighbors and friends. A letter written to her from Lunenburg, whither he had returned to close up his affairs, leaving her with her brother at Olney, describes the numerous tokens of regret and esteem of which he is the recipient. The climax of the list comes in the humorous tale of how an old-fashioned neighbor, Mrs. L——, “says it troubled her so much on New Year’s night that she could not sleep. She actually got up after trying vainly to court slumber, lighted her pipe, and smoked and thought the matter over. She was not reconciled, after all.... When I take my departure it will be with feelings of profound regret, and full confidence in the friendship of those I leave behind.”
The land bought in Ohio by the two victims of the “Western fever” is now covered by the city of Cleveland. If the two New-Englanders could have forecast the future, their heirs would be multi-millionaires.