“There is great difficulty in getting to New York this spring. The Delaware was closed by ice for two months, and up to the middle of March this was eighteen inches thick. Merchants have been detained in Baltimore from two to seven days, waiting for stages to go on. The number of travellers was so large that they could not be accommodated sooner. The steamboat runs from Richmond to Baltimore but once a week, and leaves on Sunday morning. Several of my acquaintances went on to-day. They were urgent that I should go with them, but my determination is not to travel on the Sabbath. I shall, therefore, take the land route to Balto....
“Goods are reported to be very scarce and high in all the Northern cities. They are high in this place, and advancing every day. Groceries are dearer than I have seen them since 1815, and it is thought they will be yet dearer.
“‘That will do!’ I hear you say, ‘as I am not a merchant.’ Well, no more of it! I must charge you again to be very, very careful of yourself. Kiss our little children for father. I shall hurry through my business here as soon as possible and hasten my return to my home.
“May the Lord bestow on you His choicest blessings and grant a speedy return of health! Remember me in your prayers. Adieu, my Love!
“Your own S.”
The sere and yellow sheet is marked on the outside, in the upper left-hand corner, “Single,” in the lower, “Mail,” and in the upper right-hand, “12 cents.”
This was in the dark ages when there was but one steamer per week to Baltimore, and there were not stages enough to carry the passengers from the Monument City to New York; when the railway to Fredericksburg was a dream in the minds of a few Northern visionaries, and the magnetic telegraph was not even dreamed of. My mother has told me that, in reading the newspaper aloud to her father in 1824, she happened upon an account of an invention of one George Stephenson for running carriages by steam. Captain Sterling laughed derisively.
“What nonsense these papers print! You and I won’t live to see that, little girl!”
I heard the anecdote upon an express train from Richmond to New York, his “little girl” being the narrator.
In those same dark ages, strong men, whom acquaintances never accused of cant, or suspected of sentimentality, went to evening prayer-meetings, and accounted it a delight to hear two sermons on Sunday; laid pulpit teachings to heart; practised self-examination, and wrote love-letters to their own wives. If this were not the “Simple Life” latter-day philosophists exploit as a branch of the New Thought Movement, it will never be lived on this low earth.