And then there was the Smithsonian to be visited, where the rooms seemed to me haunted by the shade of the dear Professor Henry who was wont to accompany me through the galleries in times past, explaining the mysteries of the contents of the institution over which he presided with such care, knowledge, and judgment, with that gentle and persuasive inductiveness which we recognise in the style of Professor Owen.
The Patent Office, which would repay a week's careful study, was hurriedly inspected, and the Post Office and Agricultural Department shared the same fate. Everywhere we had to acknowledge the extreme courtesy of the officials of the national establishments in the United States.
In a restaurant in Pennsylvania Avenue, where, in the midst of all these multifarious labours, we took refuge for a moment, to eat an oyster, there was lying on the table a dish of frogs' legs about the size of those of a chicken, neatly garnished with green leaves, beneath a block of ice. The Duke asked the attendant whether they were really good to eat. "I believe you!" he replies. "For myself I cannot bear poultry, but I can always eat those. And now look!" said he, "I will show you a curious thing. You would think that these legs have no life in them. But just watch." He took up a pinch of salt from a cellar near at hand and sprinkled it on the legs, which immediately were agitated with convulsive twitches, amounting in several instances to vigorous kicks. I felt as surprised as Galvani was when he touched the leg of the frog with his scalpel. Apropos of this plat I may mention that subsequently we overcame our repugnance so far as to order a dish, and found it very excellent indeed, and whenever the delicacy was obtainable it became quite a usual portion of our more sumptuous entertainments. But for my part I considered it very like flavourless but tender chicken. Once, indeed, long ago, I had had an involuntary experience of the taste, for, walking one morning with a southern planter by the side of a shallow ditch bordering his sugar-cane field, I saw an enormous thing about the size of the top of a man's hat, struggling in the mud, upon which one of the black attendants precipitated himself, and seizing it, he mounted the bank with a frog the size of a good fowl in his hand. "What on earth is that for?" "Oh, it is most excellent eating," said my friend. "I would die of starvation," exclaimed I, "before I would touch a morsel of it." At lunch that day there was put upon the table a spatch-cock fowl, which my host asked me to try. "What do you think of it?" "It is excellent." "That," he said, "is a part of the frog you despised so much this morning."
The Attorney-General, Mr. MacVeagh, assembled a party to meet the Duke at dinner; and our last night, which was passed at his hospitable mansion, was the pleasantest we had in Washington.
CHAPTER V.
Harrisburg—new york—boston—canada.
Departure from Washington—Harper's Ferry—The State Capital—Rats on the Rampage—Pennsylvania Farming.
Next day (May 5th), at 10 o'clock, we left by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, sorry we had not more time to enjoy the hospitalities of our friends, and to see more of the interesting people and scenes with which we made such a short acquaintance; but, indeed, the number of attractions presented for the time that we had at our disposal was quite embarrassing enough, and whilst we were at Washington the party, broken up in detachments under the care of various friends, lost no time, but went to racecourses, galleries, and national institutions, crossed the Potomac to the heights of Arlington, and visited the cemeteries where tens of thousands of stone memorials, placed, as the dead men beneath them once stood, in orderly array, attest the severity of the tremendous conflict in which the first shots were fired, not very far from the spot, more than twenty years ago. It is said that there are about 15,000 bodies buried in one enclosure; even in death the white and the black are divided—the former are buried near Arlington House, the coloured men's remains lie half a mile or more away. Another cemetery, containing 5400 soldier's bodies, is near the Soldiers' Home. These and many other places were visited; but we must leave Washington at last, and were carried at express speed to the Shenandoah Junction. We are on our way to Harrisburg. Fortunately the day is bright and clear, and the sun not too warm, so that we can enjoy the charming scenery through which the railway passes, and we are interested in observing that the canal, in spite of the competition of the iron road, still keeps up navigation, and that strings of gaily-painted barges with the national flag are passing to and fro close at hand. The course of the Potomac, to which we now and then come near, is marked by the wooded heights which once formed the skirmish-ground of two great armies. It would not have been safe at one time for a man to have shown his head above the cutting of the canal, or to have ridden by the river-banks, for in all probability a Secesh bullet would have found him out or dismounted him, as there was fighting-ground all about; and the peaceful scene seemed strange to me when I contrasted it with the sight it presented as I saw it after the battle in which Senator Baker was killed and many Union men with him, and great gloom reigned at Washington—when General McClennan led all the troops that could be spared, who were pouring out in a long column on this road, and the country-side was alive with armed men in order to counteract the menaced invasion of Maryland. At the Shenandoah Junction, six miles west of Harper's Ferry, we halted for a while. It seemed to me as if it had not quite recovered from the ravages of war, and Harper's Ferry appeared as if the storm of battle that had passed over it—taken and retaken as it was so many times—had left an indelible mark of wreck and ruin about it. Nothing, however, can destroy the charm of the scenery of the beautiful valley in which the Potomac and the Shenandoah meet. We got out on the platform and walked a little way to look at the ruin of the Arsenal which was occupied by John Brown when he led his forlorn hope, "shouting the battle-cry of freedom," little deeming that the hills and valleys would re-echo with the hymn-song which so often heralded the Federal soldiers on their march to battle, to defeat or victory.
As we stood on the bridge surveying the scene, a decrepit and not very cleanly-looking old man, who was regaling himself with a use of tobacco of which the issues were visible around him, came up to have a look at the strangers. He knew every inch of the place; had been here all during the war. Sometimes the Secesh had it, and then the Federalists would drive them out; then the Confeds would take it, and so on. "There was pretty considerable fighting all round. See them hills? That one there had a Federal fort on top of it; that other one the Confeds used to hold." Why, he remembered old John Brown's scare as if it was yesterday. "Yes, sir! But they hanged him pretty smart! He and his people could make no fight of it when Uncle Sam's reg'lars came up." And in front of us were the walls of the burned armoury of the Government, and the name of the United States officer in command still visible over the doorway—the gaunt ruin, roofless, windowless, of a time which seemed so remote and which was not a generation gone by.
After our short stay there we went on to Hagerstown, where Colonel Kennedy, the President, and Judge Watts, one of the Directors, of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, joined us, after a divergence to the junction of the two rivers to get a sight of the country.
The Cumberland Valley is one of the most fruitful tracts in the United States. It presented in its substantial farmhouses, clean well-tilled fields and kempt fences, strong contrast to the untidy-looking farms in Maryland and Virginia on the road to Richmond; we heard that the soil had somewhat suffered from incessant cropping, and that the competition of the Western States is causing the cultivation of corn to be neglected. The towns appeared to be numerous and thriving, and the people well-to-do. It had been arranged that we should pay a visit on our way to a very interesting establishment, as it proved, at Fort Carlisle, and I give elsewhere a detailed account of what we saw in connection with a subject which appears to me to be of great, if somewhat sentimental, interest—the condition and future of the Indian race. The Duke's address to the Red children seemed to give them great satisfaction, and he said with truth that nothing we had seen since we had arrived in the United States interested us so much as the establishment where they were the objects of a philanthropic experiment, to which every one all over the world will, I am sure, wish success.