What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

The other was much less objectionable. He was a younger man, and called himself a farmer, but his farming had evidently run much to horse-dealing, and he dressed in a horsey style. He had a miserable sickly wife with him, who had once upon a time been pretty. She wore the remains of dresses that had once been smart, and was by far the most slatternly woman I ever saw. Her husband, so far as I could observe, did not ill-treat her, but he was constantly saying unkind things in language which should have made her blush, if she had not left all blushes far behind her, and at which the other worse brute used to laugh with obstreperous approbation. He could sing too, as I thought at that time very well, and used to sing a song telling how “The farm I now hold on your honour’s estate, is the same that my grandfather held,” &c. &c. The tune of it runs in my head to this day; and I remember thinking that if the song related the singer’s own fortunes, “his honour” must have gained by the change of tenant, however many generations of ancestors may have held it before him.

By the time our voyage came to an end I was pretty nearly worn out by want of rest and night and day exposure to the weather. But to own the truth honestly, I was supported by a sense of pride in having sustained an amount of fatigue which none other in the ship had, and few probably could have, sustained, and which I had been defied to sustain. And after I had had a sleep “the round of the clock,” as the phrase goes, I was none the worse. Moreover, it was a matter of extreme consolation to me to think that I was accumulating a store of strange experiences of a kind which nothing in my previous life had seemed to promise me. But above all the approach to New York, and the sight of the bay, was, I felt, more than enough to repay me for all the discomfort of the voyage. I thought it by far the grandest sight I had ever seen, as indeed it doubtless was.

I do not remember to have been much struck by the town of New York. I remember thinking it had the look of an overgrown colossal village, and that it was very different in appearance from any English city. It seemed to me too that there was a strange contrast between the roomy, clean, uncity-like appearance of the place, and the apparent hurry and energetic ways of the inhabitants. I remember also remarking the very generally youthful appearance of those who seemed to be transacting most of the business of the place.

We were received most kindly by an old friend of my parents, Mr. Wilkes, the uncle, I think, or perhaps great-uncle of him who as Commodore Wilkes of the Trent subsequently became known to the world, as having very nearly set his country and England by the ears! How and why old Mr. Wilkes was a friend of my father’s I do not know, but suspect that it was through the medium of some very old friends of my grandfather Milton, of the name of Garnet. Two very old ladies of that name, spinster sisters, I remember to have seen at Brighton some twenty or five and twenty years ago. I remember that Mr. Wilkes struck me as a remarkably courteous and gentlemanlike old man, very English both in manners and appearance, in a blue dress coat and buff waistcoat, and long white hair. I fancy that he was connected in some way (by old friendship only, I imagine,) with the Misses Wright, and I gathered that he altogether disapproved of Frances Wright’s philanthropic Nashoba enterprise, and consequently of the share in it which my father and mother, on behalf of my brother Henry, had undertaken. Of the wisdom of his misgivings the result furnished abundant proof.

My recollections of the journey from New York to Cincinnati are of a very fragmentary description, those of so very many other journeys during the well nigh sixty years which have elapsed since it was performed have nearly obliterated them. I remember being struck by the uncomfortable roughness of all the lodging accommodation, as contrasted with the great abundance, and even, as it appeared to me, luxury of the commissariat department.

We passed by Pittsburg and crossed the Alleghany Mountains, the former remaining in my memory as a nightmare of squalor, and the latter as a vision of beauty and delight. We travelled long days through districts of untouched forest over the often described “corduroy” roads. I was utterly disappointed by the forests; all that I saw of them appeared to me a miserable collection of lank, unwholesome-looking, woebegone stems, instead of Windsor Forest on a vastly increased scale, which was, I take it, what I expected. I remember, too, being much struck by the performance of the drivers of the stages over the corduroy roads aforesaid, and often over boggy tracts of half reclaimed forest amid the blackened stumps of burned trees. The things they proposed to themselves to accomplish, and did accomplish without coming to grief, other than shaking every tooth in the heads of their passengers, would have made an English coachman’s hair stand on end! To have seen them at their work over a decent bit of road would on the other hand have provoked the laughter and contempt of the same critics. Arms and legs seemed to take an equal part in the work; the whip was never idle, and the fatigue must have been excessive. I do not think that any man could have driven fifty miles at a stretch over those roads.

Cincinnati was reached at last. The journey to me had been delightful in the highest degree, simply from the novelty of everything. As things were done at that time it was one of very great fatigue, but in those days I seemed to be incapable of fatigue. At all events it was all child’s play in comparison with my crossing the ocean in the good ship Corinthian.

We found my mother and two sisters and my brother Henry well, and established in a roomy bright-looking house, built of wood, and all white with the exception of the green Venetian blinds. It stood in its own “grounds,” but these grounds consisted of a large field uncultivated save for a few potatoes in one corner of it; and the whole appearance of the place was made unkempt-looking—not squalid, because everything was too new and clean looking for that—by uncompleted essays towards the making of a road from the entrance-gate to the house, and by fragments of boarding and timber, which it had apparently been worth no one’s while to collect after the building of the house was completed. With all this there was an air of roominess and brightness which seemed to me very pleasant. The house was some five or ten minutes’ walk from what might be considered the commencement of the town, but it is no doubt by this time, if it still stands at all, more nearly in the centre of it.

CHAPTER VIII.

My father and I remained between five and six months at Cincinnati, and my remembrances of the time are pleasant ones. In the way of amusement, to the best of my recollection, there was not much besides rambling over the country with my brother, the old companion of those London rambles which seemed to me then almost as far off in the dim past as they do now. But we were free, tied to no bounds, and very slightly to any hours. And I enjoyed those rambles immensely. I do not remember that the country about Cincinnati struck me as especially interesting or beautiful, and the Ohio, la belle rivière, distinctly disappointed me. But it was a new world, and every object, whether animate or inanimate, was for us full of interest.