On the third morning, after waiting two hours upon the bank of the Creek for a perjured boatman, Mr. Williams rushed desperately into a crowd of teamsters and captured the youth whose first impressions of a railway have been chronicled on a preceding page. Probably even he, had time been allowed to consider the proposition at length, would have declined the journey; but, overborne by the vehemence of his employer, he found himself well upon the road to Schaeffer's Farm before he had by any means decided to go thither.
The pleasantest part of the "carriage exercise" on this road is fording the Creek, a course adopted wherever the bluff comes down to the bank, and the flat reappears upon the opposite side, no one having yet spent time to grade a continuous road on one side or the other. A railway company has, however, made a beginning in this direction; and it is promised that in another year the traveller may proceed from Schaeffer's to Oil City by rail.
At Titusville Miselle bade good-bye to her kind friend Williams, and once more took herself under her own protection.
Spending the night at Corry, she next day found herself in the city of Erie, and could have fancied it Heidelberg instead, the signs bearing such names as Schultz, Seelinger, Jantzen, Cronenberger, Heidt, and Heybeck. Hans Preuss sells bread, Valentin Ulrich manufactures saddles, and P. Loesch keeps a meat-market, with a sign representing one gentleman holding a mad bull by a bit of packthread tied to his horns, while an assistant leisurely strolls up to annihilate the creature with a tack-hammer.
Here, too, a little beyond the middle of the town, was a girl herding a flock of geese, precisely as did the princess in the "Brüder Grimm Tales," while a doltish boy stared at her with just the imbecile admiration of Kurdkin for the wily maiden who combed her golden, hair and chanted her naughty spell in the same breath.
A little farther on stood a charming old Dutch cottage with cabbages in the front yard, and a hop-vine clambering the porch. An infant Teuton swung upon the gate, who, being addressed by Miselle, lisped an answer in High Dutch, while his mother shrilly exchanged the news with her next neighbor in the same tongue.
Two hours sufficed to exhaust the wonders of Erie, and Miselle gladly took the cars for Buffalo, and on the road thither fell in with a good Samaritan, who solaced her weary faintness with delicate titbits of grouse, shot and roasted upon an Ohio prairie.
At Buffalo waited the Eastern-bound cars of the New-York Central Railway; but only twenty miles farther on, thundered Niagara, and Miselle could not choose but obey the sonorous summons. So, after spending the night at a "white man's" hotel in Buffalo, the next morning found her standing, an insignificant atom, before one of the world's great wonders. One or two other travellers, however, have mentioned Niagara; and Miselle refrains from expressing more than her thanks for the kindness which enabled her to fulfil her darling wish of standing behind the great fall on the Canada side.
Truly, it is no empty boast that places Americans preëminent over the men of every other nation in their courtesy to women; and Miselle would fain most gratefully acknowledge the constant attention and kindness everywhere offered to her, while never once was she annoyed by obtrusive or unwelcome approach; and not the vast resources of her country, not the grandeur of Niagara, give her such pride and satisfaction as does the new knowledge she has gained of her countrymen.: