Читать книгу John Smith's Funny Adventures on a Crutch - A. F. Hill - Страница 12

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WE arrived in Boston Harbor Monday afternoon about four o’clock, and entered a very dense fog about the same time. The fog was so thick for several minutes that objects could not be seen from one end of the vessel to the other. The engine was quickly stopped, and we narrowly escaped a collision with a steamer. But in the course of ten minutes, the heavy mist swept down the harbor in a body, and left all clear around us; when we were somewhat surprised to find ourselves within one hundred yards of the shore. We floated up to the pier at the foot of State street; the propeller was soon made fast, and I immediately went ashore, in the midst of a soaking rain that seemed to be sent just then for my express benefit. I got into a carriage—one that had sleigh-runners substituted for wheels—and rode to a good comfortable hotel which the Captain had recommended.

It rained till after dark; and, in fact, I retired to my room, went asleep and left it raining. I remember that I heard some one remark, just before I retired, that if it kept on raining,—he didn’t say how long—it would spoil the sleighing, and wheels would come into requisition again: for in the New England States, especially Massachusetts, and those lying north of it, a vehicle with wheels is seldom seen in the depth of winter. The sleighing usually continues good till spring, and the wheels are removed for a time from all vehicles, and runners are adjusted in their stead. Not even the street-cars or omnibuses are any exceptions: they, too, cease to rattle, roll and rumble over the streets, and go gliding about with so little noise that one gets the queer idea into his head that they are barefooted.

Next morning I discovered that it had cleared off, and that the thermometer had gracefully descended to zero. [Well, that was nothing.] In fact, during the ensuing six weeks which I spent in the New England States, the sleighing continued excellent, and the thermometer ranged pretty generally from about five degrees above zero to five below. To be sure, we had a cool night or two, now and then, when it went down to ten or fifteen below; but no one thought much of that. Such is the character of the winter in New England—the good old-fashioned kind that a fellow likes to see.

I glanced over toward Charlestown early on the morning after my arrival, beheld Bunker Hill Monument towering far above the smoke-stacks and steeples in the perspective; and I determined to visit it at once. I accordingly climbed to the top of an omnibus, cold as it was—for I wanted to see all I could—and rode over.

It is not universally known that the battle of Bunker Hill is so called because it was fought on Breed’s Hill. The latter is near Bunker’s Hill, and it is on Breed’s Hill that the monument now stands—and always has stood since it was built, (for they never moved it.) The reason the battle was called the battle of Bunker Hill, and, consequently, that the monument is styled the “Bunker Hill Monument,” is, that the engagement should have been fought there. Colonel Prescott was sent with a thousand men to throw up earthworks on Mr. Bunker’s Hill, which overlooked Charlestown Neck; but either mistaking his instructions, or not being acquainted with the vicinity, he took possession of Breed’s Hill instead, and threw up an earthwork there in rather unpleasant proximity to the British fleet in the harbor.

The monument is built of granite, is about twenty-five feet square at the base, and about twelve or fifteen at the top; which top is accessible by means of an interior winding stone stairway, dimly lighted with rather small jets of gas that are too few and too far between. At intervals of about twenty feet there are narrow apertures to let in air; and that cold morning they let in too much. During the previous night, too, the rain had blown in and frozen on the stone steps, so that fully one half of them were perfectly enameled with ice.

To ascend these with a crutch under such circumstances was no less than a dangerous undertaking. The superintendent advised me not to try it, but I could not act upon his advice, from the fact that I had “made up my mind” to go up. (It’s a wonder I didn’t “go up,” in another way.) If there had not been a small iron railing to cling to, I could never have reached the head of that almost interminable staircase. As it was, I came near falling backward, and only saved myself by clutching this railing.

Should one start to fall down these steps, nothing would save him. They wind around and around, with here and there only a narrow landing, not more than twice the width of a stair, and too narrow to arrest the progress of a descending form. One might as well leap down from the top, either outside or within the circular shaft around which the stairs wind, as to go tumbling around and around, down, down, down, the solid spiral stairway, thumped and beaten by the edges of two or three hundred stone steps; for in either case I suppose that brandy and water wouldn’t save him.

I reached the top pretty tired, after having ascended two hundred and ninety-five icy steps; and from this height of two hundred feet, had a good view of Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, and the harbor.

Finding it rather cold up there—for there were several good sized windows open for the wind to blow in at, and visitors to look out of—I soon made up my mind to descend; in fact the cold was so severe that it had a rather benumbing effect on me; and as my thigh and the calf of my leg fairly ached from my recent exertions, I fully realized the danger of descending, and fancied I would have made a considerable pecuniary sacrifice to be safely at the base of the tall structure. There was no way to get there, however, but to walk down, if it might be so called, and I began the perilous descent. I was not half way down when my crutch and cane both slipped from an icy step, and I fell. O, what a fall there would have been, my countrymen, if I hadn’t caught the iron railing! I gripped the cold iron with my right hand, and arrested my crutch with my left; but my cane escaped me, and away it went, tumbling knocking, cracking rattling and clattering, till it reached the bottom. I fancied it took it something like a minute to make the descent, but the probability is that the time it occupied in the journey was not more than ten seconds. Its last echo had just died away, when I heard the voice of the superintendent calling to me from below; and his voice had a kind of twisty sound by the time it wound its way up to me.

“Did you fall?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, telling a white one, “I merely threw my cane down because I can get down better without it.”

I did, however, get along better without it, for I could now grasp the railing all the time with one hand while the other held the crutch.

Well, it is not my intention to write an ordinary book of travels. That has been done too often. All the places I have visited have been described time and again; and I will only entertain the reader with my (John Smith’s) odd adventures therein.

While in Boston I had the pleasure of an introduction to Mrs. Partington. That amiable old lady is a jovial, round-faced old gentleman of fifty-five or sixty. His name is B. P. Shillaber, and he is connected with the Boston Gazette. He is a noble-hearted, excellent gentleman; and the people of this country owe him their thanks for the many happy smiles his eccentric and inimitable pen has called out upon their faces. Long life and many happy years to Mrs. Partington!

I remained in New England during the rest of the winter, and had a pleasant time and many sleigh-rides. I visited Lexington, Lowell, Lawrence and most of the large towns of Massachusetts; Manchester, Concord and Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Bellows Falls, Rutland and Burlington, Vermont; and Portland and some smaller towns and cities in Maine.

In the city of Portland I hired a horse and sleigh one morning, and resolved to drive a few miles into the country. It was snowing vigorously, but was not very cold; I had a spirited horse before me; a good light sleigh under me; and away I went, bounding over the road, neither knowing nor caring whither I went. By and by, when I had traveled five or six miles, and distanced a number of other travelers, in similar vehicles, on the way, I saw a town just ahead of me. The snow was still falling so briskly that I was almost in the town before I saw it. As I drove along, I asked a boy what place it was, and he said, “Westbrook.” I entered the village, and found it to be one of considerable extent. In fact, I drove half-a-mile, and still there was no end of houses. On the contrary, they became thicker and thicker; and I began to conclude that “Westbrook” must be quite a city. By and by I found myself on a street that reminded me forcibly of one I had seen in Portland; and, what made it more remarkable, I observed that it rejoiced in the same name. What a coincidence! But I marveled more still, as I followed this street a little way and passed an hotel that was the very image of the one I stayed at in Portland—and lo! there stood at the door a porter who was dark-skinned and cross-eyed, exactly like the porter of my hotel in that city! Was I dreaming? No, not exactly; but I must have been during my drive, for I had wandered around among the country roads in the snow-storm, lost my reckoning, and actually entered Portland again. I had come in through a little suburban village, north of the city, called “Westbrook;” and hence my delusion.

In Rutland, a beautiful little city nestling in a kind of basin high up among the Green Mountains of Vermont, I arrived one night at a late hour. I went to a good comfortable hotel—for they have such there—and asked for a “single room.” The host regretted that he had no single rooms unoccupied. Passengers from the earlier trains had taken them all. He could put me in a double-bedded room where another guest had just retired—one who appeared to be a “perfect gentleman:” that was the best he could do. It was the best I could do, too; so, I was shown to the room.

I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket, and, not being perfectly sure that the man in the other bed was a perfect angel, I thought there would be no harm in placing it in the watch-fob of my unimpeachables, and placing the same rolled up in a ball, under my neck. I did so. When morning came, the “other fellow” got up first, and I felt somewhat amused when I chanced to observe—for I was awake, and dreading to “turn out” on account of the sharp morning air—that he had done so too. We had both taken each other for rogues.

Well, that is the right way to view every stranger when you are traveling. Look on every man you meet, and especially if he speaks to you, as a deep-dyed villain, till you have had the most incontrovertible proof that he is not.

I made Boston my head-quarters, while visiting different portions of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts; and about the last of February, I departed for Philadelphia. I didn’t try the “dark-blue sea” again; but took the “Shore Line” railroad, stopping a short time in Providence, New Haven and New York.

I arrived in New York one March evening, and, allowing my baggage to go on to Philadelphia, resolved to remain in the city that night and go to the “Quaker City” next day. I wanted to go via the Camden and Amboy Railroad, and was told that the boat—for passengers on this road take the boat from New York to South Amboy, a distance of twenty-eight miles—would leave at six in the morning. That evening, while in the sitting-room of my old hotel, I observed two suspicious-looking fellows eyeing me rather sharply, and I felt that they were entitled to a little watching from me. So, I watched them. When I retired, I locked and bolted my door and even braced it with my crutch. [A handy thing to have in a house, sometimes.] I slept soundly till five o’clock, at which time the porter, according to instructions, knocked at my door and awoke me.

There was no one in the hotel below, when I went down but a sleepy porter, and I was wondering where my suspicious-looking friends (?) were, and where they stayed, and congratulating myself that I was escaping them nicely by going away at that early hour in the morning, when the street-door opened and the two identical gentlemen stepped in, and took a seat by the stove. Pretending not to notice them, I stepped out.

It was still far from daylight, and the snow was flying merrily. The wind was howling, and each blaze of gas in the street-lamps was fluttering and struggling as though it might go out at any moment. I wanted to go to Pier No. 1, North River, from which the boat was to start, and I walked as fast as I could—and that was not slow—toward Broadway, glancing back over my shoulder at intervals of two seconds, to see if my villains were coming. It was the quietest hour I ever saw in New York. Not a stage, carriage, cart or car was astir in that part of the city; and neither policeman nor “any other man” was to be seen. The snow and wind combined were fairly blinding, and it was very far from being a “fine morning.”

I had nearly reached Broadway, when I looked back and saw the two dears coming, a square distant. They were passing a lamp-post, and the glimpse I caught of their figures convinced me of their identity. Without exhibiting any haste or trepidation, I walked on to the corner of Broadway and Park Row and turned to the left; but instead of walking down Broadway, suddenly stepped aside and stood in the door-way of Barnum’s old Museum—which was still standing at that time, but over whose ashes Bennett’s majestic marble palace now stands—leaned my cane up in a corner, drew my revolver, cocked it, and awaited the attack.

I had just completed my preparations for a defence of my position, when the happy pair came. The light of a street-lamp at the corner shone full upon them, and I must have been blind indeed if I had not recognized them. Their hats were drawn down over their eyes, to shield those organs from the driving snow, and as I was in the shade, they failed to see me, and rushed by. They were running, their footsteps soon died away, and their “forms” faded down Broadway, which was then as quiet as a country lane. I was very well satisfied to escape an encounter with them, because I preferred not to shoot them, as I would certainly have found it necessary to do had they seen me.

I knew they would soon discover that I had dodged them, and return; so, replacing my revolver, taking my cane, and keeping an eye down Broadway, I glided across the silent thoroughfare, went down Vesey Street to North River, and thence down West Street to Pier No. 1, which was not really much out of my way.

I reached the boat in good time, and arrived in Philadelphia that day by twelve o’clock.