Читать книгу The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches - Benjamin F. Taylor - Страница 5

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The world has certainly grown. Putting the period just in time, the statement is a safe one—"has certainly grown." When De Witt Clinton developed the Dutch idea in America, and made a line of poetry from tide-water to Lake Erie, which people vilified and christened "Clinton's Ditch," the world was not quite ready for it, and the Governor went ahead in a canal-boat! Fancy that world distanced by a three-horse-power tandem team at six miles an hour to-day.

But it was a stately affair then. There was a barrel of salt water standing at the bow of the packet-boat. There was the proud and portly Governor erect behind the barrel like Virgil's ears of attention—arrectis auribus. There were the horses rosetted and bespangled. There were the high and mighty dignitaries on deck, clustered like young bees on a hive's front door-step at swarming time. There were the enthusiastic crowds along the way. Arrived at Buffalo, amid surges of music and rattle of cannon, the Chief Executive poured that brackish Atlantic water into the fine indigo blue of Lake Erie. It was not quite so grand as the old ceremonial when the Doge of Venice wedded the Adriatic, but it meant a great deal more. It meant Bishop Berkely, who said something about a Westward-going star, of which some mention has been made once or twice. It meant Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, in that far future which is our instant present. It meant EMPIRE! You can count the acts that have meant more, within a hundred years, upon four fingers and a thumb—more than ladling out that barrel of sea-water in a strange place. Well, the boats began to slide along the thoroughfare of water, and go up stairs and down stairs in a strange way; and they multiplied like the sluggard's schoolma'am—who was his aunt, also—till there are boats in sight in summer days everywhere between Buffalo and tide-water; and they grow larger, till there are a thousand craft on the Erie Canal of greater tonnage than the vessel from whose deck Lawrence sent up the dying charge that made him as deathless as the Pleiades.

The cargoes of those boats, when they began to creep, was something wonderful: men, women and children, plows, axes and Bibles; teachers, preachers and Ramage presses, along with bedsteads that corded up and creaked like gates in high winds; big wheels, little wheels and reels, looms with timber enough in them for saw-mills and a log or two left to begin upon. So you see, when they went West in those days they packed up their homes and took them along. You were sure of their finding anchor-ground somewhere, for how could a man go adrift with a wife, five children, a brass kettle and a feather-bed tied to him? You were sure, too, that the world would not be wronged out of a home—perhaps a better and a happier one than the man set afloat on Clinton's Ditch for a place nearer sundown.

Thus it was that the grand westward drift of things received its first impulse. Churches with steeples to them, school-houses full of children, newspapers, farms, Christian homes, not one of which appeared on the bills of lading, were all tumbled aboard the canal-boat amidships or somewhere, though nobody seemed to know it. The mighty fleet of white-decked "liners," looking like Brobdignagian—that word won't hurt you if you don't go near it!—ants' eggs with windows in them, has had more to do with the march of civilization than all the aquatic armaments that ever thundered. Sometimes, scurrying along in the cars at thirty miles an hour, you catch glimpses of nests of these eggs adrift in the green fields, floating by the white villages, and advancing, by contrast, so wonderfully slow that they go backward. Now and then a chit of a girl, with a little market-basket of garden vegetables upside down on the top of her head, or a young fellow who parts his hair in the middle, and has nothing else to part with worth mentioning, catches a glimpse of the eggs, too, and tosses a sniff of contempt at them out of the window, never dreaming that he looks upon a letter or two of the alphabet of progress.

I never see one of those boats without a sigh of regret, not because I want to be captain or cook or anything, but because I took my first foreign voyage on one of them, and the boat was a "liner" at that! We "took ship" at Oneida, took water along the way, took soundings when we ran aground, took steamer at Buffalo. It was a taking trip. Of the passengers, one turned into Doctor of Divinity, another into Professor of Latin in the University of Michigan, a third into President of a Southern College, a fourth into the pastor of a Michigan church, two bright and pleasant young ladies into dust long ago, and the seventh and youngest into the writer of this sketch.

It was a merry, care-free party. Not one of the survivors can say that for himself to-day. We were clustered in the little forward cabin. We ran over the deck to the after-cabin for meals. We sat upon our baggage, and took something more than a bird's-eye view of the country. We told stories and sang songs and dreamed dreams. We went into cool locks where the water splashed and tumbled about the bows, and were glad. We suffocated ourselves with blankets when we crossed the Montezuma mosquitoes. Why not? Verily, there is but one Marsh there, but of mosquitoes there are several. I have heard of Montezuma's death. It was some time ago, but it would have been no wonder had he died young, not because of the love of the Gods, but of the mosquitoes. We sat on the deck and watched the steersman's intonations. When he cried, "Low bridge!" we merely ducked our heads; but when he said, "Low bridge!" down we went flat upon the floor like a parcel of undiscovered idolaters. The Palinurus slued the stern of the boat around, and we leaped off upon the "heel-path" and took a stroll. He drove bows on upon the opposite shore, and we took a walk on the "tow-path" with the "drive," who looked like a bundle of old clothes, was as smart as a whip, and profane as "our army in Flanders." He sang songs through the night and the rain as happy as a frog, and when, covered with mud and water, he came aboard to eat, he looked like a bewildered muskrat, and his tracks like a muskrat's also.

We used to hear one genuine word of old English in those seafaring days. Perhaps some other ambitious "liner" was pulling out ahead of us. You confer with the "drive" as to the chance of passing it. You offer him a shilling to try, and his under jaw drops like the lower half of a bellows. But promise him a "scale"—scale, skilling, shilling—and he gets all the tough pull out of his tandem that there is in it, and goes by if he can. Websterian "probabilities" says that is not the derivation of "scale" at all, but no matter. So you see, we went to sea without leaving shore. Now and then a cigar-shaped packet, fuller of windows on the sides than ever a German flute was of finger-holes, would pass us with a swash and the blast of a bugle to "open lock," and the three horses at a swinging trot, the deck crowded with passengers, and the cook in the kitchen stewing and frying and roasting himself and the dinner in the same kettles.

It was the aristocrat of canal craft, the packet was, the captain was somebody, and wore gloves, and when on my voyage I saw one coming, I went down into the cabin, red as to my ears, for something I had forgotten, and that I never found in time to come out of the egg till the packet had gone by. It has since occurred to me that possibly the redness of ears at that time might not have been a quality so remarkable as their length. How you would like the snuggery of the cabin now, and the shelf of a berth that you couldn't turn over in if a heavy fellow happened to be sagging on the shelf above you, and the canal-banks even with the top of your head when you sit down, and the sun about as hot upon the roof as if he had actually taken a deck passage and come bodily aboard, is not a matter of doubt. But the memory of that voyage is pleasant, after all—after all what? all these years; like the music of Caryl, "pleasant but mournful to the soul." And should this short story of a long voyage bring back to any reader some such journey that he took in the years that are gone, some cheerful hours he spent, some cherished friends he made, some faces he learned to love, that for him shall never be changed nor sent away, then these paragraphs are not vain.