Across The Plains | Page 6

Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there
are few poems with a nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful land;
and if the new Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his verse

will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states
and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.
Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg. I
had now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with her
children; these I was to watch over providentially for a certain distance
farther on the way; but as I found she was furnished with a basket of
eatables, I left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner for myself. I
mention this meal, not only because it was the first of which I had
partaken for about thirty hours, but because it was the means of my first
introduction to a coloured gentleman. He did me the honour to wait
upon me after a fashion, while I was eating; and with every word, look,
and gesture marched me farther into the country of surprise. He was
indeed strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the
Christy Minstrels of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly
somewhat dark, but of a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a
slight and rather odd foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and
armed with manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to
name their parallel in England. A butler perhaps rides as high over the
unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort of
sighing patience which one is often moved to admire. And again, the
abstract butler never stoops to familiarity. But the coloured gentleman
will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar like an upper form boy to
a fag; he unbends to you like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He
makes himself at home and welcome. Indeed, I may say, this waiter
behaved himself to me throughout that supper much as, with us, a
young, free, and not very self-respecting master might behave to a
good-looking chambermaid. I had come prepared to pity the poor negro,
to put him at his ease, to prove in a thousand condescensions that I was
no sharer in the prejudice of race; but I assure you I put my patronage
away for another occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that
result.
Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of
etiquette: if one should offer to tip the American waiter? Certainly not,
he told me. Never. It would not do. They considered themselves too
highly to accept. They would even resent the offer. As for him and me,

we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation; he, in particular, had
found much pleasure in my society; I was a stranger; this was exactly
one of those rare conjunctures.... Without being very clear seeing, I can
still perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly
pocketed a quarter.
WEDNESDAY. - A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and
orphans on board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio. This
had early been a favourite home of my imagination; I have played at
being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a
dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched. My preference was
founded on a work which appeared in CASSELL'S FAMILY PAPER,
and was read aloud to me by my nurse. It narrated the doings of one
Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter, very obligingly
washed the paint off his face and became Sir Reginald
Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him. The idea of a man
being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a baronet, was one
which my mind rejected. It offended verisimilitude, like the pretended
anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape from uninhabited
islands.
But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. We were now on those
great plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The
country was flat like Holland, but far from being dull. All through Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw of them from the
train and in my waking moments, it was rich and various, and breathed
an elegance peculiar to itself. The tall corn pleased the eye; the trees
were graceful in themselves, and framed the plain into long, aerial
vistas; and the clean, bright, gardened townships spoke of country fare
and pleasant summer evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat
paradise; but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil. That