Across The Plains | Page 7

morning
dawned with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was
not perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the
heart and seemed to travel with the blood. Day came in with a shudder.
White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as we see them
more often on a lake; and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk
them up, leaving an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from

horizon to horizon, the mists had still been there, and we knew that this
paradise was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria. The fences
along the line bore but two descriptions of advertisement; one to
recommend tobaccos, and the other to vaunt remedies against the ague.
At the point of day, and while we were all in the grasp of that first chill,
a native of the state, who had got in at some way station, pronounced it,
with a doctoral air, "a fever and ague morning."
The Dutch widow was a person of some character. She had conceived
at first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she was at no
pains to conceal. But being a woman of a practical spirit, she made no
difficulty about accepting my attentions, and encouraged me to buy her
children fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels, and even to sleep
upon the floor that she might profit by my empty seat. Nay, she was
such a rattle by nature, and, so powerfully moved to autobiographical
talk, that she was forced, for want of a better, to take me into
confidence and tell me the story of her life. I heard about her late
husband, who seemed to have made his chief impression by taking her
out pleasuring on Sundays. I could tell you her prospects, her hopes,
the amount of her fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week,
and a variety of particular matters that are not usually disclosed except
to friends. At one station, she shook up her children to look at a man on
the platform and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me she
explained how she had been keeping company with this Mr. Z., how far
matters had proceeded, and how it was because of his desistance that
she was now travelling to the West. Then, when I was thus put in
possession of the facts, she asked my judgment on that type of manly
beauty. I admired it to her heart's content. She was not, I think,
remarkably veracious in talk, but broidered as fancy prompted, and
built castles in the air out of her past; yet she had that sort of candour,
to keep me, in spite of all these confidences, steadily aware of her
aversion. Her parting words were ingeniously honest. "I am sure," said
she, "we all OUGHT to be very much obliged to you." I cannot pretend
that she put me at my ease; but I had a certain respect for such a
genuine dislike. A poor nature would have slipped, in the course of
these familiarities, into a sort of worthless toleration for me.

We reached Chicago in the evening. I was turned out of the cars,
bundled into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the
station of a different railroad. Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city.
I remember having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards its
restoration at the period of the fire; and now when I beheld street after
street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers, I
thought it would be a graceful act for the corporation to refund that
sixpence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a cheerful dinner. But there
was no word of restitution. I was that city's benefactor, yet I was
received in a third-class waiting- room, and the best dinner I could get
was a dish of ham and eggs at my own expense.
I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in Chicago.
When it was time to start, I descended the platform like a man in a
dream. It was a long train, lighted from end to end; and car after car, as
I came up with it, was not only filled but overflowing. My valise, my
knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous tomes of Bancroft,
weighed me double; I was hot, feverish, painfully athirst; and there was
a great darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by
gas. When at last I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle of
rags, the world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my
consciousness dwindled within me to a mere pin's