Border and Bastille | Page 8

more unsafe in really rough weather than the crankiest of our old "coffin brigs," seems quite ascertained now: the fact of their being unable to make headway through a heavy sea unless towed by a consort, speaks for itself. The immediate cause of the Monitor's foundering (according to Captain Worden's account, which my informant had from his own lips) was a leak sprung, where her protruding stern-armour, coming down flat on the waves with every plunge of the vessel, became loosened from the main hull; but, for some time before this was discovered, she seems to have spent more minutes under than above the water, and nothing alive could have stood unlashed for a second on her deck. So great was the public disappointment, that the tribe of false prophets--whose cry of "Go up to Ramoth Gilead, and prosper," deafens us here, not less, usually in defeat than in success--did for awhile abate their blatancy; while Ericsson--most confident of projectors--spake softly, below his breath, as he suggested faint excuse and encouragement.
The news from the West--hourly improving, and more clearly confirmed--were hardly welcomed, as they deserved, and scarcely counter-balanced the naval disaster. It was not long, however, before Rosecrans the Invincible came in for his full share of credit--perhaps not more than he merited. Few other Federal commanders can claim that epithet; and, though some people persisted in considering Murfreesburg a Pyrrhic victory, it is certain that he held his ground manfully, and eventually advanced, where defeat, or even a retrograde movement, would have been simply ruin.
On the fifth day our small company were scattered--each going his own way, east, north, and south--while the Parisian abode in New York still.
CHAPTER II.
CONGRESSIA.
Of two lines to Philadelphia I selected the longest, wishing to see the harbor, down which a steamer takes passengers as far as Amboy; but the Powers of the Air were unpropitious again: it never ceased blowing, from the moment we went on board a very unpleasant substitute for the regular passage-boat, till we landed on the railway pier. My first experience of American travel was not attractive. The crazy old craft puffed and snorted furiously, but failed to persuade any one that she was doing eight miles an hour; the grime of many years lay thick on her dusky timbers--dust under cover, and mud where the wet swept in, and her close, dark cabins were stifling enough to make you, after five minutes of vapor-bathing, plunge eagerly into the bitter weather outside. Indeed, there was not much to see, for the track lies on the inner and uglier side of Staten Island. The last few miles lead through marshes, with nothing taller growing than reeds and osiers.
For an hour or so after leaving Amboy, you look out on a country thickly populated, well cultivated, and trimly fenced, bearing a strong resemblance to parts of our own eastern counties. We passed through one wood, in height of trees, sweep of ground, color of soil, and build of boundary-fence, so exactly like a certain cover in Norfolk similarly bisected by the rail, that I could have picked out the precise spot where, many a time and oft, I have waited for the "rocketers." But the character of the landscape soon changed; loose, sprawling "zigzags" usurped the place of neat squared posts and rails; the stunted woodland stretched farther afield, with rarer breaks of clearing; and the low hill-ranges, behind which the watery sun soon absconded, looked drearily bare in the distance.
It was pleasant, from the ferry boat, which was our last change, to meet the lights of Philadelphia, gleaming out on the broad dark Susquehanna.
I can say little of that staid, opulent, intensely respectable city--not even if the imputation of dullness, cast upon her by the more mercurial South, be a slander; for the few hours of my stay there were spent almost entirely with my Asiatic friend, whose invitations and inducements to a longer sojourn were very hard to resist. But I was impatient to get on (as men will be who cannot see their arm's-length into the future), and at midnight I started again for Washington.
My recollections of that journey are the reverse of roseate. The atmosphere of the cars--windows hermetic, and stoves red-hot--made one look back regretfully on the milder inferno of the passage-boat; the acrid apple-odor was more pungently nauseating; and the abomination of expectoration less carefully dissembled. Besides this, I was afflicted by another nuisance, purely private and personal.
Whether there be any such thing as love at first sight or no, is a question--grave or gay, as you choose to discuss it--but, that instinctive antipathies exist, is most certain. I was the victim of one of such that night. Waiting for change in the ticket-office, my eye lighted on a dark man, of African appearance, standing unpleasantly