Their Pilgrimage | Page 9

safe now, so long after
the war?"
"Oh, I should say so."
"That's what Mr. Benson says. He says it's all nonsense the talk about
what the South 'll do now the Democrats are in. He says the South
wants to make money, and wants the country prosperous as much as
anybody. Yes, we are going to take a regular tour all summer round to
the different places where people go. Irene calls it a pilgrimage to the
holy places of America. Pa thinks we'll get enough of it, and he's
determined we shall have enough of it for once. I suppose we shall. I
like to travel, but I haven't seen any place better than Cyrusville yet."
As Irene did not make her appearance, Mr. King tore himself away
from this interesting conversation and strolled about the parlors, made
engagements to take early coffee at the fort, to go to church with Mrs.
Cortlandt and her friends, and afterwards to drive over to Hampton and
see the copper and other colored schools, talked a little politics over a
late cigar, and then went to bed, rather curious to see if the eyes that
Mrs. Cortlandt regarded as so dangerous would appear to him in the
darkness.
When he awoke, his first faint impressions were that the Hygeia had
drifted out to sea, and then that a dense fog had drifted in and
enveloped it. But this illusion was speedily dispelled. The window-
ledge was piled high with snow. Snow filled the air, whirled about by a

gale that was banging the window-shutters and raging exactly like a
Northern tempest.
It swirled the snow about in waves and dark masses interspersed with
rifts of light, dark here and luminous there. The Rip-Raps were lost to
view. Out at sea black clouds hung in the horizon, heavy
reinforcements for the attacking storm. The ground was heaped with
the still fast- falling snow--ten inches deep he heard it said when he
descended. The Baltimore boat had not arrived, and could not get in.
The waves at the wharf rolled in, black and heavy, with a sullen beat,
and the sky shut down close to the water, except when a sudden
stronger gust of wind cleared a luminous space for an instant.
Stormbound: that is what the Hygeia was--a winter resort without any
doubt.
The hotel was put to a test of its qualities. There was no getting abroad
in such a storm. But the Hygeia appeared at its best in this emergency.
The long glass corridors, where no one could venture in the arctic
temperature, gave, nevertheless, an air of brightness and cheerfulness to
the interior, where big fires blazed, and the company were exalted into
good-fellowship and gayety--a decorous Sunday gayety-- by the
elemental war from which they were securely housed.
If the defenders of their country in the fortress mounted guard that
morning, the guests at the Hygeia did not see them, but a good many of
them mounted guard later at the hotel, and offered to the young ladies
there that protection which the brave like to give the fair.
Notwithstanding this, Mr. Stanhope King could not say the day was
dull. After a morning presumably spent over works of a religious
character, some of the young ladies, who had been the life of the
excursion the day before, showed their versatility by devising serious
amusements befitting the day, such as twenty questions on Scriptural
subjects, palmistry, which on another day is an aid to mild flirtation,
and an exhibition of mind-reading, not public--oh, dear, no--but with a
favored group in a private parlor. In none of these groups, however, did
Mr. King find Miss Benson, and when he encountered her after dinner
in the reading-room, she confessed that she had declined an invitation
to assist at the mind- reading, partly from a lack of interest, and partly
from a reluctance to dabble in such things.
"Surely you are not uninterested in what is now called psychical

research?" he asked.
"That depends," said Irene. "If I were a physician, I should like to
watch the operation of the minds of 'sensitives' as a pathological study.
But the experiments I have seen are merely exciting and unsettling,
without the least good result, with a haunting notion that you are being
tricked or deluded. It is as much as I can do to try and know my own
mind, without reading the minds of others."
"But you cannot help the endeavor to read the mind of a person with
whom you are talking."
"Oh, that is different. That is really an encounter of wits, for you know
that the best part of a conversation is the things not said. What they call
mindreading is a vulgar business compared to this. Don't you think