 | Inklings of adventure |  |
INCIDENTS ON THE HUDSON.
M. Chabert, the fire-eater, would have found New-York
uncomfortable. I would mention the height of
the thermometer but for an aversion I have to figures.
Broadway, at noon, had been known to fry soles.
I had fixed upon the first of August for my annual
trip to Saratoga, and with a straw hat, a portmanteau,
and a black boy, was huddled into the “rather-faster-than-lightning”
steamer, “North America,” with about
seven hundred other people, like myself, just in time.
Some hundred and fifty gentlemen and ladies, thirty
seconds too late, stood “larding” the pine chips upon
the pier, gazing after the vanishing boat through showers
of perspiration. Away we “streaked” at the rate
of twelve miles in the hour against the current, and
by the time I had penetrated to the baggage closet,
and seated William Wilberforce upon my portmanteau,
with orders not to stir for eleven hours and seven minutes,
we were far up the Hudson, opening into its
hills and rocks, like a witches' party steaming through
the Hartz in a cauldron.
A North River steam-boat, as a Vermont boy would
phrase it, is another guess sort o' thing from a Britisher.
A coal-barge and an eight-oars on the Thames
only, our river boats are long, shallow and graceful,
of the exquisite proportions of a pleasure yacht, and
painted as brilliantly and fantastically as an Indian
shell. With her bow just leaning up from the surface
of the stream, her cut-water throwing off a curved and
transparent sheet from either side, her white awnings,
her magical speed, and the gay spectacle of a thousand
well-dressed people on her open decks, I know nothing
prettier than the vision that shoots by your door
as you sit smoking in your leaf-darkened portico on
the bold shore of the Hudson.
The American edition of Mrs. Trollope (several
copies of which are to be found in every boat, serving
the same purpose to the feelings of the passengers
as the escape-valve to the engine) lay on a sofa beside
me, and taking it up, as to say, “I will be let alone,”
I commenced dividing my attention in my usual quiet
way between the varied panorama of rock and valley
flying backwards in our progress, and the as varied
multitude about me.
For the mass of the women, as far as satin slippers,
hats, dresses, and gloves could go, a Frenchman
might have fancied himself in the midst of a transplantation
from the Boulevards. In London, French
fashions are in a manner Anglified: but an American
woman looks on the productions of Herbault, Boivin,
and Maneuri, as a translator of the Talmud on the
inspired text. The slight figure and small feet of the
race rather favour the resemblance, and a French
milliner, who would probably come to America expecting
to see bears and buffaloes prowling about the
landing-place, would rub her eyes in New-York, and
imagine she was still in France, and had crossed perhaps
only the broad part of the Seine.
The men were a more original study. Near me sat
metropolis, evidently for the first time, and had
“looked round sharp.” In a fist of no very delicate
proportions, was crushed a pair of French kid gloves,
which, if they fulfilled to him a glove's destiny, would
flatter “the rich man” that “the camel” might yet
give him the required precedent. His hair had still
the traces of having been astonished with curling
tongs, and across his Atlantean breast was looped, in
a complicated zig-gag, a chain that must have cost
him a wilderness of raccoon-skins. His coat was
evidently the production of a Mississippi tailor, though
of the finest English material; his shirt-bosom was
ruffled like a swan with her feathers full spread, and
a black silk cravat, tied in a kind of a curse-me-if-I-care-sort-of-a-knot,
flung out its ends like the arms of
an Italian improvisatore. With all this he was a man
to look upon with respect. His under jaw was set up
to its fellow with an habitual determination that
would throw a hickory-tree into a shiver, but frank
good-nature, and the most absolute freedom from suspicion,
lay at large on his Ajacean features, mixed
with an earnestness that commended itself at once to
your liking.
In a retired corner, near the wheel, stood a group
of Indians, as motionless by the hour together as
figures carved in rosso antico. They had been on
their melancholy annual visit to the now-cultivated
shores of Connecticut, the burial-place, but unforgotten
and once wild home of their fathers. With the
money given them by the romantic persons whose
sympathies are yearly moved by these stern and poetical
pilgrims, they had taken a passage in the “fire-canoe,”
which would set them two hundred miles on
their weary journey back to the prairies. Their
Apollo-like forms loosely dressed in blankets, their
and close clutch upon the rifle, the total absence of
surprise at the unaccustomed wonders about them,
and the lowering and settled scorn and dislike expressed
in their copper faces, would have powerfully
impressed a European. The only person on whom
they deigned to cast a glance was the Kentuckian,
and at him they occasionally stole a look, as if, through
all his metropolitan finery, they recognised metal
with whose ring they were familiar.
There were three foreigners on board, two of them
companions, and one apparently alone. With their
coats too small for them, their thick soled boots and
sturdy figures, collarless cravats, and assumed unconsciousness
of the presence of another living soul, they
were recognisable at once as Englishmen. To most
of the people on board they probably appeared equally
well-dressed, and of equal pretensions to the character
of gentlemen; but any one who had made observations
between Temple Bar and the steps of Crockford's,
would easily resolve them into two Birmingham bagmen
“sinking the shop,” and a quiet gentleman on a
tour of information.
The only other persons I particularly noted were a
Southerner, probably the son of a planter from Alabama,
and a beautiful girl, dressed in singularly bad
taste, who seemed his sister. I knew the “specimen”
well. The indolent attitude, the thin but powerfully-jointed
frame, the prompt politeness, the air of superiority
acquired from constant command over slaves, the
mouth habitually flexible and looking eloquent even
in silence, and the eye in which slept a volcano of violent
passions, were the marks that showed him of a race
that I had studied much, and preferred to all the many
and distinct classes of my countrymen. His sister was
of the slightest and most fragile figure, graceful as a
in her motions, vivid in her attention to everything
about her, and amused with all she saw; a copy
of Lalla Rookh sticking from the pocket of her French
apron, a number of gold chains hung outside her travelling
habit, and looped to her belt, and a glorious
profusion of dark curls broken loose from her combs
and floating unheeded over her shoulders.
Toward noon we rounded West Point, and shot
suddenly into the overshadowed gorge of the mountains,
as if we were dashing into the vein of a silver
mine, laid open and molten into a flowing river by a
flash of lightning. (The figure should be Montgomery's;
but I can in no other way give an idea of the
sudden darkening of the Hudson, and the under-ground
effect of the sharp over-hanging mountains as you
sweep first into the Highlands.)
The solitary Englishman, who had been watching
the southern beauty with the greatest apparent interest,
had lounged over to her side of the boat, and, with
the instinctive knowledge that women have of character,
she had shrunk from the more obtrusive attempts
of the Brummagems to engage her in conversation,
and had addressed some remark to him, which seemed
to have advanced them at once to acquaintances of a
year. They were admiring the stupendous scenery
together a moment before the boat stopped for a passenger,
off a small town above the point. As the
wheels were checked, there was a sudden splash in the
water, and a cry of “A lady overboard!” I looked
for the fair creature who had been standing before me,
and she was gone. The boat was sweeping on, and
as I darted to the railing I saw the gurgling eddy
where something had just gone down; and in the
next minute the Kentuckian and the youngest of the
Indians rushed together to the stern, and clearing the
the very centre of the foaming circle. The Englishman
had coolly seized a rope, and, by the time they
re-appeared, stood on the railing with a coil in his hand,
and flung it with accurate calculation directly over
them. With immovably grave faces, and eyes blinded
with water, the two divers rose, holding high between
them—a large pine faggot! Shouts of laughter pealed
from the boat, and the Kentuckian, discovering his
error, gave the log an indignant fling behind, and, taking
hold of the rope, lay quietly to be drawn in; while
the Indian, disdaining assistance, darted through the
wake of the boat with arrowy swiftness, and sprang
up the side with the agility of a tiger-cat. The lady
re-appeared from the cabin as they jumped dripping
upon the deck; the Kentuckian shook himself, and
sat down in the sun to dry; and the graceful and
stern Indian, too proud even to put the wet hair away
from his forehead, resumed his place and folded his
arms, as indifferent and calm, save the suppressed
heaving of his chest, as if he had never stirred from
his stone-like posture.
An hour or two more brought us to the foot of the
Catskills, and here the boat lay alongside the pier to
discharge those of her passengers who were bound to
the house on the mountain. A hundred or more
moved to the gangway at the summons to get ready,
and among them the Southerners and the Kentuckian.
I had begun to feel an interest in our fair fellow-passenger,
and I suddenly determined to join their party
—a resolution which the Englishman seemed to come
to at the same moment, and probably for the same
reason.
We slept at the pretty village on the bank of the
river, and the next day made the twelve hours' ascent
through glen and forest, our way skirted with the
and towered over by trees whose hoary and moss-covered
trunks would have stretched the conceptions
of the “Savage Rosa.” Every thing that was not
lovely was gigantesque and awful. The rocks were
split with a visible impress of the Almighty power
that had torn them apart, and the daring and dizzy
crags spurred into the sky as if the arms of a buried
and frenzied Titan were thrusting them from the
mountain's bosom. It gave one a kind of maddening
desire to shout and leap—the energy with which it
filled the mind so out-measured the power of the
frame.
Near the end of our journey, we stopped together
on a jutting rock, to look back on the obstacles we had
overcome. The view extended over forty or fifty
miles of vale and mountain, and, with a half-shut eye,
it looked, in its green and lavish foliage, like a near
and unequal bed of verdure, while the distant Hudson
crept through it like a half-hid satin riband, lost as if
in clumps of moss among the broken banks of the
Highlands. I was trying to fix the eye of my companion
upon West Point, when a steamer, with its
black funnel and retreating line of smoke, issued as if
from the bosom of the hills into an open break of the
river. It was as small apparently as the white hand
that pointed to it so rapturously.
“Oh!” said the half-breathless girl, “is it not like
some fairy bark on an Eastern stream, with a spice
lamp alight in its prow?”
“More like an old shoe afloat, with a cigar stuck in
it,” interrupted Kentucky.
As the sun began to kindle into a blaze of fire, the
tumultuous masses, so peculiar to an American sky,
turning every tree and rock to a lambent and rosy
gold, we stood on the broad platform on which the
invigorating and rarified air of the mountain. A hot
supper and an early pillow, with the feather beds and
blankets of winter, were unromantic circumstances,
but I am not aware that any one of the party made
any audible objection to them; I sat next the Kentuckian
at table, and can answer for two.
A mile or two back from the mountain-house, on
nearly the same level, the gigantic forest suddenly
sinks two or three hundred feet into the earth, forming
a tremendous chasm, over which a bold stag might
almost leap, and above which the rocks hang on either
side with the most threatening and frowning grandeur.
A mountain-stream creeps through the forest to the
precipice, and leaps as suddenly over, as if, Arethusalike,
it fled into the earth from the pursuing steps of a
Satyr. Thirty paces from its brink, you would never
suspect, but for the hollow reverberation of the plunging
stream, that any thing but a dim and mazy wood
was within a day's journey. It is visited as a great curiosity
in scenery, under the name of Cauterskill Falls.
We were all on the spot by ten the next morning,
after a fatiguing tramp through the forest; for the Kentuckian
had rejected the offer of a guide, undertaking
to bring us to it in a straight line by only the signs of
the water-course. The caprices of the little stream
had misled him, however, and we arrived half-dead
with the fatigue of our cross-marches.
I sat down on the bald edge of the precipice, and
suffered my more impatient companions to attempt the
difficult and dizzy descent before me. The Kentuckian
leapt from rock to rock, followed daringly by the
Southerner; and the Englishman, thoroughly enamoured
of the exquisite child of nature, who knew no
reserve beyond her maidenly modesty, devoted himself
to her assistance, and compelled her with anxious entreaties
as they proceeded, and with my head over the projecting
edge of the most prominent crag, watched them in
a giddy dream, half-stupified by the grandeur of the
scene, half-interested in their motions.
They reached the bottom of the glen at last, and
shouted to the two who had gone before, but they had
followed the dark passage of the stream to find its
vent, and were beyond sight or hearing.
After sitting a minute or two, the restless but overfatigued
girl rose to go nearer the fall, and I was remarking
to myself the sudden heaviness of her steps, when she staggered, and turning towards her companion,
fell senseless into his arms. The closeness of the
air below, combined with over-exertion, had been too
much for her.
The small hut of an old man who served as a guide
stood a little back from the glen, and I had rushed
into it, and was on the first step of the descent with a
flask of spirits, when a cry from the opposite crag, in
the husky and choking scream of infuriated passion,
suddenly arrested me. On the edge of the yawning
chasm, gazing down into it with a livid and death-like
paleness, stood the Southerner. I mechanically followed
his eye. His sister lay on her back upon a flat rock
immediately below him, and over her knelt the Englishman,
loosening the dress that pressed close upon
her throat, and with his face so near to her's as to
conceal it entirely from the view. I felt the brother's
misapprehension at a glance, but my tongue clung to
the roof of my mouth; for in the madness of his fury
he stood stretching clear over the brink, and every
instant I looked to see him plunge headlong. Before
I could recover my breath, he started back, gazed
wildly round, and seizing upon a huge fragment of
rock, heaved it up with supernatural strength, and
I turned away and covered up my eyes. I felt assured
he had dashed them to atoms.
The lion roar of the Kentuckian was the first sound
that followed the thundering crash of the fragments.
“Hallo, youngster! What in tarnation are you
arter? You've killed the gal, by gosh!”
The next moment I heard the loosened stones as he
went plunging down into the glen, and hurrying after
him with my restorative, I found the poor Englishman
lying senseless on the rocks, and the fainting
girl, escaped miraculously from harm, struggling
slowly to her senses.
On examination, the new sufferer appeared only
stunned by a small fragment which had struck him
on the temple, and the Kentuckian, taking him up in
his arms like a child, strode through the spray of the
fall, and held his head under the descending torrent
till he kicked lustily for his freedom. With a draught
from the flask, the pale Alabamian was soon perfectly
restored, and we stood on the rock together looking at
each other like people who have survived an earth-quake.
We climbed the ascent and found the brother lying
with his face to the earth, beside himself with his conflicting
feelings. The rough tongue of the Kentuckian,
to whom I had explained the apparent cause of
the rash act, soon cleared up the tempest, and he
joined us presently, and walked back by his sister's
side in silence.
We made ourselves into a party to pass the remainder
of the summer on the lakes, unwillingly letting off the
Kentuckian, who was in a hurry to get back to propose
himself for the Legislature.
Three or four years have elapsed, and I find myself
a traveller in England. Thickly sown as are the
with a lovely countrywoman in — Square, and
a gossip with her husband over a glass of wine, in
which Cauterskill Falls are not forgotten, are memorandums
in my diary never written but in “red
letters.”
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