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 annua
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 caldron.
A North-river steamboat, 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
are scarce more dissimilar. Built for smooth water
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 backward 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 favor 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
a Kentuckian on three chairs. He had been to the 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-zag, a chain that must have cost him a wilderness
of rackoon-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
gaudy wampum-belts and feathers, the muscular arm
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 metropolian 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
teste, 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 fawn, but with no trace of the dancing
master's precepts 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 underground
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 ac
quaintances 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 taffrail with tremendous leaps, dived
side by side into the very centre of the foaming circle.
The Englishman had coolly seized a rope, and, by the
time they reappeared, 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 fagot! 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 reappeared 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
most gorgeous and odorent flowers, and turned aside
and towered over the trees whose hoary and moss-covered
trunks would have stretched the conceptions
of the “Savage Rosa.” Everything that was not
lovely was gigantesque and awful. The rocks were
split with the 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 phrensied 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
house is built, braced even beyond weariness by 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, Arethusa-like, 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 anything 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
leaped from rock to rock, followed daringly
by the southerner; and the Englishman, thoroughly
enamored 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 to descend more cautiously. I lay
at my length 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 toward 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 hers 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. Be
fore I could recovery my breath, he started back, gazed
wildly round, and seizing upon a huge fragment of
rock, heaved it up with supernatural strength, and
hurled it into the abyss. Giddy and sick with horror,
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 had survived an earthquake.
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
wonders and pleasures of London, an occasional dinner
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.”
