University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER III.

IN WHICH THE EXPEDITION DANCES A HORNPIPE ON
THE TOP OF A MOUNTAIN.

After an early breakfast at about sunrise, we
left the hotel in Winchester on the morning of the
1st of June; and taking out the Northwestern road,
we went on our way rejoicing. Passing through
the North mountain, five miles out, where it breaks
down almost on a level with the valley we had just
left, we entered fairly into the mountain region—
whence it is nothing but chain after chain, until
you cross over the broad belt to the great, spreading,
western, shining plain, watered by the Mississippi
and its tributaries.

For several hours we travelled along without
stint or stay, filled with the bliss of this first morning
of June. Our horses tread the ground lightly,
vigorous and nimble-footed, no touch of weariness
yet upon them; and our swift wheels turn with
scarce-perceptible sound—a mere low hum along
the slaty road. Delicious is the summer's day, delicious
to both soul and sense! No poet's dream of
June was ever so enchanting. It has rained over

night, and fresh and fragrant everywhere is the
morning. The forest-leaves are all washed clean as
the waters of heaven can make them, and the grasses
are more delicately green in their renewal. The
rain-drops, not yet dried up, sparkle all over the
forest, in the glittering sunshine, like beads of pearl.
All nature, animate and inanimate—on four legs,
two, or none—feels the heavenly influence of the
hour. The woods are vocal with the rapturous voice
of birds. The wild-flowers—the wild-rose and the
wood-violet, the gorgeous laurel, and the sweet elderbloom—in
all their freshened glory, give their delicate
perfumes to the liberal air, and their hues of
heaven to the enraptured sight. The streams, sometimes
crossing our path, and sometimes flowing on
by our side—seeming to go with us whichever way
we go—flowing on adown the dell or by the rifted
rock, and all embowered with shrubs and tangled
vines: these sing their sweet songs tuneful to the
ear, until at length, ecstasy—born of the murmuring
waters, the balm of the air, the glory of the
wild-flowers, the warble of the birds, and the smooth
velocity of your rheda—enters into the heart, and
pervades your countenance with a radiance that is
almost divine.

Thus full of all joy that is born of summer and
the mountains, we speed on our way—to happiness
and to Winston! On we drive, over the smooth
road, through gorge, and dell, and valley, when by-and-by

we ascend a mountain, winding up its side
like the track of a snake, until we reach the top.
Here a magnificent panorama of distant-blending
valleys and mountains piled on mountains, breaks
suddenly on our view; and, seized with a shouting
spirit of exultation—

meaning thereby this all-hailed land of ours, which
the patriotic reader will of course understand.

The day is now some four hours old by the shadow;
and before yet the last echoes of our voices
have died away in the hills and rocks around, a
wayfarer, all in minstrel array bedight, walked in
wearily among us. He called a halt, and made a
stand, too, on the mountain's brow. This was a wandering
Italian, with his hand-organ strapped to his
back, who had ascended from the other side; and
it was not long before he had unburdened himself
of his bread-winner, and given us a specimen of
what his art could do. His instrument was a very
good one, and our imaginations had by this time
thrown around him an air of romance and poetry.
Had we encountered him in the streets of a city, he
would have been nothing more than an ordinary
strolling minstrel to us; but here, in the forest, his
music struck upon the ear pleasantly enough, and
brought to its aid much poetic association. It sounded

of the days when the old harper begged his bread
from door to door: and the hand-organ is already
half-elevated into the harp, and he who turns it has
a soul alive to poetry and song. Happy power of
illusion! it is better than gold in gilding this bare
life—this life so bare and hard to the pure reason,
so full of charm to the imagination!

Thus idealizing the hand-organ and the very good-looking,
rather handsome man, who turned it, we
now left our wagons; and, out in the road, and face
to face, we hold friendly parley with the stranger.
The wandering minstrel is a Neapolitan; and the
Signor Strozzi, our artist, glad of a chance to refresh
himself with a little Italian, immediately enlarges
upon the renowned city—its towers and palaces,
the bay, the towns around, and the neighboring volcano
lurid in the heavens. Not unmindful of his
country, there is moisture in the eye of the minstrel,
and something very like a tear is on his cheek.
There is something sympathetic in all show of feeling;
and when the prior of St. Philips repeated in
feeling tones the song of the harper in Rokeby—

when the feeling prior, here on the mountain's brow,
crooned forth these verses—the ruined exile standing
tired before him, with his arm thrown over his
bread-winner—let the susceptibility to emotion be
here recorded of the expedition, which made us
draw forth our purses and give to this rude votary
of the "joyous science" more silver and gold than
he had gathered in a week in all his roaming. We
were as good as two or three villages to him.

Having, however, some latent, half shame-prompted
idea that we might be indulging a little too much
in a sentimental luxury, incompatible with the manly
and somewhat rough, Runic character of our enterprise,
we daffed aside these softer emotions, and
struck off into a lighter and gayer strain, more in
keeping with the actual state of the case around us.
And so the Neapolitan, Jacomo, assumed once more
his usual professional bearing, and struck his lyre
to the strains that nightly over the earth swell the
hearts of those who worship at the feet of Terpsichore—that
is, he played us some waltzes and

polkas. And presently we all began to dance—the
little figures in the glass case in front of the organ,
and we on the slaty summit of the mountain-road.

Away we go, in fine accord with the minstrelsey—
now waltzing together in bold sweeps around the
brow of the mountain; and now, with arms akimbo,
dancing a polka, in many mazy gyrations, after the
most approved manner of executing that dance, as
it was first exhibited by the ballet-people at our
theatres, before yet it became fashionable in high
life. The whole affair we concluded with Fisher's
hornpipe, through which we capered with such surprising
agility as was never before or since made
manifest on the top of any mountain in the United
States—or, probably, at the bottom of any one
either. As we danced, we all sang, too, in accompaniment
with the strains, thus doubly taxing our
powers. The dust flew, and rose into the heavens;
Jacomo's black eye sparkled as he swiftly turned
his crank. The scene was as intense as the race
down the quarter stretch between Eclipse and Henry,
when North and South hung suspended on the
strife. We swam the very air agile and swift-bounding—some
of us—as the antelope; others with a
strained, incongruous jerking and ponderous agility,
very much like what might be supposed of a
buffalo in a hornpipe. Even the lame leg of Murad
the Unlucky might be caught a glimpse of, every
now and then, flying about in the midst of the hurlyburly
as something independent of anybody present:
in our American vernacular, it seemed to be
going it on its own hook. The horses drew up
around us with their wagons, and, with ears bent
forward, and fascinated gaze, looked on in pleased
wonderment. Fisher's hornpipe is perhaps one of
the fastest tunes now known in all Christendom;
and yet, fast as we danced it, we sang it. It was
thus the wild descant rang through the forest:—

The echoes around take up our voices at every
pause for breath; the mountains, as in the old
Bible times, cry aloud for joy; and ever see the
devil, and nightcap on, and whale by the tail,
in the cadence of the hornpipe, are repeated far
and near, until at length the uproar dies away—in
some far remote dell, a last faint, feeble sound of
whale . . . tail, lingering for a moment on the ear,
and all is hushed: the echoes have gone to sleep
again, and nothing breaks upon the stillness of the
mountains, save the lazy sound of the summer
wind, that is itself almost silence.

Somewhat fagged and out of breath, we now
once more took to our wagons, the horses by this
time well rested; and leaving the Neapolitan, disconsolate
Jacomo, standing irresolute on the mountain's
brow, we swept down the windings of the

highway, at the rate of some twelve miles to the
hour—Jacomo still standing motionless as a picture,
as we entered a wild defile of the forest, and
for ever lost him to the sight. Winding our way
over a broken range of picturesque hills, we at
length entered a ravine, down which a clear, sparkling
stream hunts its course to a neighboring river.
Here are some very remarkable cliffs of a pure
white sandstone, which is in some demand among the
nicer housekeepers of Winchester and Romney for
scouring purposes. Into the base of one of these
cliffs, a large excavation has been made, where the
rock is so purely white, that it suggests to you the
idea of a quarry of the finest loaf-sugar. Passing
these loaf-sugar cliffs, we drove on leisurely down
the cool ravine, by the banks and through the fords
of the silvery stream, when presently we emerged
from the deep shadows of some thickly-clustered
hemlocks and pines into the light of day, and
found ourselves before the tavern door of Mr.
Charles Blue. Here we stopped to feed and rest
our horses for some two or three hours—taking
care, in the meantime, to regale ourselves with such
delicacies of fried chickens, broiled ham and eggs,
and fresh butter and milk, as the house afforded us.

About two o'clock—the day being still pleasant,
and without any burdensome heat—we took to the
road again; and after some two hours' travel, through
the green valleys and over other mountains, we at

length came in sight of the little town of Romney,
beautifully situated upon a sloping plateau of land
that lies back of the high banks and bluffs of the
South Branch; the river here flowing along in all
its winding lines of beauty—on through rich bottoms
and bold over-hanging mountains, to its junction
with the Potomac.

Somewhere about four o'clock—after descending
a long and beautiful sweep of road, grand enough
in all its features to be the avenue to some lordly
city—we drove up to the door of the village inn
(the old Virginia designation is ordinary), situated
pleasantly on the main street of Romney, and kept
by Mr. Armstrong, formerly a member of Congress
from this district, but who has for some years past
chosen the better part—shaken the dust of the capitol
from his feet, and commanded the respect and
good will of all considerate people who travel this
way, by the manner in which he discharges his present
representative duty to the public. In this comfortable
inn, we took our ease for the rest of the
day, having accomplished just forty-four miles over
those mountains, since first we drew rein in the
morning.

How the Signor Strozzi was taken by some of
the good people of Romney for an Italian revolutionist—how
Doctor Blandy built a very remarkable
castle in the air, that from a neighboring
eminence commanded the South Branch valley—

how Mr. Butcut set the porch in a roar, at a story
he told of some cockneys who came over to New
York to hunt bears about that city; how the
Prior discoursed eloquently on Lucerne grass and
the ancients; how Triptolemus, when the levée we
held on the porch was at the highest, called everybody
by somebody else's name; how we passed
altogether a very cheerful and gay evening of it,
among the social citizens of Romney, who did us
the honor to make our acquaintance—we will not
detain the reader by setting forth in full in these
pages, but here end this chapter, and with it the
narrative of the evening.