University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER II.

GETTING UNDER WAY.

The stout Earl Percy, here alluded to, did take
his pleasure on the Scottish ground—and how, all
the world knows that has read the fine old ballad
of "Chevy Chase." How the stout gentlemen, and
also those who were none of the stoutest, who took
their pleasure on the Blackwater, came off, hearken
to the following chronicle, and you shall learn.

It was toward the first of June last past, that a
number of gentlemen, residing near each other, in
a pleasant part of that rich valley vaunted to the
world as the garden of Virginia, and called by the
people of the mountain-ranges back of it the land
of Egypt, from the quantity of grain which it produces,
determined to make a pleasure expedition
into the Allegany country, having it chiefly in view
to harry its streams for trout. Accordingly, on one
fine morning—it was on the last day of the universally-lauded

month of May—we gathered together,
prepared as best we knew how for the expedition.

It was at the pleasant country-dwelling of Mr.
Peter Botecote, one of our number, that we made
our rendezvous:—

and all the rest of us—men, dogs, and horses.
Here, after some animated parley, and an early dinner,
it was resolved that we should forthwith take
our departure, notwithstanding the strawberries that
were ripe in the garden, and the cream that was
abounding in the dairy, and what too was far more
delaying, the fascination of our lady-hostess. Pleasant
enough this bower of Botecote's; but hope smiled
its enchantments upon us far away, from the very
midst of the wild Alleganies, and our hearts were
too much agog and all a-tiptoe with its illusions, to
think of staying. The delirium of the mountains
was upon us; and so, amid the neighing and pawing
of horses, the speeding to and fro of servants,
the dancing eyes of children, and the wife's half-sorrowful
smile as she committed her adventurous
husband to the destiny of a two or three weeks' separation,
we wheeled into order, and took up the line
of march. "Hey!"—"Get away!"—"Ho!"—"Ha,
you dog!"—whips flourishing, dogs barking—all
the commotion that a country-gentleman's establishment

could well get up; every good spirit attending,
to say nothing of the high ones: thus we left
the Botecote portals, and—

We drove to Winchester, a town when George
II. was king here in Virginia: not one of your recent
cities, grown up to a hundred thousand people
within the memory of men alive, but an old, time-honored
town, of some five thousand souls, with remembrances
about it; familiar to the footsteps of
Thomas, the sixth Lord Fairfax, when he lived at
Greenway court (some ten miles off), and held power
as lieutenant of the county of Frederick, hunted
the boar, wrote for "The Spectator," and set twenty
covers daily at his table: famous, too, in our provincial
history, as the military headquarters of Washington
during the war of '65 against the French for
the possession of the western country. Here, to
this old border stronghold of the Dominion, where
the dismantled ramparts of Fort Loudon still look
down upon the town, we drove over night, a matter
of some twenty miles, ready to make a more sustained
movement the next morning on Winston—
some eighty-seven miles distant, as already stated,
on the Northwestern road.

The expedition travelled in three light carriages,
such as are commonly called wagons, all tight and
sound, freshly washed, oiled, and rubbed, and glittering

in the sun "like images:" each wagon drawn
by a vigorous trotter in fine condition, and able on
a good road easily to make such time as would have
satisfied Dr. Johnson, even though his philosophy
of happiness should have required a greater speed
than ten miles an hour. We were five in all: the
sixth didn't go, that gentleman having failed us by
the way, owing to some anxieties he entertained
about trusting himself so high up on the continent.
But no matter; we were yet five. There was—

Mr. Peter Botecote, generally called Butcut by
his familiars—sometimes But;

Mr. Guy Philips, the Master of the priory of St.
Philips: hence familiarly the master, sometimes the
Prior, and occasionally "the county Guy;"

Triptolemus Todd, Esq., our Murad the Unlucky,
and sometimes Trip;

Doctor Adolphus Blandy, physician to the expedition:
Galen he was called for short;

And the Signor Andante Strozzi, our artist, also
amateur musician.

Mr. Perry Winkle, jocosely called by his friends,
in one syllable, Perrywinkle, is the name of the
gentleman who did n't go—which we mention
here that he may not altogether escape immortality—and
would also give his likeness, were it
not for a well-founded apprehension that it might
too much divert the attention of the reader from
our narrative.

The array, it will be perceived from the naming,
is somewhat imposing, and gives promise of something
to be done and said out of the common.
Truly, this record of the performance need not fall
short of the promise, if the ambitious chronicler
can succeed, by any happy art, in anything like a
history that shall be a just impress—an impress
of the body and soul—of the expedition. Thucydides
hit it, in his narrative of The Sailing for
Sicily, also in The Landing of Alcibiades at
Athens; Livy, in that part of his twenty-first book
which we've got, and no doubt in the remainder
of it, if we could only find it; Segur, in the retreat
from Moscow; Macaulay, in the landing of the
prince of Orange, and the march on London;
Voltaire's Charles the Twelfth, too, ought not to be
passed over in this enumeration; nor yet Sallust's
little narrative of Catiline. Let us add another to
the illustrious roll, by writing the Blackwater Narrative
up to the immortal standard.

Deserted, then, by Mr. Perrywinkle, we were
yet five in number; all good men and true, and
of unusually diversified character and appearance:
none of us to be called old in years, but old enough
in the ups and downs, and ins and outs of this world,
having made "many hair-breadth 'scapes by flood
and field," by town and country, by man and woman
also, in our time—even the more youthful
Triptolemus, who has killed in his time several

good pointers in shooting partridges, and some few
years ago shot himself in the right knee—which
will account for his lameness in these pages. Without
mincing matters too much, we will speak it out
freely, that we were all men of some mark and
likelihood, as men go; and although the world
might not judge us (which it is our opinion it
would make a great mistake in not doing) as "fit
to stand by Cæsar in a tented field," there can be
no doubt that it would hold us all, if it had the
honor of our acquaintance, as fit to sit by that
"foremost man of all the world," at a dinner or a
supper, at any rate.

We will take the liberty of saying, however,
with great modesty, and begging pardon of everybody,
and especially of the old Romans, that if
"the mightiest Julius" had been along with us
upon this expedition, he would have found the
passage into the country of the Blackwater a far
more fatiguing enterprise than any of his incursions
into the countries of the Allobrogi, or Nervii,
or Acquitanii, or Boii, or any other of those outsiders,
against whom the elegant and captivating
greatest Roman marched.

It will not be amiss here to mention, that we
travelled upon our inroad very much after the
fashion in which Cæsar went upon his. Grave
History has not thought it beneath her dignity to
record how the great master of the Roman world

went upon his depredations; and it is one of her
condescensions for which we are very much obliged
to her. It is therefore, we know, among other things
of this elegant and all-accomplished subverter of the
republic and founder of the fourth and last universal
empire, that he rode in a carriage upon his
forays. This carriage was called a rheda, "a sort
of gig or curricle," says a recent very distinguished
authority, Mr. De Quincey, "a four-wheeled carriage,
and adapted to the conveyance of about half
a ton." This, the reader will perceive, is in and
about our modern wagon; and we have no doubt,
if the matter were fairly investigated, it would be
ascertained that the rheda of the Roman is the
prototype of the wagon of the American: it's a
four-runner at any rate. Julius used this carriage,
we are informed, because it enabled him to take
with him the amount of equipment that was essential
to his elegant and patrician habits: his various
mantles—for instance, the one he overcame the
Nervii in, which he preserved and wore many
years after in the city, and was the same in which
the envious Casca made the rent, that Shakspere
and Casca between them have made so immortal;
his bandboxes, in which he kept the wreaths he
wore around his head, as our ladies do now on
festival occasions—the ivy, the laurel, the oak
wreaths, and what others I know not; his bathing
apparatus, brushes, soaps, &c.; his unguents and
perfumes, with the various ancient Roman balms
for the cure of baldness. The rheda was adjusted
to the convenient transportation of these essentials
of an elegant Roman gentleman of that day: and
so the wagon to the wants of the daintiest gentleman
of this.

It will be perceived, therefore, that our expedition
has many points of resemblance to those so
famous of the splendid Roman. It was depredatory
in the first place. It combined, in the second, about
an equal commingling of the luxurious and the rough-and-tumble.
Thirdly: considering that it took the
field about nineteen centuries later than Cæsar's,
there is a very remarkable resemblance between
the vehicles used in both. Fourthly: in one single
engagement, fought on the Blackwater, and which
lasted only about two hours, no less than four hundred
and ninety some odd of the enemy were slain,
and what is more, fully a hundred of them eaten
next thing to alive: and this, we take it, will compare
with anything done in Gaul. Lastly: the wild
tribes that infested the Alleganies, fled before our
arms; many a flying army of deer owed their lives
to the mercy of the invaders; the badgers and the
otters—a feeble people, yet sagacious and wary—
we laid ourselves out to take by policy, that is entrap
them, as Cæsar did the like people of Gaul;
and had not the fierce panthers, the rude bears,
the prowling wolves, and the other warlike inhabitants

of these untamed forests, betaken themselves
to their fastnesses, and there remained with a savage
fortitude that defied hunger all the time we were
out, we should have vanquished them with as great
slaughter as befell the Boii, and Nervii, the Helvetians,
the Acquitanii, Vercingetorix, Orgetorix,
Dumnorix, Benorix, and all the other Orixes, at the
hands of Julius—roasted and devoured some of
them too, next thing to alive.

But enough. The reader is, no doubt, by this
time, impressed with a due sense of the dignity of
our undertaking. Let us not then any longer dally
with our narrative, but hasten on to the field of our
renown.