While Crossing The St. John, Near The Pretty Town Of Hampton, One Of Our
Leaders Put Both His Fore Feet Into A Hole, And Was With Difficulty
Extricated.
Precisely at midnight the stage clattered down the steep streets of the
city of St. John, to which the ravages of the cholera had recently given
such a terrible celebrity.
After a fruitless pilgrimage to three hotels,
we were at length received at Waverley House, having accomplished a
journey of one hundred miles in twenty hours! On ringing my bell, it was
answered by a rough porter, and I soon found that waiting chambermaids
are not essential at Transatlantic hotels; and the female servants, or
rather helps, are of a very superior class. A friend of mine, on leaving
an hotel at Niagara, offered a douceur in the shape of half a dollar to
one of these, but she drew herself up, and proudly replied, "American
ladies do not receive money from gentlemen." Having left my keys at the
Bend, I found my valise a useless incumbrance, rather annoying after a
week of travelling.
We spent the Sunday at St. John, and, the opportune arrival of my keys
enabling me to don some habiliments suited to the day, I went to the
church, where the service, with the exception of the sermon, was very well
performed. A solemn thanksgiving for the removal of the cholera was read,
and was rendered very impressive by the fact that most of the congregation
were in new mourning. The Angel of Death had long hovered over the doomed
city, which lost rather more than a tenth of its population from a disease
which in the hot summer of America is nearly as fatal and terrible as the
plague. All who could leave the town fled; but many carried the disease
with them, and died upon the road. The hotels, shipyards, and stores were
closed, bodies rudely nailed up in boards were hurried about the streets,
and met with hasty burial outside the city, before vital warmth had fled;
the holy ties of natural affection were disregarded, and the dying were
left alone to meet the King of Terrors, none remaining to close their
eyes; the ominous clang of the death-bell was heard both night and day,
and a dense brown fog was supposed to brood over the city, which for five
weeks was the abode of the dying and the dead.
A temporary regard for religion was produced among the inhabitants of St.
John by the visit of the pestilence; it was scarcely possible for the most
sceptical not to recognise the overruling providence of God: and I have
seldom seen more external respect for the Sabbath and the ordinances of
religion than in this city.
The preponderance of the rougher sex was very strongly marked at Waverley
House. Fifty gentlemen sat down to dinner, and only three ladies,
inclusive of the landlady. Fifty-three cups of tea graced the table, which
was likewise ornamented with six boiled legs of mutton, numerous dishes of
splendid potatoes, and corn-cobs, squash, and pumpkin-pie, in true
colonial abundance.
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