Everything In The Hotel Was Black; Not Black To The Eye, For The Eye
Teaches Itself To Discriminate Colors Even When Loaded With Dirt,
But Black To The Touch.
On coming out of a tub of water my foot
took an impress from the carpet exactly as it would have done had I
trod barefooted on a path laid with soot.
I thought that I was
turning negro upward, till I put my wet hand upon the carpet, and
found that the result was the same. And yet the carpet was green to
the eye - a dull, dingy green, but still green. "You shouldn't damp
your feet," a man said to me, to whom I mentioned the catastrophe.
Certainly, Pittsburg is the dirtiest place I ever saw; but it is, as
I said before, very picturesque in its dirt when looked at from
above the blanket.
From Pittsburg I went on by train to Cincinnati, and was soon in the
State of Ohio. I confess that I have never felt any great regard
for Pennsylvania. It has always had, in my estimation, a low
character for commercial honesty, and a certain flavor of
pretentious hypocrisy. This probably has been much owing to the
acerbity and pungency of Sydney Smith's witty denunciations against
the drab-colored State. It is noted for repudiation of its own
debts, and for sharpness in exaction of its own bargains. It has
been always smart in banking. It has given Buchanan as a President
to the country, and Cameron as a Secretary of War to the government!
When the battle of Bull's Run was to be fought, Pennsylvanian
soldiers were the men who, on that day, threw down their arms
because the three months' term for which they had been enlisted was
then expired! Pennsylvania does not, in my mind, stand on a par
with Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, or Virginia.
We are apt to connect the name of Benjamin Franklin with
Pennsylvania, but Franklin was a Boston man. Nevertheless,
Pennsylvania is rich and prosperous. Indeed it bears all those
marks which Quakers generally leave behind them.
I had some little personal feeling in visiting Cincinnati, because
my mother had lived there for some time, and had there been
concerned in a commercial enterprise, by which no one, I believe,
made any great sum of money. Between thirty and forty years ago she
built a bazaar in Cincinnati, which, I was assured by the present
owner of the house, was at the time of its erection considered to be
the great building of the town. It has been sadly eclipsed now, and
by no means rears its head proudly among the great blocks around it.
It had become a "Physio-medical Institute" when I was there, and was
under the dominion of a quack doctor on one side, and of a college
of rights of women female medical professors on the other. "I
believe, sir, no man or woman ever yet made a dollar in that
building; and as for rent, I don't even expect it." Such was the
account given of the unfortunate bazaar by the present proprietor.
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