You Entered Through A Long Bar-Room, Thence
Passed Into A Little Dining-Room, And Thence Into A Still Smaller
Kitchen.
The furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung
in the American taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.
Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes
afterwards I had refused a drink from the proprietor, and was going
on, in my plain European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr.
Mitchell sternly interposed, and explained the situation. He was
offering to treat me, it appeared, whenever an American bar-keeper
proposes anything, it must be borne in mind that he is offering to
treat; and if I did not want a drink, I must at least take the
cigar. I took it bashfully, feeling I had begun my American career
on the wrong foot. I did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have
been from a variety of reasons, even the best cigar often failing
to please if you smoke three-quarters of it in a drenching rain.
For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; 'westward
the march of empire holds its way'; the race is for the moment to
the young; what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely
know; what is to be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations.
Greece, Rome, and Judaea are gone by forever, leaving to
generations the legacy of their accomplished work; China still
endures, an old-inhabited house in the brand-new city of nations;
England has already declined, since she has lost the States; and to
these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark
possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of the
side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn
naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age. It will be
hard for an American to understand the spirit. But let him imagine
a young man, who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle,
following bygone fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh
instincts, and who now suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all
about his own age, who keep house together by themselves and live
far from restraint and tradition; let him imagine this, and he will
have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with which spirited
English youths turn to the thought of the American Republic. It
seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was still conducted
in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it had not yet
been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some
unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume forms of
procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial. Which of these two he
prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will decide rightly
for himself. He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key;
rather go without food than partake of stalled ox in stiff,
respectable society; rather be shot out of hand than direct his
life according to the dictates of the world.
He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness,
the fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of
country towns. A few wild story-books which delighted his
childhood form the imaginative basis of his picture of America. In
course of time, there is added to this a great crowd of stimulating
details - vast cities that grow up as by enchantment; the birds,
that have gone south in autumn, returning with the spring to find
thousands camped upon their marshes, and the lamps burning far and
near along populous streets; forests that disappear like snow;
countries larger than Britain that are cleared and settled, one man
running forth with his household gods before another, while the
bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach; oil
that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the
brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage,
action, and constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has
seized and set forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious
verses.
Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York
streets, spying for things foreign. The place had to me an air of
Liverpool; but such was the rain that not Paradise itself would
have looked inviting. We were a party of four, under two
umbrellas; Jones and I and two Scots lads, recent immigrants, and
not indisposed to welcome a compatriot. They had been six weeks in
New York, and neither of them had yet found a single job or earned
a single halfpenny. Up to the present they were exactly out of
pocket by the amount of the fare.
The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such
a dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at
which I should have hesitated; the devil was in it, but Jones and I
should dine like heathen emperors. I set to work, asking after a
restaurant; and I chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-
looking passers-by to ask from. Yet, although I had told them I
was willing to pay anything in reason, one and all sent me off to
cheap, fixed-price houses, where I would not have eaten that night
for the cost of twenty dinners. I do not know if this were
characteristic of New York, or whether it was only Jones and I who
looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprising suggestions. But at
length, by our own sagacity, we found a French restaurant, where
there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking, some so-called
French wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole. I never
entered into the feelings of Jack on land so completely as when I
tasted that coffee.
I suppose we had one of the 'private rooms for families' at Reunion
House.
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