I left However, and However saw me depart with the greatest apparent apathy. My gay and lightsome bark sat trimly on the waves, buffeting the billows, and calmly smiling on the raging waters' breast.

Perhaps the mythical personage will urge here that a bark cannot smile; in which case I will but pray him to point out the exact anatomical section so widely known as the "breast" in a river, and I shall then be at no loss to find something to sustain my simile.

I thought of poor Mary Stuart in leaving. Her adieux to the heartless vales, her valedictory remarks to the stoical mountains, her watery and tearful tributes to the unheeding rivers, all rose before my mind with extraordinary accuracy.

I tried to be sentimental, but I failed. I could do nothing but gaze with mute astonishment at the wine traffic which was going on about me.

In a word, the wine made me positive, and sentimentalism went where the Southern Confederacy has gone-up.

Not that I imbibed any wine. Not that any one about me imbibed any; but it was the evidence of wine, the people of wine, the servants of wine, the caskers of wine, the makers of wine, the growers of wine, the police of wine, the incontrovertible evidence that in France, at least, wine was King. But at length my gay and lightsome bark cut short my reflections, and conveyed me gently dancing o'er the ocean's foam.

She tripped it on the light, fantastic tow.

My bark was very majestic. I was proud of her. Her cabin was magnificent. She could seat two hundred and fifty people at dinner every day; but she never seated me! I paid one hundred and thirty dollars for lodging for ten days.

Board? No.

But that was not the bark's fault, you may say.

DRIVING UP BROADWAY.

193

Granted.

But I declare it was not mine. Give me a choice in the matter, and I never, never would be seasick. At length, the bark accomplished her mission, taking me from France, and landing me in Broadway-I should say, America.

I was very patriotic. The war had been raging for more than a year, and at this particular moment, the rebels were especially triumphant. Consequently I was aggressively patriotic. I could brook nothing like a slight either to our flag, or our institutions, or our cities, or our streets, or our people. There were several English persons aboard, who were somewhat disposed to ridicule. everything American, and to them I kept averring, as we sailed up the bay, that Fifth Avenue was the finest residence street, Broadway the finest business street in the world.

After we landed, I was driven up Broadway. Great Heaven! was this my favorite street? What! Decorated (Heaven save the mark) with these abominable floating canvas signs, these grotesque oriflammes, these parodies on banners, these painted attractions, whose legitimate abode is near the festive tent of some ambulating circus, but which should be banished at once and forever from the honest thoroughfares of men! I felt ashamed of my Broadway. I can say now truthfully, that in my opinion, if we had no other reason for rejoicing that the war is over, we should thank Heaven, fasting day and night, for having sent Peace to take those banners away.

I know that this subject has been touched upon by an English writer of some celebrity, who has left no figure of speech unwritten to ridicule the American war. Contracted disease of Banner on the Brain. His remarks, however, were made in a canting and disagreeable spirit, while mine are not. Indeed, indeed they are not.

But it was funny, wasn't it, to see a charger all out of

drawing, carrying a rider, whose only really distinguishable article of apparel was a Kossuth hat, the twain accompanied by an unsheathed sabre, dashing frantically from the fourth story of a house in Broadway towards an oligarchic slave-holding foe, lying perdu, it would seem, on an apparently innocent housetop on the opposite side?

Or again, to behold a battalion of ferocious (painted) Zouaves bayonetting nothing with undiminished ardor during the somewhat protracted space of four years, while tender invocations to the patriotism of young male America met the eye at every step. He was conjured to conquer or die, and get $325 either way; he was entreated to join the "finest regiment going," and to "look at this" as well; he was supplicated to "come in out of the draft," and at the same time become possessor of "the biggest bounty yet." These things, most fortunately, have all disappeared. But they were there then, and tended greatly towards diminishing my idea of the beauty of our much vaunted Broadway. They made the street look cheap, and were altogether unpleasant.

After my entrée at Wallack's (whose vicissitudes have been related in a former chapter), I was for seven long months on the wing, or, less poetically and in fact more truthfully, for seven months I was traveling about in those very unpleasant railway conveyances yclept "cars," through the greater portion of our Western and Southwestern States. As soon as I returned, I was requested by all parties to write, and I yielded to the dulcet supplications of that organ more powerful than even the Boston one, generally known as the Vox Populi.

But in general I hate notes of travel, don't you?

Ah, thank you! These are not notes of travel. I am nothing if not high-toned, so I think I may dub them at once, "Les Impressions d'une Voyageuse."

Often such impressions are very silly affairs. I think

AFRICANS AND ASIATICS.

195

to be obliged to read of the exact spot in Switzerland where Maria lost her toothbrush, or to digest the progress of the Joneses on the Rhine, is about the mildest of all amusements. But this is gentle agony compared to the lively torture of wading through Mrs. Magacer's " Ancient Greece" or Lady Bigot's Rome.

While I am on the subject I may say at once that I honestly believe I have read everybody's "Paris" going; read it and sometimes liked it, but I will also make a clean breast of it and openly avow that one man's "Central Asia" is enough for me.

One man's "Central Asia" satisfies the requirements of my inmost soul. How any one can stand promiscuous varieties of Central Asia is a mystery which I have yet to fathom.

Why, look at it in a sensible light! If all men are our brethren, so be it. I am not political; I have not, nor never had any unfriendly animus towards American Africans. Dinah is a splendid washerwoman, and Uncle Joe excels any gentleman of my acquaintance in the accomplishments of whitewashing and carpet shaking. If he is my brother, he is at least an honest, inoffensive man, and an upright creature in every respect. But your Central Asiatic, it appears, can do nothing on earth but stick arrows into unoffending white travelers, pilfer all the Mericans he can lay hands upon, and make himself in many other ways intensely disagreeable. If he is my brother, why I can only say, I am not proud of the relationship.

But what under the sun, be it tropical or polar, am I doing in Asia, when I should be among the quiet citizens of the splendid town of Cincinnati, where began my round of Western engagements?

What, indeed!

I must confess I felt rather timorous about appearing

196

WESTERN WELCOME.

in Cincinnati. It had been the stronghold of my family for years, and I had a disagreeable inward conviction that my crudities, inevitable to a novice, would be doubly palpable to a public whose great theatrical deity was my sister; a public who saw no ill with her, no good without her; who scorned any Evadne but hers, and figuratively snapped their fingers at anybody else's Adelgitha. She had retired from the stage, true; but she still lived in their memories, and with jealous eye and unwilling ear they observed the usurpation of her roles by any new aspirant for public favor. Contrary to my expectation, however, they received me with open arms, crowded my houses, bestowed upon me fifty times the applause I merited, and when, at last, I left their town, they sent me on my way with many a hearty God-speed.

But my great fun in Cincinnati (as it was in all the towns) was reading the criticisms on my acting which appeared in the different papers. Somehow, like that fable of Esop's which tells of the man and his donkey, I could not please everybody.

One critic said I was as fine a tragedienne as Rachel, whereupon the afternoon paper came out and said I

wasn't.

I agreed fully with the afternoon paper.

You will be pained to learn, as I was, that the critic who compared me to Rachel is now an inmate of the Walnut Hills Insane Asylum-a mild but hopeless lunatic; but I think, from his writings, that his mind was slightly failing him when I was there.

It was at Cincinnati I had my first great benefit, attended by the distinguished officer and commander of the post, Major General Hooker, by the talented author of "Sheridan's Ride," and by that much-talked-of and seemingly ubiquitous body, the elite of the city. The theatre was prettily decorated with flags in honor of the event,