XXXII
"After we are exhausted by a long course of application to business, how delightful are the first moments of indolence and repose! O che bella coza di far niente!" – Stewart.
"Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn!"
Falstaff.
That distinguished metaphysician Dugald Stewart, in his treatise upon the "Active and Moral Powers," has, in the language of my motto, somewhere216 observed, that leisure after continued exertion is a source of happiness perfect in its kind; and surely, at the moment I am now writing, my own feelings abundantly testify to the force of the remark. For more than one month past have I been urging myself onward from village to village and from hamlet to hamlet, through woodland, and over prairie, river, and rivulet, with almost the celerity of an avant courier, and hardly with closer regard to passing scenes and events. My purpose, reader, for I may as well tell you, has been to accomplish, within a portion of time to some degree limited, a "tour over the prairies" previously laid out. This, within the prescribed period, I am now quite certain of fulfilling; and here am I, at length "taking mine ease in mine inn" at the ancient and venerable French village Kaskaskia.
It is evening now. The long summer sunset is dying away in beauty from the heavens; and alone in my chamber am I gathering up the fragments of events scattered along the pathway of the week that is gone. Last evening at this hour I was entering the town of Pinkneyville, and my last number left me soberly regaling myself upon the harmonious vocalities of the sombre little village of Salem. Here, then, may I well enough resume "the thread of my discourse."
During my wanderings in Illinois I have more than once referred to the frequency and violence of the thunder-gusts by which it is visited. I had travelled not many miles the morning after leaving Salem when I was assailed by one of the most terrific storms I remember to have yet encountered. All the morning the atmosphere had been most oppressive, the sultriness completely prostrating, and the livid exhalations quivered along the parched-up soil of the prairies, as if over the mouth of an enormous furnace. A gauzy mist of silvery whiteness at length diffused itself over the landscape; an inky cloud came heaving up in the northern horizon, and soon the thunder-peal began to bellow and reverberate along the darkened prairie, and the great raindrops came tumbling to the ground. Fortunately, a shelter was at hand; but hardly had the traveller availed himself of its liberal hospitality, when the heavens were again lighted up by the sunbeams; the sable cloud rolled off to the east, and all was beautiful and calm, as if the angel of desolation in his hurried flight had but for a moment stooped the shade of his dusky wing, and had then swept onward to accomplish elsewhere his terrible bidding. With a reflection like this I was about remounting to pursue my way, when a prolonged, deafening, terrible crash – as if the wild idea of heathen mythology was indeed about to be realized, and the thunder-car of Olympian Jove was dashing through the concave above – caused me to falter with foot in stirrup, and almost involuntarily to turn my eye in the direction from which the bolt seemed to have burst. A few hundred yards from the spot on which I stood a huge elm had been blasted by the lightning; and its enormous shaft towering aloft, torn, mangled, shattered from the very summit to its base, was streaming its long ghastly fragments on the blast. The scene was one startlingly impressive; one of those few scenes in a man's life the remembrance of which years cannot wholly efface; which he never forgets. As I gazed upon this giant forest-son, which the lapse of centuries had perhaps hardly sufficed to rear to perfection, now, even though a ruin, noble, that celebrated passage of the poet Gray, when describing his bard, recurred with some force to my mind: in this description Gray is supposed to have had the painting of Raphael at Florence, representing Deity in the vision of Ezekiel, before him:
"Loose his beard and hoary hair
Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air," &c.
A ride of a few hours, after the storm had died away, brought me to the pleasant little town of Mt. Vernon.217 This place is the seat of justice for Jefferson county, and has a courthouse of brick, decent enough to the eye, to be sure, but said to have been so miserably constructed that it is a perilous feat for his honour here to poise the scales. The town itself is an inconsiderable place, but pleasantly situated, in the edge of a prairie, if I forget not, and in every other respect is exactly what every traveller has seen a dozen times elsewhere in Illinois. Like Shelbyville, it is chiefly noted for a remarkable spring in its vicinity, said to be highly medicinal. How this latter item may stand I know not, but I am quite sure that all of the pure element it was my own disagreeable necessity to partake of during my brief tarry savoured mightily of medicine or of something akin. Epsom salts and alum seemed the chief substances in solution; and with these minerals all the water in the region appeared heavily charged.
It was a misty, miserable morning when I left Mt. Vernon; and as my route lay chiefly through a dense timbered tract, the dank, heavy atmosphere exhaling from the soil, from the luxuriant vegetation, and from the dense foliage of the over-hanging boughs, was anything but agreeable. To endure the pitiless drenching of a summer-shower with equanimity demands but a brief exercise of stoicism: but it is not in the nature of man amiably to withstand the equally pitiless drenching of a drizzling, penetrating, everlasting fog, be it of sea origin or of land. At length a thunder-gust – the usual remedy for these desperate cases in Illinois – dissipated the vapour, and the glorious sunlight streamed far and wide athwart a broad prairie, in the edge of which I stood. The route was, in the language of my director, indeed a blind one; but, having received special instructions thereupon, I hesitated not to press onward over the swelling, pathless plain towards the east. After a few miles, having crossed an arm of the prairie, directions were again sought and received, by which the route became due south, pathless as before, and through a tract of woodland rearing itself from a bog perfectly Serbonian. "Muddy Prairie" indeed. On every side rose the enormous shafts of the cypress, the water-oak, and the maple, flinging from their giant branches that gray, pensile, parasitical moss, which, weaving its long funereal fibres into a dusky mantle, almost entangles in the meshes the thin threads of sunlight struggling down from above. It was here for the first time that I met in any considerable numbers with that long-necked, long-legged, long-toed, long-tailed gentry called wild-turkeys: and, verily, here was a host ample to atone for all former deficiency, parading in ungainly magnificence through the forest upon every side, or peeping curiously down, with outstretched necks and querulous piping, from their lofty perches on the traveller below. It is by a skilful imitation of this same piping, to say nothing of the melodious gobble that always succeeds it, that the sportsman decoys these sentimental bipeds within his reach. The same method is sometimes employed in hunting the deer – an imitated bleating of the fawn when in distress – thus taking away the gentle mother's life through the medium of her most generous impulses; a most diabolical modus operandi, reader, permit me to say.
Emerging at length, by a circuitous path, once more upon the prairie, instructions were again sought for the direct route to Pinkneyville, and a course nearly north was now pointed out. Think of that; east, south, north, in regular succession too, over a tract of country perfectly uniform, in order to run a right line between two given points! This was past all endurance. To a moral certainty with me, the place of my destination lay away just southwest from the spot on which I was then standing. Producing, therefore, my pocket-map and pocket-compass, by means of a little calculation I had soon laid down the prescribed course, determined to pursue none other, the remonstrances, and protestations, and objurgations of men, women, and children to the contrary notwithstanding. Pushing boldly forth into the prairie, I had not travelled many miles when I struck a path leading off in the direction I had chosen, and which proved the direct route to Pinkneyville! Thus had I been forced to cross, recross, and cross again, a prairie miles in breadth, and to flounder through a swamp other miles in extent, to say nothing of the depth, and all because of the utter ignorance of the worthy souls who took upon them to direct. I have given this instance in detail for the special edification and benefit of all future wayfarers in Illinois. The only unerring guide on the prairies is the map and the compass. Half famished, and somewhat more than half vexed at the adventures of the morning, I found myself, near noon, at the cabin-door of an honest old Virginian, and was ere long placed in a fair way to relieve my craving appetite. With the little compass which hung at the safety-riband of my watch, and which had done me such rare service during my wanderings, the worthy old gentleman seemed heart-stricken at first sight, and warmly protested that he and the "stranger" must have "a small bit of a tug" for that fixen, a proposition which said stranger by no means as warmly relished. Laying, therefore, before the old farmer a slight outline of my morning's ramble, he readily perceived that with me the "pretty leetle fixen" was anything but a superlative. My evening ride was a delightful one along the edge of an extended prairie; but, though repeatedly assured by the worthy settlers upon the route that I could "catch no diffickulty on my way no how," my compass was my only safe guide. At length, crossing "Mud River" upon a lofty bridge of logs, the town of Pinkneyville was before me just at sunset.218
Pinkneyville has but little to commend it to the passing traveller, whether we regard beauty of location, regularity of structure, elegance, size, or proportion of edifices, or the cultivation of the farms in its vicinage. It would, perhaps, be a pleasant town enough were its site more elevated, its buildings larger, and disposed with a little more of mathematical exactness, or its streets less lanelike and less filthy. As it is, it will require some years to give it a standing among its fellows. It is laid out on the roll of a small prairie of moderate fertility, but has quite an extensive settlement of enterprising farmers, a circumstance which will conduce far more to the ultimate prosperity of the place. The most prominent structure is a blood-red jail of brick, standing near the centre of the village; rather a savage-looking concern, and, doubtless, so designed by its sagacious architect for the purpose of frightening evil doers.
Having taken these observations from the tavern door during twilight, the traveller retired to his chamber, nothing loath, after a ride of nearly fifty miles, to bestow his tired frame to rest. But, alas! that verity compels him to declare it —
"'Tis true, and pity 'tis 'tis true,"
the "Traveller's Inn" was anything, nay, everything but the comfort-giving spot the hospitable cognomen swinging from its signpost seemed to imply. Ah! the fond visions of quietude and repose, of plentiful feeding and hearty sleeping, which those magic words, "Traveller's Inn," had conjured up in the weary traveller's fancy when they first delightfully swung before his eye.
"But human pleasure, what art thou, in sooth!
The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below!!"
Well – exhausted, worn down, tired out, the traveller yet found it as utterly impossible quietly to rest, as does, doubtless, "a half-assoilzed soul in purgatory;" and, hours before the day had begun to break, he arose and ordered out his horse. Kind reader, hast ever, in the varyings of thy pilgrimage through this troublous world of ours, when faint, and languid, and weary with exertion, by any untoward circumstance, been forced to resist the gentle promptings of "quiet nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep," and to count away the tedious hours of the livelong night till thy very existence became a burden to thee; till thy brain whirled and thy nerves twanged like the tense harp-string? And didst thou not, then – didst thou not, from the very depths of thy soul, assever this ill, of all ills mortality is heir to, that one most utterly and unutterably intolerable patiently to endure? 'Tis no very pitiful thing, sure, to consume the midnight taper, "sickly" though it be: we commiserate the sacrifice, but we fail not to appreciate the reward. Around the couch of suffering humanity, who could not outwatch the stars? the recompense is not of this world.
"When youth and pleasure meet,
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet,"
who asks for "sleep till morn!" But when in weariness of the flesh and in languidness of spirit, the overspent wayfarer has laid down his wearied frame to rest for the toils of the morrow, it is indeed a bitter thing rudely to have that rest broken up! "The sleep of the wayfaring man is sweet," and to have that slumber obtruded upon by causes too contemptible for a thought, is not in nature with equanimity to bear! Besides, the luckless sufferer meets with no commiseration: it is a matter all too ludicrous for pity; and as for fortitude, and firmness, and the like, what warrior ever achieved a laurel in such a war? what glory is to be gained over a host of starving – but I forbear. You are pretty well aware, kind reader, or ought to be, that the situation of your traveller just then was anything but an enviable one. Not so, however, deemed the worthy landlord on this interesting occasion. His blank bewilderment of visage may be better imagined than described, as, aroused from sleep, his eye met the vision of his stranger guest; while the comic amalgamation of distress and pique in the marvellously elongated features of the fair hostess was so truly laughable, that a smile flitted along the traveller's rebellious muscles, serving completely to disturb the serenity of her breast! The good lady was evidently not a little nettled at the apparent mirthfulness of her guest under his manifold miseries – I do assure thee, reader, the mirthfulness was only apparent– and did not neglect occasion thereupon to let slip a sly remark impugning his "gentle breeding," because, forsooth, dame Nature, in throwing together her "cunning workmanship," had gifted it with a nervous system not quite of steel. Meanwhile, the honest publican, agreeable to orders, having brought forth the horse, with folded hands all meekly listened to the eloquence of his spouse; but the good man was meditating the while a retaliation in shape of a most unconscionable bill of cost, which was soon presented and was as soon discharged. Then, leaving the interesting pair to their own cogitations, with the very top of the morning the traveller flung himself upon his horse and was soon out of sight.
Kaskaskia, Ill.