Heaven knows what I have not been through with since I saw
you — dust, dirt, dyspepsia, hotels, railroads, prairies, Western steamboats,
Western people, more prairies, tobacco juice, captains of boats, pilots of
ditto, long days of jolting in the cars, with stoppages of ten minutes for
dinner, and the devil take the hindmost. There ought to be no chickens this
year, so many eggs have we eaten. Flossy was quite ill for two days at St.
Louis. Chev is too rapid and restless a traveller for pleasure. Still, I think
I shall be glad to have made the journey when it is all over — I must be
stronger than I was, for I bear fatigue very well now and at first I could not
bear it at all. We went from Philadelphia to Baltimore, thence to Wheeling,
thence to see the Manns at Antioch — they almost ate us up, so glad were they
to see us. Thence to Cincinnati, where two days with Kitty Rรถlker, a party at Larz
Anderson's — Longworth's wine-cellar, pleasant attentions from a gentleman by
the name of King, who took me about in a carriage and proposed everything but
marriage. After passing the morning with me, he asked if I was English. I told
him no. When we met in the evening, he had thought matters over, and exclaimed,
“You must be Miss Ward!” “And you,” I cried, “must be the nephew of my father's
old partner. Do you happen to have a strawberry mark or anything of that kind about
you?” “No.” “Then you are my long-lost Rufus!” And so we rushed into each
other's confidence and swore, like troopers, eternal friendship. Thence to
Louisville, dear, a beastly place, where I saw the Negro jail, and the criminal
court in session, trying a man for the harmless pleasantry of murdering his
wife. Thence to St. Louis, where Chev left us and went to Kansas, and Fwotty
and I boated it back here and went to a hotel, and the William Greenes they
came and took us, and that's all for the present. . . .
SOURCE: Laura E. Richards & Maud Howe Elliott, Julia
Ward Howe, 1819-1910, Large-Paper Edition, Volume 1, p. 168-70
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