[From Hamilton, Canada, the record continues:]
What's the use of going to England and using up excitement,
all at once, when one can come to Canada and get enough here? I am as
distinctly a foreigner here as in Sebastopol, and circumstances have enabled me
to enjoy the experience more fully than I expected. . . .
Behold me, then, domesticated at the City Hotel. Not a
Yankee in it but myself — all straight, solid Englishmen, with deep, clear
voices emerging from their fur-covered chests. Everybody's made handsome by a
fur cap without a vizor, the most picturesque thing possible. The rooms of the
hotel are dark, solidly furnished, and hung with colored prints of horses,
races, and mail-coaches. The long dining-hall has a large painting of the Queen
at one end, of the British arms at the side, with many others of various merit.
At dinner each guest is offered a tall, narrow glass of foaming ale. No other
gustatory novelty save macaroni pudding. I wish to chronicle, however,
that I never saw guests eat faster in America — I mean the United States. Also
I never had a scantier supply of water and towels — far inferior to Niagara,
though, to be sure, water is what people come there for.
I am now writing in the Institute News Room and Library.
Little bluff Canadian boys in fur caps are coming in for books to my kind and
busy friend Mr. Milne (pronounced Mellen) . . . and a group of sturdy seniors
are debating the £1000 which the city has just voted toward the fund for
relieving the wives and children of those killed in the Russian War.
Hamilton is a city nearly as large as Worcester and growing
rapidly, but with nothing in the least resembling its apparent life. A set of
English and Scotch merchants, old and young, congregate in this Reading Room,
which has a sort of provincial or Little Pedlington air. For instance there
are six little tables, with chessboards on top; — conceive of persons with time
to play chess in New England!
* * * * * * * * * *
I had a fine afternoon walk up the mountain west of the
city. . . . At the top I passed a tollgate and stopped to read the
inscriptions; the tolls were very complicated — distinction made between
private and hired teams, and between the width of tire of different wheels.
Below, in large letters, “Clergymen and Funerals gratis” I preferred to pass,
however, neither as a clergyman nor as a funeral, but as a foot-passenger.
[Continued HERE.]
[Continued HERE.]
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 95-7
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