A WEEK'S VISIT TO BOSTON
_May 1, '81._--Seems as if all the ways and means of American travel
to-day had been settled, not only with reference to speed and
directness, but for the comfort of women, children, invalids, and old
fellows like me. I went on by a through train that runs daily from
Washington to the Yankee metropolis without change. You get in a
sleeping-car soon after dark in Philadelphia, and after ruminating an
hour or two, have your bed made up if you like, draw the curtains, and
go to sleep in it--fly on through Jersey to New York--hear in
your half-slumbers a dull jolting and bumping sound or two--are
unconsciously toted from Jersey City by a midnight steamer around
the Battery and under the big bridge to the track of the New Haven
road--resume your flight eastward, and early the next morning you wake
up in Boston. All of which was my experience. I wanted to go to the
Revere house. A tall unknown gentleman, (a fellow-passenger on his way
to Newport he told me, I had just chatted a few moments before with
him,) assisted me out through the depot crowd, procured a hack, put me
in it with my traveling bag, saying smilingly and quietly, "Now I want
you to let this be _my_ ride," paid the driver, and before I could
remonstrate bow'd himself off.
The occasion of my jaunt, I suppose I had better say here, was for
a public reading of "the death of Abraham Lincoln" essay, on the
sixteenth anniversary of that tragedy; which reading duly came off,
night of April 15.
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