Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium; Vol. 1 (of 2): being Notes of Eight Years' Travels and Residence in Europe with his North American Indian CollectionCatlin, George
History
Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium; Vol. 1 (of 2): being Notes of Eight Years' Travels and Residence in Europe with his North American Indian Collection
Catlin, George
England -- Description and travel; France -- Description and travel; Indians of North America
This arrangement for a few days promised to be an advantageous one for
each party. Daniel was to have free access and egress for the purpose
of giving them their food, and the price proposed to the good woman was
met as a liberal reward for the reception of any living beings that
she could imagine, however large, that could come within her idea of
the dimensions of a cage. Daniel had told her that they were two huge
bears; and in his reply to inquiries, assured her that they were not
harmless by any means, but that the enormous strength of their cage
prevented them from doing any mischief.
The kind old lady agreed, for so much per day, to allow the cage to
stand in her yard, by the side of her house, at least until her husband
returned. With much excitement and some growling about the docks and
the wharf, they were swung off from the vessel, and, being placed on a
"float," were conveyed to, and quietly lodged and fed in, the retired
yard of the good woman, when the gate was shut, and they fell into a
long and profound sleep.
The grizly bears being thus comfortably and safely quartered in the
immediate charge of my man Daniel, who had taken an apartment near
them, and my collection being lodged in the Custom-house, I started by
the railway for London to effect the necessary arrangements for their
next move. I had rested in and left Liverpool in the midst of rain, and
fog, and mud, and seen little else of it; and on my way to London I
saw little or nothing of the beautiful country I was passing through,
travelling the whole distance in the night. The luxurious carriage in
which I was seated, however, braced up and embraced on all sides by
deep cushions; the grandeur of the immense stations I was occasionally
passing under; the elegance and comfort of the cafés and restaurants I
was stumbling into with half-sealed eyes, with hundreds of others in
the middle of the night, with the fat, and rotund, and ruddy appearance
of the night-capped fellow-travellers around me, impressed me at once
with the conviction that I was in the midst of a world of comforts and
luxuries that had been long studied and refined upon.
I opened my eyes at daylight at the terminus in the City of London,
but could see little of it, as I was driven to Ibbotson's Hotel, in
Vere-street, through one of the dense fogs peculiar to the metropolis
and to the season of the year in which I had entered it. To a foreigner
entering London at that season, the first striking impression is the
blackness and gloom that everywhere shrouds all that is about him. It
is in his hotel--in his bed-chamber--his dining-room, and if he sallies
out into the street it is there even worse; and added to it dampness,
and fog, and mud, all of which, together, are strong inducements for
him to return to his lodgings, and adopt them as comfortable, and as a
luxury.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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