American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'Street, Julian
General
American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'
Street, Julian
Southern States -- Description and travel; Southern States -- Social life and customs
It is a town in which to ramble for an hour, uphill, down and around;
stopping now to delight in a crumbling stone wall, tied together with
Kenilworth ivy; now to watch a woman making apple butter in a great iron
pot; now to see an old negro clamber slowly into his rickety wagon, take
up the rope reins, and start his skinny horse with the surprising words:
"Come hither!"; now to look at an old tangled garden, terraced rudely up
a hillside; now to read the sign, on a telegraph pole in the village,
bearing the frank threat: "If you Hitch your Horses Here they will be
Turned Loose." Now you will come upon a terraced road, at one side of
which stands an old house draped over the rocks in such a way as to
provide entrance from the ground level, on any one of three stories; or
an unexpected view down a steep roadway, or over ancient moss-grown
housetops to where, as an old book I found there puts it, "between two
ramparts, in a gorge of savage grandeur, the lordly Potomac takes to his
embrace the beautiful Shenandoah."
The liaison between the rivers, described in this Rabelaisian manner by
the author of "The Annals of Harper's Ferry," has been going on for a
long time with all the brazen publicity of a love scene on a park bench.
I recommend the matter to the attention of the Society for the
Suppression of Vice, which once took action to prohibit a novel by Mr.
Theodore Dreiser. A great many people wish to read Mr. Dreiser's books
yet no one has to read them if he does not want to. But it is a
different matter with these rivers. Sensitive citizens of Harper's Ferry
and pure-minded passengers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad are obliged
daily to witness what is going on.
Before the days of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and of the
late Anthony Comstock, when we had no one to make it clear to us exactly
what was shocking, little was thought of the public scandal between the
Potomac and the Shenandoah. Thomas Jefferson seems to have rather liked
it; there is a point above the town, known as Jefferson's Rock, at
which, it is said, the author of the Declaration of Independence stood
and uttered a sentiment about the spectacle. Everybody in Harper's Ferry
agrees that Jefferson stood at Jefferson's Rock and said something
appropriate, and any one of them will try to tell you what he said, but
each version will be different.
A young lady told me that he said: "This view is worth a trip across the
Atlantic Ocean."
A young man in a blue felt hat of the fried-egg variety said that
Jefferson declared, with his well-known simplicity: "This is the
grandest view I ever seen."
An old man who had to go through the tobacco chewer's pre-conversational
rite before replying to my question gave it as: "Pfst!--They ain't
nothin' in Europe ner Switzerland ner nowheres else, I reckon', to beat
this-here scenery."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account