There was little to do during the long spring days when the steamboats sailed along the great, quiet rivers. It seemed very strange that every one rushed so to get through the meals quickly. As the service was _table d’hôte_, it is possible that people hurried in order to get all that they could before the food was removed. My mother always made a practice of eating slowly; hence her excellent digestion. On this trip our mother purchased a red toy balloon for brother Harry. It was then a novelty and cost something like a dollar. As it was affixed to the tail of one of our dogs, it did not long survive. We had supposed this fascinating object would be a lasting investment. On our outward journey we stopped overnight at Harper’s Ferry. I remember climbing the hill and looking down upon the valley where the Judas tree was in blossom. Did it bloom in somber foreboding of the blood to be shed there, a little later, in the John Brown raid and in the Civil War? I remember too vast engines with which we climbed the terrifying slopes of the Alleghanies. No sleeping-cars were then to be seen, but only cars with reclining chairs. Hence the advisability of traveling by water whenever possible. At Cincinnati, then the principal city of that part of the country and much larger than Chicago, we stayed with Mr. and Mrs. William Greene, the former a cousin of Grandfather Ward. We visited the observatory and the Longworths’ wine-cellar, where I was discovered in a corner, a glass of champagne tilted up against my nose. At the age of eleven I saw no reason why I should _not_ partake of the wine, since they were kind enough to offer it to me. My memories of Louisville, Kentucky, are sinister. Here we were shown the spot where several negroes had been lynched. We also went to court, where a man was on trial for the murder of his wife. From the appearance of his face, I fancy he must have committed the crime while drunk. We stayed also at the house of my father’s great friend, Horace Mann, then president of Antioch College, a coeducational institution of Ohio. Mrs. Mann believed in using cream in cooking, rather than butter. If you had no cream, you thickened milk with flour! The Manns were “so glad to see us they almost ate us up”! Mrs. Mann was a woman of intellectual tastes and interested in good works. She was the sister of the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne and of Miss Elizabeth Peabody, who first introduced the kindergarten in America. Horace Mann himself had a pleasant, kindly face and beautiful snow-white hair parted in the middle. This had suddenly turned white (in a single night, it was said) through grief at the death of his first wife. In this year, 1857, there was a terrible financial panic, of which I heard some echoes. Nickel cents were then first coined, replacing the large copper ones we had used previously.