Pomona's Travels: A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former HandmaidenStockton, Frank R.
General
Pomona's Travels: A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former Handmaiden
Stockton, Frank R.
Americans -- Great Britain -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
"I don't want to say anything," said I, "against what I have seen
to-day, and I don't want to think of anything else while I am looking
at it; but this I will say, that landscape with Scott is very different
from landscape without him."
"That is very true, isn't it?" said she; and then she stopped making
comparisons, and I looked out of the window.
Oban is a very pretty place on the coast, but we never should have gone
there if it had not been the place to start from for Staffa and Iona.
When I was only a girl I saw pictures of Fingal's Cave, and I have read
a good deal about it since, and it is one of the spots in the world
that I have been longing to see, but I feel like crying when I tell
you, madam, that the next morning there was such a storm that the boat
for Staffa didn't even start; and as the people told us that the storm
would most likely last two or three days, and that the sea for a few
days more would be so rough that Staffa would be out of the question,
we had to give it up, and I was obliged to fall back from the reality
to my imagination. Jone tried to comfort me by telling me that he would
be willing to bet ten to one that my fancy would soar a mile above the
real thing, and that perhaps it was very well I didn't see old Fingal's
Cave and so be disappointed.
"Perhaps it is a good thing," said I, "that you didn't go, and that you
didn't get so seasick that you would be ready to renounce your
country's flag and embrace Mormonism if such things would make you feel
better." But that is the only thing that is good about it, and I have a
cloud on my recollection which shall never be lifted until Corinne is
old enough to travel and we come here with her.
But although the storm was so bad, it was not bad enough to keep us
from making our water trip to Glasgow, for the boat we took did not
have to go out to sea. It was a wonderfully beautiful passage we made
among the islands and along the coast, with the great mountains on the
mainland standing up above everything else. After a while we got to the
Crinan Canal, which is in reality a short cut across the field. It is
nine miles long and not much wider than a good-sized ditch, but it
saves more than a hundred miles of travel around an island. We was on a
sort of a toy steamboat which went its way through the fields and
bushes and grass so close we could touch them; and as there was eleven
locks where the boat had to stop, we got out two or three times and
walked along the banks to the next lock. That being the kind of a ride
Jone likes, he blessed Buxton. At the other end of the canal we took a
bigger steamboat which carried us to Glasgow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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