It stopped just before the hotel porter began to come around to rouse the travelers who had said the night before that they wanted to be awakened.In all well-regulated hotels this process begins at two o'clock and keeps up till seven.If the porter is at all faithful, he wakes up everybody in the house; if he is a shirk, he only rouses the wrong people.We treated the pounding of the porter on our door with silent contempt.At the next door he had better luck.Pound, pound.An angry voice, "What do you want?""Time to take the train, sir."
"Not going to take any train."
"Ain't your name Smith?"
"Yes."
"Well, Smith"--
"I left no order to be called." (Indistinct grumbling from Smith's room.)Porter is heard shuffling slowly off down the passage.In a little while he returns to Smith's door, evidently not satisfied in his mind.Rap, rap, rap!
"Well, what now?"
"What's your initials? A.T.; clear out!"And the porter shambles away again in his slippers, grumbling something about a mistake.The idea of waking a man up in the middle of the night to ask him his "initials" was ridiculous enough to banish sleep for another hour.A person named Smith, when he travels, should leave his initials outside the door with his boots.
Refreshed by this reposeful night, and eager to exchange the stagnation of the shore for the tumult of the ocean, we departed next morning for Baddeck by the most direct route.This we found, by diligent study of fascinating prospectuses of travel, to be by the boats of the International Steamship Company; and when, at eight o'clock in the morning, we stepped aboard one of them from Commercial Wharf, we felt that half our journey and the most perplexing part of it was accomplished.We had put ourselves upon a great line of travel, and had only to resign ourselves to its flow in order to reach the desired haven.The agent at the wharf assured us that it was not necessary to buy through tickets to Baddeck,--he spoke of it as if it were as easy a place to find as Swampscott,--it was a conspicuous name on the cards of the company, we should go right on from St.John without difficulty.The easy familiarity of this official with Baddeck, in short, made us ashamed to exhibit any anxiety about its situation or the means of approach to it.
Subsequent experience led us to believe that the only man in the world, out of Baddeck, who knew anything about it lives in Boston, and sells tickets to it, or rather towards it.
There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it, when the traveler is settled simply as to his destination, and commits himself to his unknown fate and all the anticipations of adventure before him.We experienced this pleasure as we ascended to the deck of the steamboat and snuffed the fresh air of Boston Harbor.
What a beautiful harbor it is, everybody says, with its irregularly indented shores and its islands.Being strangers, we want to know the names of the islands, and to have Fort Warren, which has a national reputation, pointed out.As usual on a steamboat, no one is certain about the names, and the little geographical knowledge we have is soon hopelessly confused.We make out South Boston very plainly : a tourist is looking at its warehouses through his opera-glass, and telling his boy about a recent fire there.We find out afterwards that it was East Boston.We pass to the stern of the boat for a last look at Boston itself; and while there we have the pleasure of showing inquirers the Monument and the State House.We do this with easy familiarity; but where there are so many tall factory chimneys, it is not so easy to point out the Monument as one may think.
The day is simply delicious, when we get away from the unozoned air of the land.The sky is cloudless, and the water sparkles like the top of a glass of champagne.We intend by and by to sit down and look at it for half a day, basking in the sunshine and pleasing ourselves with the shifting and dancing of the waves.Now we are busy running about from side to side to see the islands, Governor's, Castle, Long, Deer, and the others.When, at length, we find Fort Warren, it is not nearly so grim and gloomy as we had expected, and is rather a pleasure-place than a prison in appearance.We are conscious, however, of a patriotic emotion as we pass its green turf and peeping guns.Leaving on our right Lovell's Island and the Great and Outer Brewster, we stand away north along the jagged Massachusetts shore.These outer islands look cold and wind-swept even in summer, and have a hardness of outline which is very far from the aspect of summer isles in summer seas.They are too low and bare for beauty, and all the coast is of the most retiring and humble description.Nature makes some compensation for this lowness by an eccentricity of indentation which looks very picturesque on the map, and sometimes striking, as where Lynn stretches out a slender arm with knobby Nahant at the end, like a New Zealand war club.We sit and watch this shore as we glide by with a placid delight.Its curves and low promontories are getting to be speckled with villages and dwellings, like the shores of the Bay of Naples; we see the white spires, the summer cottages of wealth, the brown farmhouses with an occasional orchard, the gleam of a white beach, and now and then the flag of some many-piazzaed hotel.The sunlight is the glory of it all; it must have quite another attraction--that of melancholy--under a gray sky and with a lead-colored water foreground.