Would change carriages when we stopped at the next station,
for comparisons are very different from poetry, and if you try to mix
them with scenery you make a mess that is not fit for a Christian. But
I thought first I would give her a word back:
"I have seen to-day," I said, "the loveliest scenery I ever met with;
but we've got grand canons in America where you could put the whole of
that scenery without crowding, and where it wouldn't be much noticed by
spectators, so busy would they be gazing at the surrounding wonders."
"Fancy!" said she.
"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.
In the morning it hailed, which afterward turned to rain, but in the
afternoon there was only showers now and then, so that we spent most of
the time on deck. On this boat we met a very nice Englishman and his
wife, and when they had heard us speak to each other they asked us if
we had ever been in this part of the world before, and when we said we
hadn't they told us about the places we passed. If we had been an
English couple who had never been there before they wouldn't have said
a word to us.
As we got near the Clyde the gentleman began to talk about
ship-building, and pretty soon I saw in his face plain symptoms that he
was going to have an attack of comparison making. I have seen so much
of this disorder that I can nearly always tell when it is coming on a
person. In about a minute the disease broke out on him, and he began to
talk about the differences between American and English ships. He told
Jone and me about a steamship that was built out in San Francisco which
shook three thousand bolts out of herself on her first voyage. It
seemed to me that that was a good deal like a codfish shaking his
bones out through swimming too fast. I couldn't help thinking that that
steamship must have had a lot of bolts so as to have enough left to
keep her from scattering herself over the bottom of the ocean.
I expected Jone to say something in behalf of his country's ships, but
he didn't seem to pay much attention to the boat story, so I took up
the cudgels myself, and I said to the gentleman that all nations, no
matter how good they might be at ship-building, sometimes made
mistakes, and then to make a good impression on him I whanged him over
the head with the "Great Eastern," and asked him if there ever was a
vessel that was a greater failure than that.
