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. . . and so we arrived at a ford that of course we couldn’t cross.
To crown it all, it was raining. Captains Denegre and Tucker went off in the gathering darkness through mud ankle-deep, reappearing with news of a house somewhere into which we might be taken. Whatever failed us in those days, it was not Virginian hospitality! The good people whose home we invaded seemed more than pleased to receive us, and next morning betimes started us again “On to Richmond.” By that time all Christmas cheer had gone out of us. To reach a ferry, where there was only a tiny makeshift of a skiff, we and the mules wearily took up the burden of life again, plodding five miles through sloughs and hopeless mud, up perpendicular hills and down again, till every bone ached and philosophy ceased to be a virtue.
Once more on the shores of classic Pamunkey, liquid mud flowing everywhere, in prospect a crossing, two by two, in a miserable egg-shell made of slimy planks, the bottom quite under water! The crowning feat of our expedition was, on reaching the other shore, all vehicles failing, to take heart of grace and walk six miles, in a downpour, to the nearest station of the railway. If it is asked what were our notions of perfection, I would answer that in those days we were sustained by what Cervantes styled “the bounding of the soul, the bursting of laughter, and the quicksilver of the five senses.”
From Recollections Grave and Gay by Mrs. Burton Harrison. Scribners, New York, 1911.
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