Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/40

Rh This fragment of a letter — and there were many like it — shows what we endured before rapid transit was accomplished, I have seen many inventions, the electric telegraph, postage-stamps, envelopes, chloroform, photographs, sewing-machines, parlor matches, canning of fruit and vegetables, but none of them equal the parlor car and the rapidity of steam travel; not even the steam furnace, which doubtless saves many a life in the cold Northern States. "When I remember that freezing child on the top of that dreary stage-coach with the thermometer at zero, I do not wonder that I have been a rheumatic all my later life. I only wonder that I lived a year.

My health gave way between these exposures and Mr. Emerson's stairs, and my kind father came home from the West to see to me and to take me back with him. He had accepted from General Harrison's administration the office of Surveyor-General of Iowa, then much farther off from New Hampshire than it now is. He had previously been made chairman of the great convention at Harrisburg which nominated General Harrison in 1840, and had received from Leslie Coombs, of Kentucky, this compliment:

"General Wilson, you were sent to New Hampshire, but you were misdirected: you were meant for Kentucky."

His great stature, his love of field sports, captivated the ardent soul of the Kentuckian, and I think my father had always sighed for a buffalo-hunt and a chase over the prairies.

He took up his temporary official residence in Dubuque, Iowa, and I was to accompany him thither. My mother did not relish the idea of so long a journey, but to me it was like a flight into Paradise. We were to