From St. Paul to Dubuque, as the boats had ceased running, a circuitous route and a night of discomfort were inevitable.  Leaving the main road to Chicago at Clinton Junction, I had the pleasure of waiting at a small country inn until midnight for a freight train.  This was indeed dreary, but, having Mrs. Child’s sketches of Mmes.  De Stael and Roland at hand, I read of Napoleon’s persecutions of the one and Robespierre’s of the other, until, by comparison, my condition was tolerable, and the little meagerly furnished room, with its dull fire and dim lamp, seemed a paradise compared with years of exile from one’s native land or the prison cell and guillotine.  How small our ordinary, petty trials seem in contrast with the mountains of sorrow that have been piled up on the great souls of the past!  Absorbed in communion with them twelve o’clock soon came, and with it the train.

A burly son of Adam escorted me to the passenger car filled with German immigrants, with tin cups, babies, bags, and bundles innumerable.  The ventilators were all closed, the stoves hot, and the air was like that of the Black Hole of Calcutta.  So, after depositing my cloak and bag in an empty seat, I quietly propped both doors open with a stick of wood, shut up the stoves, and opened all the ventilators with the poker.  But the celestial breeze, so grateful to me, had the most unhappy effect on the slumbering exiles.  Paterfamilias swore outright; the companion of his earthly pilgrimage said, “We must be going north,” and, as the heavy veil of carbonic acid gas was lifted from infant faces, and the pure oxygen filled their lungs and roused them to new life, they set up one simultaneous shout of joy and gratitude, which their parents mistook for agony.  Altogether there was a general stir.  As I had quietly slipped into my seat and laid my head down to sleep, I remained unobserved—­the innocent cause of the general purification and vexation.

We reached Freeport at three o’clock in the morning.  As the depot for Dubuque was nearly half a mile on the other side of the town, I said to a solitary old man who stood shivering there to receive us, “How can I get to the other station?” “Walk, madam.”  “But I do not know the way.”  “There is no one to go with you.”  “How is my trunk going?” said I.  “I have a donkey and cart to take that.”  “Then,” said I, “you, the donkey, the trunk, and I will go together.”  So I stepped into the cart, sat down on the trunk, and the old man laughed heartily as we jogged along through the mud of that solitary town in the pale morning starlight.  Just as the day was dawning, Dubuque, with its rough hills and bold scenery, loomed up.  Soon, under the roof of Myron Beach, one of the distinguished lawyers of the West, with a good breakfast and sound nap, my night’s sorrows were forgotten.