“Them?” he answered.  “Them’s the men that’s been out West, out to Michig’n, aft’ Sir Ben Franklin.”

Of the other sights of Harrisburg the Brant House or Hotel, or whatever it is called, seems most worth notice.  Its facade is imposing, with a row of stately columns, high above which a broad sign impends, like a crag over the brow of a lofty precipice.  The lower floor only appeared to be open to the public.  Its tessellated pavement and ample courts suggested the idea of a temple where great multitudes might kneel uncrowded at their devotions; but from appearances about the place where the altar should be, I judged, that, if one asked the officiating priest for the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, his prayer would not be unanswered.  The edifice recalled to me a similar phenomenon I had once looked upon,—­the famous Caffe Pedrocchi at Padua.  It was the same thing in Italy and America:  a rich man builds himself a mausoleum, and calls it a place of entertainment.  The fragrance of innumerable libations and the smoke of incense-breathing cigars and pipes shall ascend day and night through the arches of his funereal monument.  What are the poor dips which flare and flicker on the crowns of spikes that stand at the corners of St. Genevieve’s filigree-cased sarcophagus to this perpetual offering of sacrifice?

Ten o’clock in the evening was approaching.  The telegraph office would presently close, and as yet there were no tidings from Hagerstown.  Let us step over and see for ourselves.  A message!  A message!

“Captain H. still here leaves seven to-morrow for Harrisburg Penna Is doing well Mrs HK—.”

A note from Dr. Cuyler to the same effect came soon afterwards to the hotel.

We shall sleep well to-night; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or, if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall gently narcotize the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber like the leaves of a lily at nightfall.  For now the over-tense nerves are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz, like that which comes over one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, makes the whole frame alive with a luxurious languid sense of all its inmost fibres.  Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild, pensive clerk was so magnetized by it that he came and sat down with us.  He presently confided to me, with infinite naivete and ingenuousness, that, judging from my personal appearance, he should not have thought me the writer that he in his generosity reckoned me to be.  His conception, so far as I could reach it, involved a huge, uplifted forehead, embossed with protuberant organs of the intellectual faculties, such as all writers are supposed to possess in abounding measure.  While I fell short of his ideal in this respect, he was pleased to say that he found me by no means the remote and inaccessible personage he had imagined, and that I had nothing of the dandy about me, which last compliment I had a modest consciousness of most abundantly deserving.