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This we crossed by a rude rope-ferry, filled at the time with a passing caravan, and then began at once to ascend the valley of the Tchirtchick toward Tashkend. The blackened cotton which the natives were gathering from the fields, the lowering snow-line on the mountains, the muddy roads, the chilling atmosphere, and the falling leaves of the giant poplars—all warned us of the approach of winter.
Now whenever Tom makes a statement Miss Kitty looks first at me to see how I am taking it. It is a fair, pale morning, as still as a picture, after last night's orgy of wind and dust. The maiden is making her first sketch on American soil of the rope-ferry, with the boat on this side.
Gertrude held the lines, the sun shining full in her face, and talked to the boatman, to George, and the horses, but George said little as he was busy quieting the excited animals and studying the primitive rope-ferry. To the regular ferrage, Gertrude added a dime for Tim, the helper, who watered the horses.
This is the sovereign's rural court, and is probably the best known by the world of all the English castles. The name is given various derivations: some ascribe it to the river's winding course; others to "Wind us over," in allusion to a rope-ferry there in ancient times; others to "Wind is sore," as the castle stands high and open to the weather.
A man by the name of Gulliver had established the old rope-ferry, before the day of bridges, but it was naturally called Green's Ferry, being a ferry at Green's place. He had been of an undoubted valor in the Indian fights of early days, was full of reminiscences, had no personal objections to anybody or anything, and had long given over to Judge Garvey the trouble of forming his opinions.
The great elms by Overton Church and the half-timbered and thatched houses crowding up to its gates somewhat make up for the splendor of the coped wall and new monuments in the churchyard. A scene wholly old is the Erbistock Ferry, which one might mistake for a rope-ferry on the Mosel. The cottage looks like the dilapidated lodge of an old monastery, and here, at least, is no trimness.
It was in following up this belated clue that the pilgrims had come to the Ferry inn, crossing by team from valley to valley, cutting off a great bend of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners, emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country in the dawn of enterprise.
Fording the Platte, a large deep stream, was a little unpleasant to us novices, for we tumbled about a great deal over the stones in the river-bed, and felt as if an upset was quite possible. The crossing is sometimes dangerous, and there is a rope-ferry, but to-day the water was low and fordable with ease. We are now no longer in the United States, but in the Indian country.
On the way to Buckeye we again encountered the Sacramento, here dwindled to a narrow mountain-stream, with bold precipitous banks and a rock bottom, a smooth and deep, but rapid current, and full of trout and salmon. We crossed it on a rope-ferry, and climbed the steeps on the other side, but did not leave it. Thenceforward to Shasta Peak we were never out of its neighborhood.
Passing over the suspension bridge to the east side of the river, and down by it to the Silver Cascade and Bridal-veil Falls, which charm from their exquisite beauty, then on to the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers at Fort Snelling, and across by the rope-ferry under the tall battlements of the frowning fort, whose edge is on a line with the towering, perpendicular bluff two hundred feet above your head, round by the road and up to the plain above, and into the inclosure of this old-time fortification, where, leaving your carriage, you proceed to the round tower, or look out of the fort, and on the very pinnacle of both cliff and battlement you may gaze out and over a spectacle more grand and beautiful than anything we know short of the White Hills.
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