In like manner I am belatedly sensible of the interest which our dear H. G. took in our going, and the specific instructions which he gave me for my entry into the great world; as if he would realize in my prosperous future the triumphs which fortune had denied him in his past. He adjured me not to be abashed in any company, but face the proudest down and make audacity do the part of the courage I was lacking in. Especially he would have me not distrust myself in such a social essential as dancing, which was a grace I was confessedly imperfect in, but to exhaust the opportunities of improving it which the Saturday evening hops at our hotel would give me. He advised me not to dress poorly, but go to the full length of Polonius's precept--
"Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy"--
though what advantages his own experiences in these matters had won him could not have been very signal. He knew my ambition in that way, and how it had been defeated by the friendly zeal of our home-tailor; and we both held that with the clothing-stores of High Street open to my money all I had to do was to fix my mind upon a given suit which would fit me as perfectly as the Jew said, and then wear it away triumphantly appareled for the highest circles. We did not know that the art of dressing well, or fashionably, comes from deep and earnest study, and that the instinct of it might well have been blunted in me by my Quaker descent, with that desire to shine rather in the Other World than in this which had become a passion with my grandfather.
No fact of my leaving home upon the occasion which I must have felt so tremendous remains with me. I cannot even say whether it was through the snow or the mud that we drove ten miles from the county-seat to the railroad station at Ashtabula; whatever the going, it was over the warped and broken boards of the ancient plank-road which made any transit possible in that region of snow and mud, and remained till literally worn away even in the conception of the toll-taker. Without intervening event, so far as my memory testifies, or circumstance, any more than if we had flown through the air, we were there in Columbus together, living in an old-fashioned hotel on the northward stretch of High Street, which was then the principal business street, and for anything I know is so yet. The hotel was important to the eye of our village strangeness, but it was perhaps temperamentally of the sort of comfortable taverns which the hotels had come to displace. My father had gone to live there because he knew it from our brief sojourn when we came to the city from the country five or six years before, and because it was better suited to his means; but one of the vividest impressions of his youth had been the building of the National Road, a work so monumental for the new country it traversed, and he poetically valued the Goodale House for facing upon this road, which in its course from Baltimore to St. Louis became High Street in Columbus.