John Milton Binckley, June 1859 Travel Diary, Pages 3-4

[Many thanks to William Myers, Mary Davy, Sally Young and Sue Davis for their ongoing research collaboration; specifically to William for providing scans of the original document, and in turn many thanks to Peter Johnston Binckley and Patricia D'Arcy "Trish" Binckley (1951-2007), at the source.

The handwriting is difficult to translate and transcribe. Sally Young and William Myers helpfully made additional suggestions. Corrections and clarifications will be ongoing.]

[John Milton Binckley,  June 1859 Travel Diary, pages 3-4.]

3

not without endangering myself. To save basket & cane.

Soon, after starting, get Mother into the sleeping cars. They cost 50 cents extra, . . . berth. I wanted none for myself, but for mother, & took mine in order to be near her . . . checks. The sleeping cars pleasant & snug looking place. I observed regularly enough spitoons in the standing cars & not elsewhere.

Here the habit of timid women in not keeping close to escort was well illustrated. When a woman is escorted . . . she should, in a crowd, keep right in the heels of escort, who should know they were there without looking behind & missing seeing what is before, for him to see & understand.

Here we go up the Patapsco. A beautiful stream, always one of my chosen of romantic streams. Always musical, always in motion – never a mad fall, yet never a sluggish flow. . . . by a hundred dams obstructing but not stopping her singing current -- . . . I get onto an analogy between the stream

4

The bosom of some one.

I had once a notion to write a novel laying the scene in the Patapsco. I mention I thought the stream like myself – flowing on, too, to waste its waters . . . gathered from a thousand scant pastures and carried faithfully her to a thousand rugged obstructions to waste its water in the stagnant Chesapeake.

Read in the day the “news” . . . from the last Vol – just out – of Irving’s life [of] Washington. His last hours, well described. An . . . of Ben West. When in the zenith of his fame, the honored of nations & the table guest of kiss, the story of the kiss his mother gave him for his first picture, when a little boy, was told, with the remark “You have carried another kiss from your Mother!” “Alas, said the object of their admiration with tears, “I have no mother!”  A kind of paen[?] about content” conformed the staff. “Content” – contempt rather. Does the author feel contented? If so, he never reached it by reading such stuff.

[John Milton Binckley (1831-1878).
Mother = Charlotte Stocker Binckley (1788-1877).]