All I wanted was a warm room, a good bed, and unlimited time to
sleep. Now I have had a three hours' nap, and here I am, sitting by
myself in the great, lonely hotel parlor.
"Well, dear old man, I think lots of you, and only want to end all
this in a quiet home where we can sing 'John Anderson, my Jo'
together. I check off place after place as the captive the days of his
imprisonment. Only two more after to-night. Ever your loving wife."
Mrs. Stowe made one more reading tour the following year, and this
time it was in the West. On October 28, 1873, she writes from
Zanesville, Ohio, to her son at Harvard:--
You have been very good to write as often as you have, and your
letters, meeting me at different points, have been most cheering. I
have been tired, almost to the last degree. Read two successive
evenings in Chicago, and traveled the following day for thirteen
hours, a distance of about three hundred miles, to Cincinnati. We were
compelled to go in the most uncomfortable cars I ever saw, crowded to
overflowing, a fiend of a stove at each end burning up all the air,
and without a chance to even lay my head down. This is the grand route
between Chicago and Cincinnati, and we were on it from eight in the
morning until nearly ten at night.
Arrived at Cincinnati we found that George Beecher had not received
our telegram, was not expecting us, had no rooms engaged for us, and
that we could not get rooms at his boarding-place.
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