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A Boy Visits Cincinnati |
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stop was at Augusta, a village on the Kentucky side of the river, sixty-five miles east of Cincinnati. This was the home of two brothers of Mrs. Foster, the Reverend Joseph S. Tomlinson, a graduate of Transylvania College, Lexington, who was president of the Augusta Female College; and Professor William Tomlinson.1 The visitors were guests of the president, and, as Mrs. Foster wrote later, ''Henrietta had a fine opportunity of practising on the piano at his house." She described her presidential brother as "a fine, amiable gentlemanly little man" who "pay'd my passage ... to Cincinnati."2
After the village quietude of Augusta, Stephy must have been doubly thrilled with the sights and sounds of the big city when the Napoleon arrived at the Cincinnati landing. The river front,3 as the Fosters walked down the gangplank from the packet, was a grand spectacle for a small boy. Upward to Front Street spread the stone-pavea expanse known as the public landing or levee. A beehive of activity it was, with negro stevedores loading and unloading baggage and freight from a half dozen steamboats, and top-hatted drivers of omnibuses and coaches shrilly exhorting the boat passengers to take their particular vehicles to their particular hotels.
As the Fosters rode up to Fourth Street, Stephy's dark eyes must have widened as he watched the canvas-covered wagons on the levee and in the streets. In these wagons hun- |
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