Memoirs by Charles Godfrey Leland Part 25

So we started and after a few hours' travel, stopped at Altona. There I was very much amused by an old darkey at the railway-station hotel, who had, as he declared, "specially the kyar of de ladies an' quality." He had been a slave till the war broke out, and had been wondrously favoured by visions and revelations which guided him to freedom. "De Lawd he 'pear to me in a dream, an' I hyar a vi'ce which cry, 'Simon, arise an'

git out of dis, an' put fo' de Norf as fa.s.s as you kin travel, fo' de day of de 'pressor is at an end, an' you is to be free.' So I rosed an'

fled, hardly a-waitin' to stuff my bag wid some corn-dodgers an' bacon, an' foller de Norf Star till I git confused an' went to sleep agin, wen, lo, an angel expostulated hisself befo' my eyes in a wision, an' say, 'Simon, beholdes' dou dat paff by de riber? Dat's de one fo' you to foller, ole son!' So I follers it till I git on de right trail. Den I met anoder n.i.g.g.e.r a-'scapin' from the bon's of captivity, an' carryin' a cold ham, an' I jined in wid him--you bet--an' so we come to de Lawd's country."

And so gaily on to Chicago. We went directly to the first hotel, and as soon as I had toiletted and gone below, I saw on the opposite building a sign with the words _Chicago Tribune_. This was an exchange of ours, so I crossed over, and meeting the editor by chance in the doorway, was welcomed and introduced to Governor Desbrosses, who stood by. Then I went to a telegraph office and sent a despatch to the _Press_. The man wanted me to pay. I told him to C. O. D., "collect on delivery." He declined. I said, "Your princ.i.p.al office is in Philadelphia, is it not?--Third and Chestnut Streets. Just send a telegram and ask the name of your landlord. It's Leland, and _I'm the man_. If you make me pay, I'll raise your rent." He laughed heartily and let me off, but not without a parting shot: "You see, Mr. Leland, there are so many scallawags {349} from the East come here, that we are obliged to be a little particular."

I returned to the hotel, and was immediately introduced to some one having authority. I narrated my late experience. He looked at me and said, "How long have you been in Chicago?" I replied, "About thirty minutes." He answered gravely, "I think you'd better _stay_ here. You'll suit the place." I was beginning to feel the moral influence of the genial air of the West. Chicago is emphatically what is termed "a place," and a certain amount of calm confidence in one's self is not in that city to any one's discredit. Once there was an old lady of a "hard"

type in the witness-box in an American city. She glared round at the judge, the jury, and the spectators, and then burst out with, "You needn't all be staring at me in that way. I don't keer a --- for you all. I've lived eleven years in Chicago, and ain't affeard of the devil." Chicago is said in Indian to mean the place of skunks, but calling a rose a skunk-cabbage don't make it one.

Walking on the edge of the lake near the city, the waters cast up a good- sized living specimen of that extraordinary fish-lizard, the great _men.o.branchus_, popularly known as the h.e.l.l-bender from its extreme ugliness. Owing to the immense size of its spermatozoa, it has rendered great aid to embryology, a science which, when understood _au fond_, will bring about great changes in the human race. We were taken out in a steamboat to the end of the great aqueduct, which was, when built, p.r.o.nounced, I think by the London _Times_, to be the greatest engineering work of modern times.

In due time we came to St. Paul, Minnesota. We went to a very fair hotel and had a very good dinner. In the West it is very common among the commonalty to drink coffee and milk through dinner, and indeed with all meals, instead of wine or ale, but the custom is considered as vulgar by swells. Having finished dessert, I asked the Irish waiter to bring me a small cup of black coffee and brandy. Drawing himself up stiffly, Pat replied, "We don't serve caafy at dinner in _this_ hotel." There was a grand roar of laughter which the waiter evidently thought was at _my_ expense, as he retreated smiling.

We were kindly received in St. Paul by everybody. There is this immense advantage of English or American hospitality over that of all other countries, that it introduces us to the _home_, and makes us forget that we are strangers. When we were at the end of the fearfully wearisome great moral circus known as the Oriental Congress, held all over Scandinavia in 1890, there came to me one evening in the station a great Norseman with his friends. With much would-be, ox-like dignity he began, "You ha-ave now experienced de glorious haspitality off our country. You will go oom and say--"

"Stop a minute there!" I exclaimed, for I was bored to death with a show which had been engineered to tatters, and to half defeating all the work of the Congress, in order to glorify the King and Count Landberg. "I have been here in your country six weeks, and I had letters of introduction, and have made no end of acquaintances. I have been shown thousands of fireworks, which blind me, and offered dozens of champagne, which I never touch, and public dinners, which I did not attend. But during the whole time I have never once seen the inside of a Swedish or Norwegian house." Which was perfectly true, nor have I ever seen one to this day. There is a kind of "hospitality" which consists of giving yourself a grand treat at a tavern or _cafe_, and inviting your strangers to it to help you to be glorified. But to very domestic people and utter Philistines, _domestic_ life lacks the charm of a bra.s.s band, and the mirrors and gilding of a restaurant or hotel; therefore, what they themselves enjoy most, they, with best intent, but most unwisely, inflict on more civilised folk. But in America and England, where home-life is _worth_ living and abounding in every attraction, and public saloons are at a discount, the case is reversed. And in these Western towns, of which many were, so to speak, almost within hearing of the whoop of the savage or the howl of the wolf (as Leavenworth really was), we experienced a refinement of true hospitality in homes--kindness and tact such as I have never known to be equalled save in Great Britain. One evening I was at a house in St. Paul, where I was struck by the beauty, refined manners, and agreeableness of our hostess, who was a real Chippeway or Sioux Indian, and wife of a retired Indian trader. She had been well educated at a Canadian French seminary.

We were taken over to see the rival city of Minneapolis, of which word my brother Henry said it was a vile grinding up together of Greek and Indian. _Minne_ means water; _Minne-sota_, turbid water, and _Minne-haha_ does not signify "laughing," but _falling_ water. This we also visited, and I found it so charming, that I was delighted to think that for once an Indian name had been kept, and that the young ladies of the boarding-schools of St. Paul or Minneapolis had not christened or devilled it "Diana's Bath."

We were received kindly by the Council of the city of Minneapolis. Half of them had come from the East afflicted with consumption, and all had recovered. But it is necessary to remain there to live. My wife's cousin, Mr. Richard Price, who then owned the great saw-mill next the Fall of St. Anthony, came with this affliction from Philadelphia, and got over it. After six years' absence he returned to Philadelphia, and died in six weeks of consumption. Strangely enough, consumption is the chief cause of death among the Indians, but this is due to their careless habits, wearing wet moccasins and the like.

Now a great question arose. It was necessary for the magnates of our party to go to Duluth, and to do this they must make a seven days'

journey through the wilderness, either on a very rough military road cut through the woods during the war, or sometimes on no road at all. Houses or post-stations, often of only one or two rooms, were sometimes a day's journey apart. The question was whether delicate ladies, utterly unaccustomed to anything like hard travel could take this trip, during which they must endure clouds of mosquitos, put up with camp-cooking, or often none, and otherwise go through privations such as only an Indian or a frontiersman would care to experience? The entire town of St. Paul, and all the men of our party, vigorously opposed taking the ladies, while I, joining the latter, insisted on it that they could go; for, as I said to all a.s.sembled, where the devil is afraid to go he sends a woman; and I had always observed that in travelling, long after men are tired out women are generally all right. They are never more played out _than they want to be_.

"Femme plaint, femme deult, Femme est malade quand elle veult, Et par Sainte Marie!

Quand elle veult elle est guerye."

And of course _we_ carried the day. Twelve men, even though backed up by a city council, have no chance against any ten women. To be sure women, like all other savages, require a male leader--I mean to say, just as Goorkha troops, though brave as lions, must have an English captain--so they conquered under my guidance!

Having had experience in fitting out for the wilderness, I was requested to see to the stores--so many hams to so many people for so many days, so much coffee, and so forth. I astonished all by insisting that there should be one _tin cup_ to every traveller. "Every gla.s.s you have will soon be broken," I said. And so it was, sooner than I expected. As tin cups could not be found in St. Paul, we bought three or four dozen small tin basins of about six inches diameter at the rim, and when champagne was served out it was, _faute de mieux_, drunk from these eccentric goblets.

In the first waggon were Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Leland. Their driver was a very eccentric Canadian Frenchman named Louis. He was to the last degree polite to the ladies, but subject to attacks of Indian rage at mere trifles, when he would go aside, swear, and destroy something like a lunatic in a fury, and then return quite happy and serene. I was in the second waggon with three ladies, a man being wanted in every vehicle. Our driver was named George, and he was altogether like Brigham, minus the Mexican-Spanish element. George had, however, also lived a great deal among Indians, and been at the great battle of the Chippeways and Sioux, and was full of interesting and naive discourse.

Of course, we of the two leading waggons all talked to Louis in French, who gave himself great airs on it. One morning George asked me in confidence, "Mr. Leland, you're not all French, are you?" "Certainly not," I replied; "we're from Philadelphia." "Well," replied George, "so I told Louis, but he says you _are_ French, like him, and shut me up by askin' me if I hadn't heard you talkin' it. Now what I want to know is, if you're _not_ French, how came the _whole_ of you to know it?" I explained to George, to his astonishment, that in the East it was usual for all well-educated persons, especially ladies, to learn it. I soon became as intimate with George as I had been with Brigham, and began to learn Chippeway of him, and greet the Indians whom we met. One day George said--

"Of course you have no Indian blood in you, Mr. Leland; but weren't you a great deal among 'em when you were young?"

"Why?"

"Because you've got queer little old Injun ways. Whenever you stop by the roadside to talk to anybody and sit down, you always rake the small bits of wood together and pull out a match and make a _smudge_" (a very smoky fire made by casting dust on it), "just like an Indian in an Injun kind of way." (In after years I found this same habit of making fires of small bits of wood peculiar to old English gypsies.)

The smudge is the great summer inst.i.tution of Minnesota. It is the safeguard against mosquitos. They are all over the State in such numbers that they const.i.tute a plague. We all wore all the time over our faces and necks a kind of guard or veil, shaped exactly like an Egyptian _fanous_ or folding lantern. It is cylindrical, made of _tulle_ or coa.r.s.e lace, with rings. At every house people sat in the porticos over a tin bucket, in which there was a smudge--that is to say, in smoke. In the evening some one goes with a tin or iron pail containing a smudge, and fills the bedrooms with dense smoke. One evening Mr. Hinckley and another of our party went fishing without veils. They returned with their necks behind swollen up as if with _goitres_ or _Kropfe_. I knew a young Englishman who with friends, somewhere beyond Manitoba, encountered such a storm of mosquitos that their oxen were killed, and the party saved themselves by riding away on horseback. So he told me.

At the stations--all log-houses--the ladies collected pillows and buffalo blankets, and, making a great bed, all slept in one room. We men slept in waggons or under a tent, which was not quite large enough for all. The Indian women cut spruce twigs and laid them over-lapping on the ground for our bed. By preference I took the outside, _al fresco_. One night we stayed at a house which had an upper and a lower storey. The ladies camped upstairs. In the morning, when we men below awoke, all took a drink of whisky. There entered a very tall Indian, clad in a long black blanket, who looked on very approvingly at the drinking. I called to my wife above to hand me down my whisky flask. "There is a big Indian here who wants a drink," I remarked. "I think I know," she replied, "who that big Indian is," but handed down the flask. "Don't waste whisky on an _Indian_" said one of my companions. But I filled the cup with a tremendous slug, and handed it to the Objibway. He took it down like milk, and never a word spoke he, but when it was swallowed he looked at me and winked. Such a wink as that was! I think I see it now--so inspired with grat.i.tude and humour as to render all words needless. He had a rare sense of tact and grat.i.tude. Soon after I was sitting out of doors among a few ladies, when the Indian, who had divined that I was short of Chippeway and wished to learn, stalked up, and pointing to our beauty, said gravely, _squoah_--_i.e._, woman. Then he indicated several other articles, told me the Indian name for each and walked away. It was all he could do. The ladies, who could not imagine why this voluntary lesson was given to me, were much amused at it. But I understood it; he had seen the Injun in me at a glance, and knew what I wanted most!

One night we stopped at a place called Kettle River. It was very picturesque. Over the rushing stream the high rocky banks actually overhung the water. I got into a birch canoe with my wife, and two Indian boys paddled us, while others made a great fire on the cliff above, which illuminated the scene. Other Indian youths jumped into the water and swam about and skylarked, whooping wildly. It reminded me strangely of the Blue Grotto of Capri, where our boatmen jumped in and swam in a sulphur-azure glow, only that this was red in the firelight.

Our whisky ran short--it always does on all such excursions--and our drivers in consequence became very "short" also, or rather unruly. But _bon chemin_, _mal chemin_, we went on, and the ladies, as I had predicted, pulled through merrily.

One day, at a halt, I found, with the ladies, in the woods by a stream, a pretty sight. It was a wigwam, which was very open, and which had been made to look like a bower with green boughs. When I was in the artillery I was the only person who ever thus adorned our tent in Indian style. It is very pleasant on a warm day, and looks artistic. In the wigwam sat a pretty Indian woman with a babe. The ladies were, of course, at once deeply interested, but the Indian could not speak English. One of the ladies had a common j.a.panese fan, with the picture of a grotesque G.o.d, and I at once saw my way to interest our hostess.

I once read in the journal of a missionary's wife in Canada that she had a curious Malay or Cingalese dagger, with a curved blade and wooden sheath, while on the handle was the figure of an idol. One day she showed this to an Indian, and the next day he came with five more, and these again with fifteen, till it seemed as if the whole country had gone wild over it. Very much alarmed at such heathenism, the lady locked it up and would show it no more. Ere she did so, she asked an old Indian how it was possible to make a scabbard of one piece of wood, with a hole in it to fit the blade. This man, who had been one of the most devoted admirers of the deity on the handle, saw no puzzle in this. He explained that the hole was burned in by heating the blade.

I showed the G.o.d on the fan to the Indian woman, and said, "_Manitu_--_ktchee manitu_" ("a G.o.d--a great G.o.d"). She saw at once that it was heathen, and her heart went out unto it with great delight. With a very few Chippeway words and many signs I explained to her that forty days' journey from us was the sea, and forty days beyond another country where the people had this _manitou_. I believe that the lady gave her the fan, and it may be that she worships it to this day. How absurd it is to try to force on such people Catholic or Protestant forms, which they do _not_ understand and never will, while their souls take in with joy the poly-pantheistic developments of supernaturalism, and that which suits their lives. Like the little boy who _thought_ he would like to have a Testament, but _knew_ he wanted a squirt, the Indian, unable to rise to the grandeur of monotheistic trinitarianism, is delighted with goblins, elves, and sorcery. He can manage the squirt.

At Fond-du-Lac I became acquainted with a Mr. Duffy, a very genial and clever man, a son of a former governor of Rhode Island. He had an Indian wife and family, and was looked up to by the Indians as _Kitchimokomon_, "the white man." That he was a gentleman will appear from the following incident. There was one of our party who, to put it mildly, was not remarkable for refinement. A trader at Fond-du-Lac had a very remarkable carved Indian pipe, for which he asked me fifteen dollars. It certainly was rather a high price, so I offered ten. Immediately the man of whom I spoke laid down fifteen dollars and took the pipe. He was _dans son droit_, but the action was churlish. It seemed so to Duffy, who was standing by. After I had returned to Philadelphia, Mr. Duffy sent me a very handsome pipe for a present, which he a.s.sured me had been smoked at two grand councils. He was indeed a "white man."

There was an old Indian here whose name in Indian meant "He who changes his position while sitting," but white people called him Martin "for short." He was wont to smoke a very handsome pipe. One day, seeing him smoking a wretched affair rudely hewn, I asked him if he had not a better. He replied, "I had, but I sold it to the _kcheemo-komon iqueh_"--the long-knife woman (_i.e._, to a white lady). Inquiry proved that the "long-knife woman" was Miss Lottie Foster, a very beautiful and delicate young lady from Philadelphia, to whom such a barbaric term seemed strangely applied. As for me, because I always bought every stone pipe which I could get, the Indians called me _Poaugun_ or Pipe. Among the Algonkin of the East in after-days I had a name which means _he who seeks hidden things_ (_i.e._, mysteries).

We came to Duluth. There were in those days exactly six houses and twenty-six Indian wigwams. However, we were all accommodated somehow.

Here there were grand conferences of the railroad kings with the authorities of Duluth and Superior City, which was a few miles distant, and as the Dulutherans outbid the Father Superiors, the terminus of the road was fixed at Duluth.

It was arranged that the ladies should remain at Duluth while we, the men, were to go through the woods to examine a situation a day's march distant. We had Indians to carry our luggage. Every man took a blanket and a cord, put his load into it, turned the ends over the cord, and then drew it up like a bag. They carried very easily from 150 to 250 lbs.

weight for thirty miles a day over stock and stone, up and down steep banks or amid rotten crumbling trees and moss. Though a good walker, I could not keep up with them.

I had with me a very genial and agreeable man as walking companion. His name was Stewart, and he was mayor, chief physician, and filled half-a- dozen other leading capacities in St. Paul. Our fellow-travellers vanished in the forest. Mayor Stewart and I with one Indian carrier found ourselves at two o'clock very thirsty indeed. The view was beautiful enough. A hundred yards below us by the steep precipice rushed the St. Lawrence, but we could not get at it to drink.

Stewart threw himself on the gra.s.s in despair. "Yes," he cried, "we're lost in the wilderness, and I'm going to die of thirst. Remember me to my family." "I say," he suddenly cried, "ask that Injun the name of that river."

I asked of the Indian, "_Wa go nin-iu_?" ("How do you call that?") Thinking I wanted to know the name for a stream, he replied, "_Sebe_."

This is the same as _sipi_ in Missis-sippi.

"I knew it," groaned Stewart. "There is no such river as the _Sebe_ laid down on the map. We're lost in an unknown region."

"It occurs to me," I said, "that this is a judgment on me. When I think of the number of times in my life when I have walked past bar-rooms and neglected to go in and take a drink, I must think that it is a retribution."

"And I say," replied Stewart, "that if you ever do get back to civilisation, you'll be the old --- toper that ever was."

When we came to the camp we found there by mere chance a large party of surveyors. As there were thirty or forty of us, it was resolved, as so many white men had never before been in that region, to const.i.tute a township and elect a member to the Legislature, or Congress, or something--I forget what; but it appeared that it was legal, and it was actually done--I voting with the rest as a settler. I, too, am a _Minnesot_.

We railroad people formed one party and sat at our evening meal by ourselves, the surveyors made another, and the Indians a third _table- d'hote_. An open tin of oysters was before us, and somebody said they were not good. One only needs say so to ruin the character of an oyster--and too often of "a human bivalve," as the Indiana orator said.

We were about to pitch it away, when I asked the attendant to give it to the Indians. It was gravely pa.s.sed by them from man to man till it came to the last, who lifted it to his mouth and _drank off the entire quart_, _oysters and all_, as if it had been so much cider. Amazed at this, I asked what it meant, but the only explanation I could get was, "He like um oyster."

This was a charming excursion, all through the grene wode wilde, and I enjoyed it. I had Indian society, and learned Indian talk, and bathed in charming rushing waters, and saw enormous pine trees 300 feet high, and slept _al fresco_, and ate _ad libitum_. To this day its remembrance inspires in me a feeling of deep, true poetry.

I think it was at Duluth that one morning there was brought in an old silver cross which had just been found in an Indian grave on the margin of the lake, not very far away. I went there with some others. It was evidently the grave of some distinguished man who had been buried about a hundred years ago. There were the decayed remains of an old-fashioned gun, and thousands of small beads adhering, still in pattern, to the _tibiae_. I dug up myself--in fact they almost lay on the surface, the sand being blown away--several silver bangles, which at first looked exactly like birch-bark peelings, and, what I very much prized, two or three stone cylinders or tubes, about half an inch in diameter, with a hole through them. Antiquaries have been much puzzled over these, some thinking that they were musical instruments, others implements for gambling. My own theory always was that they were used for smoking tobacco, and as those which I found were actually stuffed full of dried semi-decayed "fine cut," I still hold to it. I also purchased from a boy a red stone pipe-head, which was found in the same grave. I should here say that the pipe which had been bought away from me by the man above mentioned had on it the carving of a _reindeer_, which rendered it to me alone of living men peculiarly valuable, since I have laboured hard, and subsequently set forth in my "Algonkin Legends" the theory that the Algonkin Indians went far to the North and there mingled with the Nors.e.m.e.n of Greenland and Labrador. The man who got the pipe promised to leave it to me when he died, but he departed from life and never kept his word. A frequent source of grief to me has been to see objects of great value, ill.u.s.trating some point in archaeology, seized as "curiosities" by ignorant wealthy folk. The most detestable form of this folly is the buying of _incunabula_, first editions or uncut copies, and keeping them from publication or reading, and, in short, of worshipping anything, be it a book or a coin, merely because it is _rare_. Men never expatiate on _rariora_ in literature or in china, or talk cookery and wines over-much, without showing themselves prigs. It is not any beauty in the _thing_, but the delightful sense of their own culture or wealth which they cultivate. When there is nothing in a thing but mere _rarity_ and cost to commend it, it is absolutely worthless, as is the learning and connoisseurship thereupon dependent.

Business concluded, we took a steamboat, and were very sea-sick on Lake Superior for twenty-four hours. Then we went to the Isle Royale, and saw the mines, which had been worked even by the ancient Mexicans; also an immense ma.s.s of amethysts. The country here abounds in agates. At Marquette there was brought on board a single piece of pure virgin copper from the mine which weighed more than 4,000 pounds. There it was, I think, that we found our cars waiting, and returned in them to Philadelphia.

It was at this time that my brother Henry died, and his loss inflicted on me a terrible mental blow, which went far, subsequently, to bring about a great crisis in my health. My dear brother was the most remarkable ill.u.s.tration of the fact that there are men who, by no fault of their own, and who, despite the utmost honour or integrity, deep intelligence, good education, and varied talents, are overshadowed all their lives by sorrow, and meet ill-luck at every turn. He went at sixteen as _employe_ into a Cuban importing house, where he learned Spanish. His princ.i.p.al failed, and thence he pa.s.sed to a store in New York, where he worked far too hard for $600 a year. His successor, who did much less, was immediately paid $2,500 per annum. Finding that his employer was being secretly ruined by his partner, he warned the former, but only with the result of being severely reprimanded by the merchant and my father as a mischief-maker. After a while this merchant was absolutely ruined and bankrupted by his partner, as he himself declared to me, but, like many men, still kept his _rancune_ against my poor brother. By this time the eyesight and health of Henry quite gave out for some time. Every effort which he made, whether to get employment, to become artist or writer, failed. He published two volumes of tales, sporting sketches, &c., with Lippincott, in Philadelphia, which are remarkable for originality. One of them was subsequently written out by another distinguished author in another form. I do not say it was after my brother's, for I have known another case in which two men, having heard a story from Barnum, both published it, ignorant that the other had done so. But I would declare, in justice to my brother, that he told this story, which I am sure the reader knows, quite as well as did the other.

He travelled a great deal, was eighteen months in Rome and its vicinity, visited Algeria, Egypt, and Cuba and the West, always spending so little money that my father expressed his amazement at it. I regret to say that in my youth I never astonished him in this way. But this morbid conscientiousness or delicacy as to being dependent did him no good, for he might just as well have been thoroughly comfortable, and my father would never have missed it. The feeling that he could get no foothold in life, which had long troubled me, became a haunting spectre which followed him to the grave. His work "Americans in Rome" is one of the cleverest, most sparkling, and brilliant works of humour, without a trace of vulgarity, ever written in America. It had originally some such t.i.tle as "Studios and Mountains," but the publisher, thinking that the miserable clap-trap t.i.tle of "Americans in Rome" would create an impression that there was "gossip," and possibly scandal, in it, insisted on that. It was published in the weary panic of 1862 in the war, and fell dead from the press. Though he never really laughed, and was generally absolutely grave, my brother had an incredibly keen sense of fun, and in conversation could far outmaster or "walk over the head" of any humorist whom I ever met. He was very far, however, from showing off or being a professional wit. He was very fond, when talking with men who considered themselves clever, of making jests or puns in such a manner and in such an unaffected ordinary tone of voice that they took no note of the _quodlibets_. He enjoyed this much more than causing a laugh or being complimented. But taking his life through, he was simply unfortunate in everything, and his worst failures were when he made wisely directed energetic efforts to benefit himself or others. He rarely complained or grieved, having in him a deep _fond_ of what I, for want of a better term, call _Indian nature_, or stoicism, which is common in Americans, and utterly incomprehensible to, or rarely found in, a European.

The death of my father left me a fifth of his property, which was afterwards somewhat augmented by a fourth share of my poor brother's portion. For one year I drew no money from the inheritance, but went on living as before on my earnings, so that my wife remarked it really took me a year to realise that I had any money. After some months I bought a house in Locust Street, just opposite to where my father had lived, and in this house I remained six months previously to going to Europe in 1869. We had coloured servants, and I never in all my life, before or since, lived so well as during this time. The house was well furnished; there was even the great luxury of no piano, which is a great condition of happiness.

This year I was fearfully busy. As I had taken the dramatic criticism in hand, for which alone we had always employed a man, I went during twelve months 140 times to the opera, and every evening to several theatres, _et cetera_. Once I was caught beautifully. There had been an opera bouffe, the "Grande d.u.c.h.esse" or something, running for two or three weeks, and I had written a criticism on it. This was laid over by "press of matter,"

but as the same play was announced for the next night with the same performers, we published the critique. But it so chanced that the opera by some accident was not played! The _Evening Bulletin_, my old paper, rallied me keenly on this blunder, and I felt badly. John Forney, jun., however, said it was mere rubbish of no consequence. He was such an arrant Bohemian and hardened son of the press, that he regarded it rather as a joke and a feather in our caps, indicating that we were a bounding lot, and not tied down to close observances. Truly this is a very fine spirit of freedom, but it may be carried too far, as I think it was by a friend of mine, who had but one principle in life, and that was _never_ to write his newspaper correspondence in the place from which it was dated. It came to pa.s.s that about three weeks after this retribution overtook the _Bulletin_, for it also published a review of an opera which was not sung, but I meanly pa.s.sed the occurrence by without comment. When a man hits you, it is far more generous, manly, and fraternal to hit him back a good blow than to degrade him by silent contempt.

The Presidential campaign between Grant and Johnson was beginning to warm up. Colonel Forney was in a cyclone of hard work between Washington, Pennsylvania, and New York, carrying on a thousand plots and finely or coa.r.s.ely drawn intrigues, raising immense sums, speaking in public, and, not to put it too finely, buying or trading votes in a thousand tortuous or "mud-turtlesome and possum-like ways"--for _non possumus_ was not in his Latin. Never shall I forget the disgust and indignation with which the great Republican champion entered the office one evening, and, flinging himself on a chair, declared that votes in New Jersey had gone up to sixty dollars a head! And I was forced to admit that sixty dollars for a Jerseyman did seem to be an exorbitant price. So he went forth on the war-path with fresh paint and a sharp tomahawk.