LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

had our first experience of the quiet comforts of a little English inn. The gentility, the welcome, the home snugness, the open fireplace, the teakettle, the high-posted, curtained beds, all contrasted strongly with a noisy, American tavern, with its loud talk and dirty tobacco-spitting accompaniments. The enormous feet of the Liverpool cart-horses also impressed us.

      This morning we called at the American Consulate. The clerk said the Consul was away at the bank. Possibly like Hawthorne, one of his predecessors, he found nothing to do here but look after his salary. Anyway this Consulate is one of the best things in the gift of the President. In Hawthorne’s time, the pay was four times that of a Cabinet officer. Some years, the fees equaled the President’s own salary.

      August 10.​--​The sights we had most wanted to see in London were the Tower, the Abbey, the Fish Market, the docks, and the fogs; these and Mr. Gladstone. The fogs we did not need to see; we could feel them in our very bones. It was fog everywhere. Three people were reported killed the very day we got here​--​run over by wagons and omnibuses, plowing through the murky thickness. Street lamps are burning in the middle of the afternoon.

      Billingsgate Fish Market was not half so wicked as I had heard. It is said to be two hundred years old. It smells as if it were a thousand. There is possibly nothing so interesting to an American elsewhere on English earth, as the “Poets’ Corner” in Westminster Abbey, and, next to that, the Tower of London.

      The opulence of the London docks also simply amazed us. Imagine an underground wine vault, seven acres in extent. The total vaults of the Eastern Dock Co. measure 890,000 square feet. The St. Catherine Docks cost nine millions of pounds.

      John Lothrop Motley, the historian, is American Minister at London. We called. Found him a tall, aristocratic, consumptive-looking man, apparently not over glad to see traveling Americans. He had in his youth been a fellow student of Bismarck. Later, his daughters married Englishmen. Mr. Motley, like some other Americans sent to high office in London, is not extremely popular among his own countrymen. Neither did Grant approve him; but removed him later, spite of his backing by Charles Sumner.

      The Secretary of Legation kindly got me a ticket to the gallery of the House of Parliament. It seemed extraordinary good luck, for whom else should I hear speak, that very afternoon, but John Bright, Mr. Gladstone and the future Lord Disraeli. I looked for oratory in Mr. Gladstone and saw none, either of voice, manner or word. The subject possibly required none. It was the Scotch Education Bill. The tall, grave, spare-looking man stood there with papers in his hand, talking in the most commonplace manner. Often he turned to some colleague and looked and waited as if expecting an explanation. At last he sat down suddenly, as if he had got up out of time. Mr. Disraeli had been sitting there, writing something on the top of his hat, which he had just taken off for the purpose. There seemed to be no desks. When I first noticed numbers of the members with their hats on, I wondered if the session had begun. What I noticed about Mr. Disraeli was the long legs he stretched out before him, the dark, intellectual face, the large features, the yellow skin, the long black hair, the Jewish expression. He followed Mr. Gladstone, but in a voice so subdued that I, in the gallery, did not understand a word he said. Burly John Bright, with his noble face and sturdy mien, followed. He looked like the typical Englishman. He spoke to the bill in an earnest voice and loud enough, but said nothing that I remember. A Scotch member then rose in confusion, mumbled a few words, got scared, mixed up, turned red and sat down. And this is English oratory, I meditated, and called to mind the names of Douglas and Webster and Lincoln and Blaine. I suppose I was simply there on the wrong day.

      Sunday.​--​We spent a rainy Sunday in London, walking about the deserted streets. Every blind was down​--​there was silence everywhere. We seemed the only people alive in great London town. Our melancholy was added to by having, through misunderstanding, missed a train that was to take us to a friend in the country, where a hot dinner and English hospitality had awaited us.

      At the Channel.​--​Up to this time there had been nothing so interesting and romantic to me in English scenery as the big castle above the white cliffs of Dover. There was the high, sloping, green plateau and the grey old Castle a thousand feet above us​--​below it was the sea​--​across the Channel, only thirty miles away, lay sunny France.

CHAPTER II

       1869

       Table of Contents

      IN SWITZERLAND​--​THE ALPS​--​EMBARRASSMENT IN NOT KNOWING THE LANGUAGE​--​CELEBRATED EXILES MEET IN A CERTAIN CAFE​--​BRENTANO​--​WAGNER​--​KINKEL​--​SCHERR​--​KELLER​--​AND OTHERS.

      We stayed in Paris for a week. Then, one night, we crossed the plains of France, and at daylight saw with beating hearts the Jura Mountains. They were as a high wall of cliff and forest, green, deep valleys and running rivers, between France and the land of William Tell. The afternoon of that day saw us at our journey’s end. We were in beautiful Zurich. “Next to Damascus,” said Dixon, the English traveler, “I adore Zurich.”

      That day the Glarus Alps, that usually shine so gloriously in front of the city, were obscured with clouds. But the beautiful lake was there, and old walls, and ivy-covered towers, and all the story of a thousand years.

      Zurich.​--​Page 20.

      Zurich was half a mediæval city in 1869. Years have since changed it; its walls and towers have been torn down, and granite blocks and fashionable modern streets take the place, in part, of its picturesqueness, as we saw it at that time.

      Pretty soon I was, in a way, representing my country in a republic five times as old as our own. My predecessor recognized that he had been “rotated” out of office. He knew American party customs and turned over to me a few chairs, a desk, some maps, a flag, some books, some accounts and an enormous shield that hung over the door with a terrible-looking eagle on it, holding a handful of arrows. This was the coat of arms.

      Living was cheap in Switzerland in the seventies. For one whole year we stayed in the “Pension Neptune,” a first-class place in every sense. Our apartment included a finely furnished salon, a bedroom, and a large room for the consulate. For these rooms, with board for two persons, we paid only $3.00 per day. Just outside the pension, workmen were laying street pavements of stone. They worked from daylight till dark, for forty cents a day. The servants in the pension were getting ninety cents a week and board. The clerk in the consulate was working for $300 a year, without board. Good wine, and we had it always at dinner, was a franc a bottle. Things have changed since then. Switzerland is a dear country to live in now.

      In the “Neptune” we found the interesting family of Healy, the American artist. He had painted half the famous men of Europe, even then. There, too, was the family of Commander Crowninshield, distinguished of late days as an adviser of the President in the Spanish War.

      What we were to do now, was to learn the French and German languages. Good teachers received but two francs, or forty cents, a lesson, and the necessity of the situation impelled us to hard study.

      One evening, shortly after our arrival at Zurich, we were out boating with some friends, on the beautiful lake. There were myriads of pretty water-craft, filled with joyous people, circling all about. On a floating raft near by, a band of music was playing airs from Wagner. Zurich was a Wagner town. It was nearing sunset, when suddenly I happened to cast my eyes away from the people and the boats toward the upper end of the lake. “Look at the beautiful clouds,” I exclaimed. My companion smiled. “They are not clouds,” said he. “They are the Glarus Alps.” It was the fairest sight I ever beheld in my life. Some clouds on the horizon had suddenly floated away, and the almost horizontal rays of a setting summer sun were shining on the white snowfields and ice walls of the mountains, turning them into jasper and gold. “That is what we call the ‘Alpine glow,’ ” continued my friend. “It is like looking at the walls of Paradise,” I exclaimed.

Скачать книгу