1 . MY LOG ROBERT BARRIE ALDliMDISCIP. NAVIi CT 3Z1 A3 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 7 (V- 4M/u^ 4^/A^r DATE DUE rirc ' CT275.B27 r A3 Un ' VerS " y """» My illH&&,£°!?.? rt Barrie. olin 3 1924 029 802 802 "A very interesting book . . . free and easy style.'' — The New York Herald. "A very amusing, unpretentious log, of a life rolled, like old wine, on the tongue of appreciation." — From a half column review in The Evening Post, New York. " The unaffected tone is very attractive . . . the recollections of famous people he met make the reader wish the author would enlarge on that side of his life."— The Sun, New York. " The intimate, sketchy notes here opened to us of the London, the Paris, and other foreign capitals of the late eighties have the keen interest of things that have been and are not." — The World, New York. " Many and varied are the memories which Mr. Barrie is sharing with his readers. He saw many phases of life UDder many climes ... he writes most interestingly in those chapters in which he tells of the artists and the artistic life of his day; on these memories his pen dwells 'con amore ' — then it runs almost of itself ... a chatty book, frothy and light and delightful." — Public Ledger, Philadelphia. " Wonderfully interesting reminiscences." — The Boston Globe. " Kindly, readable, and cultivated gossip. . . . Pleasant reminis- cences of a full life that many a storm-tossed reader of the day will pick up with sincere enjoyment." — The Journal, Providence. " Reminiscences of persons of prominence ... a book of decided charm . . . personal acquaintance with the author, who, apparently, is a man of genial nature, would, of course, add to the reader's pleasure . . . a charming companion." — The Eagle, Brooklyn, N. Y. " His intimates were famous figures in the Latin Quarter ; his cosmo- politanism extended to far-off Australia." — The Post, Pittsburgh. " One of those odd but thoroughly delightful and personal books of reminiscences that one runs across sometimes and blasses forever. It is a collection of intimate glimpses into a life whose orbit touched the orbits of many famous men and women . . . one of the most attractive book offerings of the summer." — The Democrat, Rochester, N Y. " One feels especially grateful to-day to any author who is able to dis- perse the clouds of cannon smoke, and doubly grateful when the process is accomplished in so entertaining a way as that of Mr. Barrie's " Log " . . . delightfully reminiscent, rambling along in the friendliest of ways that makes the reader a ' companion of the road.' . . . His affiliations were with people famous ip the artistic and social world, and his memories of them furnish an inexhaustible supply of interesting and often amusing anecdote. Few Americans knew the real Paris as did he. He had un- common advantages and possessed uncommon power of pro6ting by them. The result, for the reader, is a rare pleasure."' — The Transcript, Boston. Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029802802 MY LOG SINIBAI.DI'S STUDIO. From the painting by himself. MY LOG BY ROBERT BARRIE PHILADELPHIA THE FRANKLIN PRESS 1917 U i\' 1 1 UNI VI hi- II Y i I,;KAInY ^l n COPYRIGHTED BY THE FRANKLIN PRESS 191 7 I^l£6t2r v 'i I ; YJ1A.JK-- !- ! 3 1.1 hi / ^f V TO THE GOVERNOR ON 8TH JULY, 19 1 7, HIS SEVENTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY PREFACE Some years ago, sitting in the little Hotel Guillaume- le-Conquerant at Dives, I fell to wondering what sort of man David de Barri might have been, and what he had seen and done, and especially how he felt as he slipped out of the little river there with the Conqueror that September night nearly nine centuries ago. How I wished that he, and occasionally others of the gener- ations that came after him, had kept a log. I have tried, in the midst of a busy life, to do what I wished they had done. And I have found that although, as the wise old Romans put it, Dulce est meminisse, it is not easy to write the plainest log of the simplest life. I think that most readers, if they read through these pages, will feel in sympathy with Emerson, who, in his essay on Shakespeare, hits the nail very cleverly on the head when he says, " we tell the chronicle of a man's parentage, birth, birthplace, schoolmates, earning money, marriage, publi- cation of books, celebrity, and death, and when we have come to the end of this gossip we know as little of the real person as before." I offer this as an apology for all the defects of my little book, for it shows how really difficult the thing is. R. B. La vie est breve ; Un peu d' amour, Un peu de rgve Et puis — bonjour ! La vie est vaine ; Un peu d'espoir, Un peu de haine Et puis — bonsoir ! Our life is vain ; A little play, A little pain, And so — Good day ! Our life is brief; A little light, A little grief, And then — Good night ! BORN 2-47 BORN 7°/ Born '799 ' GREAT-GRANDFATHERS LUCKY ENOUGH TO TOUCH HANDS WITH GREAT-GRANDSONS." ANCESTRY Although it is the fashion to-day to look upon pride of descent as an empty and foolish pretension, and this it is when it is carried to excess, it cannot be denied that this very human weakness is a trait that has existed in all races that have had a civilization and a history. A reasonable interest in our ancestry should not lead to snobbery. Of course, there is no need to go into rapt- ures, like Gibbons, over the fact that our ancestors were honest people. But an interest in where we came from and how we got a name surely is not an unpardonable folly, for Marcus Aurelius devoted the whole first book of his Meditations to his ancestors, and toward the end of it thanked the gods that almost all of them were persons of probity. Carlyle's Teufelsdrockh discussed the subject of family names in a couple of pages and came to the conclusion that they are of importance and significance as being the earliest garment we wrap about ourselves. Amusing myself looking up the history of the very early clothing of the Barries I found, after going through various forms, that it appears as Barri at the time of the i MY LOG Conquest, and that David won great lands in Wales as a reward for his services, and that his son married Angareth, daughter of that Nesta who was the most beautiful woman of her time and beloved of Henry I ; and that their son, Sir Robert Barri, accompanied Fitz-Stephen at the conquest of Ireland and acquired great lands, so that his family- became known as " Barrach-More " — the great Barrys. This nickname suggested the title when Charles I created them earls of Barrymore, just as the motto Boutez-en- avant had given the hint when the head of the house of Barri had been created Viscount Buttevant. They built Barry Court and were the ancestors of, or at least gave their names to, all the Barrys of Ireland. Only one Barri, Giraldus, who stayed in Wales and was three times elected bishop of St. David's but failed to be consecrated, — perhaps because he had the cheek to ridicule Henry the Second's little round head and big round belly and lash his licentiousness and duplicity, — kept the wished-for log — and it is a tiresome one of a journey he made to and through Ireland, which can still be seen in the Vatican, where Gerald had jested and gossiped with Innocent III, greatest of popes. He also wrote an account of Wales, but he was an exception, for they were not of studious bent. There were other sailors among them ; vide Rear- Admiral Sir Robert Barrie, C. B., K. C. H., who commanded a squadron in the Chesapeake in 1 8 14. And there were some wild blades in the family: among them, one of the earls of the eighteenth century, 2 ANCESTRY an intimate of the Prince of Wales, who, among other extravagances, kept a private theatre. And, worst of all, there was the reprobate Guillaume, Comte de Barri, who sold to a king for his mistress, the name and the demi-otter and the motto, when he married Jeanne Vaubernier and left her at the church door. How the name made its way to Scotland is curious. Sir Robert, who went to Ireland with Fitz-Stephen, had an eldest son who was passed over in the succession because he was a deaf-mute. This poor fellow went to Scotland, and only left his mark there, so far as I know, in Barry Hill, in Forfarshire, but no doubt he was the ancestor of all the Scots who spell their name Barrie, including the present Sir James, born in Forfarshire, who has added to the reputation of the name, so that it is now known even among ticket sellers in the theatres. I am a firm believer that environment has much more effect on man and woman than heredity has, and that, with the possible exception of an apparently inborn love for the sea and being more contented when sailoring, the lives of those who lived before me have had little influ- ence on mine. One little fact in this connection may, however, be of interest to those who believe in a former existence and who make a study of such things : on several occasions when deep in meditation and without conscious direct thought, or the fact would be with- out value, the sense has come upon me that I was living in the eighteenth century and wore a sword which 3 MY LOG I had used or was about to use. This has always hap- pened when walking alongside a high wall in Europe, and always, also, about sunset. Perhaps it was simply that I was dreaming while awake, but here's the fact for what it is worth to the scientist. I have never had any other hal- lucinations — so far as I am aware. One point that adds to the interest is that, within my knowledge, no forbear wore a sword in Europe in the eighteenth century, so that there had been nothing of this kind to influence my mind. My mother, Margaret Graham Glass, a woman with a passion for fishing, was descended on one side from a grandfather, John Glass, who was a manufacturer of jute in Dundee ; on the other side her grandfather was John Leek, provost of Gorbas, whose wife was Lady Mary Drummond. My mother's parents were Mary Drum- mond Leek, born at Gorbas in 1811, and Alexander Glass, born at Forfar, in Fife, in 1807. I remember him as a tall, stately old man with an air and a manner: he was a Burgess of Glasgow, and they entertained the Lord Provost, and his Lady forbye, at high tea on occasions. My father, George Barrie, was descended on one side from Samuel Barrie, a fairly well-to-do farmer and breeder of horses, and his wife, Jean Bell, of Bell's Hill, Udding- stone, Bothwell Parish, Lanarkshire, who were his great- grandparents, and before them from a John Barrie, also a farmer, living in 1690. On the other side his ancestors were a long line of lairds — the Hills of Fifeshire — who 4 > MATER AND THE GOVERNOR— IN THE BEZIQUE AGE. ANCESTRY stretched away back still further into the past. All these were known by heart to my paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Hill, who would gossip away about them as though people of the seventeenth century were still in our midst. She had married Robert Barrie, born 1806, who died before I was born, and after whom I was named. This grandmother was a great old lady, of iron consti- tution, who used to tell us how she had been punished, as a child, for scampering barefooted out of the house into the snow. Born in 1807, she remembered the bell- man crying the news of the Battle of Waterloo and other similar old-time events. She had a most vivid memory. One New Year's night after the healths of those in the old country had been repeatedly drunk in champagne she, then almost ninety, laughingly saying that I was the only real gossip in the family, gave me the names and life histories of men and women of the family who in some instances must have lived nearly three hundred years ago. How much nearer we can bring the past to us in this way. The Battle of Hastings seems much more like a real event when we recall that ten men, each lucky enough to have lived to hold, in succession, the hand of his grand- son, would form a bridge that would put us in touch with the Conquest. My father, a younger son, was for several years em- ployed at, and later was in charge of, the Edinburgh branch of a London publishing house. In 1865 he came 5 MY LOG to America to open branches at New York and Montreal, and it was in the latter place that I was born the next year. The panic of 1867 involved the London house in financial difficulties and the American branches were sold so as to save the London business. At the time this no doubt seemed a disaster to the young Scot, away off in what my mother looked on as a tropical land, but it was a blessing in disguise, for he was engaged by J. B. Lip- pincott, the publisher, of Philadelphia. Lippincott seemed to have liked him. Craige Lippincott once, while lunch- ing with me at the club, told me his father had great faith in mine, and added : " he acted as wet-nurse to me on the first business trip I ever made." But there were other sons as well as Craige who were likely to succeed to the business, so my father was on the lookout for an oppor- tunity to get into business for himself, and in 1873 op- portunity knocked. He was awake ; and some kudos in the shape of medals and diplomas, and some worldly goods, are the result. The Governor, in the more orderly way of the nine- teenth century, was just as much of a gentleman- adventurer as were those old fellows who crossed the Channel with William or the Irish Sea with Fitz-Stephen, for he risked his fortunes, if not his life, just as they did. He had not been long in business when, among other similar ventures, he made an arrangement with William Edgar Marshall, a talented painter and the greatest engraver America has ever produced, for a ANCESTRY large portrait of Longfellow. Marshall tells about it in his reminiscences : " Longfellow was a poor sitter. I was a long time painting his portrait. He was not much of a talker, but there was a fellow by the name of Green who was always with him ; he talked enough for the two. One of the most entertaining men I ever knew, Green was. Talked all the time. Never gave Longfellow a chance to say anything. " I got $10,000 for the engraving, but Barrie, of Phila- delphia, who was my publisher, borrowed the portrait and kept it twenty years. Only a few years ago Captain Nathan Appleton, brother-in-law of Longfellow, asked me what had become of the original. " I then remembered that I had loaned it to Barrie. I wrote him for it and he sent it the next day. He had kept it so long, he said, that he thought it belonged to him." Again, at a time when forty thousand dollars was a great deal of money he risked it making the plates alone for an elaborate work on the W. K. Vanderbilt collec- tion, then the finest in the country. It was perhaps symp- tomatic of the thrifty Dutch temperament that Vanderbilt did not buy a single copy of the work ; on the contrary, before giving his consent he stipulated that he should have, gratis, twenty-four of the most expensive copies for distribution to his friends, explaining one evening, over a bottle of claret and some cheese in the gallery : " Barrie, 7 MY LOG people think I am rich, but there are times when I am pushed for ready money." At another time, when seventy thousand was still a good deal- to risk in one book, he invested it making a single set of plates. He did the same sort of thing a great many times ; in fact, with the exception of the great encyclopaedias, few, if any, greater single ventures in publishing have been made. And like the great reference works such ventures were not always commercial suc- cesses. The Governor, as a publisher, was an enthusiast with a vision — and often these visions were expensive, for it is not always the most worthy things that pay in publishing — and he never lacked courage. As a man, he showed courage of a rarer sort when he risked sending a boy of sixteen off around the world. MILLPORT BAY. 'THE GARRISON," MILLPORT. II YOUTH It feels dangerously like being a link with a past age to recall to mind the 'seventies when I ate buffalo meat, when derricks were just beginning to appear above the fence that surrounded City Hall square and strings of mules pulled freight cars along the railroad tracks on Market Street in Philadelphia, and we bought canoes and bows and arrows from Indians encamped under the twisted cedars at Atlantic City. My earliest recollection of Philadelphia is that of being taken by my father one Sunday morning, when he wanted to get some business papers, to the quaint old house on the south side of San- som Street east of Eighth, where he first had his business. As we were coming away we met John Sartain, the en- graver, who still lived in the old house next door and who was, I think, the Governor's landlord. I was presented to him : he, a link with an earlier age, seemed to me a kindly man, but very, very old. As this was in 1874 or 1875 and Sartain, born 1808, lived to near the end of the century, my young eyes must have deceived me as to his age. 9 MY LOG Then there is the remembrance of the May day in 1 876 when the Centennial Exposition was opened and I stood by my father's side and watched Dom Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, another link with the past, and Mrs. Pedro, and President Grant parade along the main aisle. What im- pressed me most at the time, and which seemed of more importance than any of the notables, was the way in which the Brazilian guard of honor changed step, all together, every five or six steps, apparently in accord with the music of their band, in a very peculiar fashion. Dom Pedro afterward came to my father's exhibit, ordered a copy of the book on the exposition that the Governor published, and left an autograph, which I got. Those were the days when, in my innocence, I thought that Anthony Drexel's wealth was ill-gotten because I was told that his father had sold lottery tickets — in my boyhood days only recently made an illegal affair. Days when, if I went down to the office on Saturday mornings to ride on the old-fashioned elevator, there would be lunch at Guy's, where the cooking was the best in the city and notables were to be seen in the upper room ; or I might carry a message for my father to Thomas P. White, or John G. Johnson, or C. Stuart Patterson, — the last was his friend as well as his counsellor, — or best of all, across the way to the type foundry, where Mr. Jordan would let me watch the work. Once there was a message to George W. Childs, who sat me down in his private office, full of autographed portraits of celebrities, while he wrote 10 1 ^ STEPHEN J. FERRIS. From the portrait etched by himself in 1880. YOUTH a presentation inscription in a copy of his memoirs that he gave me to take to the Governor — those memoirs with the pages so full of "I" that they should be a warning to me to abandon this attempt at once. Among others met at the office on those Saturdays was old Stephen Ferris, the painter and etcher, who etched many plates for the Governor. Born in 1834, he was still another link with the past. He told me he had made portraits when he was ten, and began to be paid for them when he was fifteen, that he had painted and drawn over two thousand, for one of which, that of Fortuny, he won in a competition the curious prize of a portion of the velvet that covered Fortuny's catafalque in Rome in 1874 and his palette and brushes. There were young fellows who made drawings for illustrations for the Gov- ernor, one of whom, a lanky, but talented youth, who made a great many, did not attract me, but who, in spite of my indifference, in after years turned out famous, was Joseph Pennell. Edwin Abbey also made drawings for the Governor, but if I ever saw him he made no impres- sion on me. The heat and mosquitoes made Philadelphia just as horrible to my mother as the upper Amazon in summer would be to me, so she used to go " home " each sum- mer. My very earliest recollection is that of a great storm on one of these voyages. My mother told me that on this trip she was the only lady in the first class saloon and that I was the pet of the officers. Some 1 1 MY LOG shadowy recollection exists of my being carried into the pantry and set down in a great drawer of loaf sugar, but this may be only an impression gained from hearing her tell about it. Certainly my pleasantest recollections of early days are of these holidays. They were generally spent on the west coast of Scotland in places on the Firth of Clyde ; often in a little stone cottage, owned by my mother's aunt, at Millport, on the Island of Cumbrae, sacred to the memory of the spunky old Scots minister who always prayed for the welfare of the inhabitants of the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland. This little cottage still stands, or did, not very long ago, not far from " The Garrison," Lord Bute's house, where the mill-stream empties into the bay. Here my grand- father sat by the fire in his old oak chair, the high back of which was like that of a settle ; here I ate porridge with a horn spoon for the first time ; here sailboats were made for me ; and from here happy parties went fishing in the long summer gloamings. Sometimes my father would stop here on his way to or from the Continent, but fishing had no great charms for him. Those were intensely happy days, and when my thoughts turn to childhood I instinc- tively turn to Scotland and not to Philadelphia, which seemed humdrum and commonplace in comparison. These delightful summers came to an end about 1880 in this way: My mother, grandmother, two younger brothers, one a baby, and I were on board the Anchoria 12 YOUTH bound for the happy land, when directly after lunch on a foggy Sunday, the second day out, I came on deck and had just reached what in those days was called the hurricane deck when a steamer, west bound, light, and consequently very high out of water, loomed up to star- board and almost instantly crashed into us just forward of the bridge; she cut into us as far as amidships and then swung around and lay grinding alongside. I was not very far from the bridge and stood rooted to the spot until an officer came running aft and shouted to the other vessel : " Keep off, for God's sake, or we'll both go down ! " Then I dashed aft after him, seeing a great jagged hole in her bow as she reversed away from us. Fighting my way against the crowd streaming up from below I got down to my mother and the collected family. Meanwhile, the ship lurched to starboard in a sickening way, and when we got on deck we had to hold on to things to avoid slipping to leeward on the slanting deck. I will never forget how the sight of hundreds of big floating cheeses in round, wooden boxes bobbing about in the sea, struck me, even in the excitement, as something comical. There was a rush for the boats which were being lowered. I remember one officer, pistol in hand, dragging the silly crowd out of one unlaunched boat, and another officer with a hatchet hacking the arm of a big brute who refused to keep back. It was all very ugly and terrifying. Our little group stood together near a skylight; my mother very brave about it, and my grandmother as cool 13 MY LOG as a cucumber. There was no weeping in our party until my mother said she would go down and get some wraps, as we would probably be some time in the boats ; then, of course, we felt that the ship would sink with her below. She went, notwithstanding my protests, and I, of the mature age of thirteen, was left in charge. She seemed away an age but, of course, it could not have been more than a few minutes. Fortunately, there was only a heavy swell and no wind and the boats on one side were launched without loss. There was a great list to starboard that made getting into the boats difficult and there was no gangway, and people had to get down by the tackles the best way they could. The baby of our party, George, was tossed down by a sailor to another sailor who stood up in one of the boats and by him was passed along into another boat. Mean- while, my grandmother, who stood quietly by, having in- sisted that she was too old to get down and so kissed my mother good-bye, was helped by her and a couple of sailors over the rail and lowered by a rope into a boat. My mother followed her and disappeared in the crowded boat looking for the baby, and we afterward learned that she had to climb into another to get him. While we stood waiting our turn there were occasional splashes as people " plopped " into the water. There was plenty of cursing and banging of boats and oars. The deck kept getting nearer the water, so that finally we got on the outside of the rail near a newly launched boat 14 YOUTH which was aft and away from the crowd. My brother Alexander, aged nine, was dropped down to a sailor and with the help of a line I was able to get into the same boat. All this, of course, took place in less time than it takes to write it. We were pushed to the bottom of the boat and told to keep down out of the way. And then a nasty thing happened. The only other person taken into that boat was a big bounder who actually, in the most theat- rical way, jingled a bag of coin and in an excited way offered it to the boat's crew if they would put him on board the other steamer, now plainly in view, as the fog had cleared and the sun was shining brightly. So off we went, although there was still a crowd on deck, and the other boats were rapidly being overloaded. We were the first to reach the other steamer, which proved to be the British Queen, westward bound and overdue. I don't know whether the bounder really gave the crew the money, but he was the first up the rope ladder and through a cargo port. Perhaps he had a wife and chil- dren and thought he was buying his life for them, but it was an awful exhibition. We boys ran to the stern of the Queen and hung over the rail in an agony of suspense until the other boats came along. By the time they got over the gangway had been lowered and we stood by it excitedly looking into the boats for my mother and grandmother. Finally they arrived, in separate boats ; the end of this to me was 15 MY LOG a raging headache. The Queen had her forward compart- ments full of water but stayed by the Anchoria, which, with three compartments full, was yet able to proceed, and both vessels slowly made their way back to New York. The discomfort was awful : my mother got part of a cabin, but we two boys, when we could, slept on the floor of the saloon. When we were back in New York I went to the dock with my father to gather up our things on the Anchoria and saw the great hole in her side big enough to drive a load of hay through. There was a place where two girls in the second class had been made prisoners in their room by the iron-plates which were crumpled back in such a way that the girls had to be rescued by chopping through a wooden bulkhead ; they had a narrow escape. Strange to say no one was hurt except a plucky young bride- groom who held his wife in one arm and burned the flesh off his right hand as he slid down a rope into a boat. This shipwreck made us abandon the summer trips ; the Governor saying he would not again allow all the eggs to go in one basket. So we began to spend our summers in New England, where the rocky shores were the nearest approach to the Clyde my mother could find. There, at the Thimble Islands, I owned my first boats. I have told in another book all about the happy life there during six long summers and have paid tribute to the memory of my mother's brother Alec, who was a great sailor, traveller, and fisherman. I imagine all parents must appear in much 16 YOUTH better light in the eyes of their children during summer vacations. It seemed so to me as a boy, and my mother certainly rose in my estimation and seemed much more like a comrade than a parent when she braved the seven miles to Faulkner's Island in a small boat to fish, and my father went up a notch when he rowed off to the little moored sloop and sat in it so that he could finish Treasure Island before we could get it away from him. Recalling this feeling awakens thought of the very different way in which a boy and a man look at things, and I am reminded how one morning I had to insist that my own young son of seven or eight should wear a new hat his mother liked and he didn't, and how, in the even- ing at dinner, when diplomatic relations had been resumed and all was well in the world, I good naturedly but foolishly, borrowing from the witty French woman, said : " When you grow up you'll find that being a father is a difficult profession," and he took the wind out of my sails, but unconsciously gave me a valuable hint and established a permanent bond of sympathy and friendship between us, by flashing back, "An' so's bein' a boy." If he lives a century he will never say a truer thing, for it has its difficulties. The problems of life appear so dif- ferently in the eyes of a son and of a father. I recall how, although I had never been punished by mine, I would much rather he had done so than embarrass me by having a bully who had beaten me summoned and bound over to keep the peace ; yet I would probably be just as 17 MY LOG indignant as he and do likewise in the same circum- stances. I had, in a sordid effort to recover marbles snatched up by a big passing stranger, gallantly but indiscreetly, in single combat, boarded him and got a broken nose. Then came the justice's part. On another occasion, with the more laudable purpose of helping to defend one of my crowd against an overwhelming party of the enemy, I had it broken again. This time I was very glad there was no way to identify anyone. Who can fathom the soul of a boy, even the boy him- self if he knew enough to try to do so ? If I had then undertaken to analyse the motives that led me to try to hide any mishap or misfortune I could no more have done so than I could have explained to myself why my mother and father seemed to me more interesting when I looked out of my window one Fourth of July morning and saw them on the lawn with General Frank Pargoud and his wife drinking a toast to the rising sun with Vive le Qualre Juillet ! They had played bezique all night. This old Confederate brigadier was born in Louisiana and still had a plantation there that gave him income enough to live and occasionally to go over to his beloved Paris. He was the first to arouse in me an interest in France. Poor old fellow ! years after when I sent him a copy of Cruises his wife had died and he wrote : " It took me back to those happy years of yore, ever gone for me, when you were making your first attempts in sailing, which has since become an art for you. How things have 1 8 YOUTH changed for me since, but their memory is as sweet, as dear, as ever ; they are my life, my consolation. I remem- ber everything, everyone — your dear parents, you, boys then, men now full of life, with a bright intellect, a cheer- ful home. I — old and alone ! " When I think of all the mistakes in life that I have made I feel certain that he was wrong about the intellect. Well, I couldn't play forever. After school the Gov- ernor wanted me to go to Oxford, but I thought if I were going into the business, the sooner I started the better. We compromised for a couple of years by my studying French and German part of the time and spend- ing the rest of it in the office. Books had always inter- ested me and publishing attracted me. Only once, when the Governor brought home to dinner a famous engineer who had built railways in South America and who told stories of adventure there, of earthquakes, and of tidal waves that wrapped ships in their anchor chains and laid them miles inland, did my interest in publishing weaken. Then I thought being a civil engineer must be interest- ing, but nothing came of it. Another time he brought home to Sunday dinner Earl Shinn, whose Christian name gave the French a lot of trouble, who was going over to Paris for a year to do some writing and look after a lot of illustrations for the Governor. He, the son of a prosperous Philadelphia Quaker, had been a student under Gerome, but was not successful because it turned out that he was absolutely 19 MY LOG color-blind. Having failed as a painter he became a critic of painters ; and a fairly successful one — at any rate, he was in demand with magazines and newspapers. My father was anxious to have me go with him and learn the work, but when I saw his imperiale and Dundreary whiskers, flaring frock coat, brilliant red and orange tie, with a skull scarf pin in it, and the straight brimmed tile, such as Chase afterward wore, I thought to myself this man must be wicked ; he will lead me astray. So I declined. I afterward, when I knew him better, learned how I had misjudged him. As I neared my twenty-first birthday it was arranged that I was to have a bigger boat, and my mother and I had gone to Brooklyn and inspected the cutter Surf, and the Governor had set his teeth to pay the two thousand for her; then he staggered me by asking if I wouldn't rather spend the money going around the world. I tried to escape by saying I didn't want to go alone, but that if he would let my brother AL, four years my junior, go with me I'd go. He called my bluff, and it was arranged that we should spend about a year in Europe and then decide about the rest of it. 20 V. V. Si*! ^ Ill WANDERJAHR Europe, over thirty years ago, seemed much more foreign to boys of sixteen and twenty, who had sat every Wednesday in meeting at the old school chartered by William Penn, even although our provincialism had been tempered by summers in the old country, than I imagine it would to-day. Of course, being alone increased the sensation of being among strange peoples. In Philadelphia when we were in the parade of car- riages in the park we seemed to be part of a brilliant turn-out; how its magnificence seemed to pale and shrivel when we first drove in the Champs-Elysees and the Bois! From lunch in the cafe of the old brick Bellevue, with Larry McCormick or Baptiste standing by droning out the latest gossip, while haywagons lazily passed over the cobblestones down Broad Street on a sleepy spring day, to lunch at Marguery's with all the bustle, the voluble French, the four streams of fiacres, the rumble of the great three-horse omnibuses, the crack- ing of whips, and the never-ending stream of passers-by 21 MY LOG so different in face and dress, was a contrast such as would not be noticed to-day. How it has all changed ! In 1 884, when we first began walking the half block along Walnut Street, past the old elm and the yellow mansion, from the office to lunch it was as quiet as a country town. Crossing Broad Street then had no terrors. During the third of a century that I have made this same daily journey I have seen great buildings go up that would overshadow those of the boulevards. And there are daring spirits that claim that more motors pass that point in a day than at any other in the world. In those days you bumped in a hack over the cobble- stones of dirty West Street in New York and into a vile smelling shed, and when the old Normandie had wallowed over and set you down in the locks at Havre everything was so different — even the landscape, the quaint old streets with houses that seemed almost mediaeval, the ships, the trains, the food, the people. Then the bitter- ness left by the Franco-Prussian war remained: some mischievous girls in the street thought we were Germans — and said so. Nowadays education and intercourse, brought about by travel, have made white people all over the world seem as though cast in pretty much the same mould and progress has wiped out many of the dif- ferences that used to exist in the appearance of cities. I acknowledge that age does make a difference, for recently I was rather annoyed and felt rather " done " to find the 22 ■ ■ It ■..: ..' CAROLUS-DURAN. WANDERJAHR Street of the Red Sea, up in the old part of Algiers, aroused only mild interest. And we found other things were so different. Sundays for example. At home in the morning the massive table for at least six, the flowers and the battery of silver, the fruit, the strong coffee with rich cream, the broiled chicken, and the waffles. My mother was a great house- keeper but also a wily woman : somebody, after a break- fast like that, had to please her by occasionally going to church. Over there the little bare table for two with the miserable cafe-au-lait. Well, to even up matters, the only time we went to church was a sunny Sunday morn- ing spent peacefully reading newly arrived Ledgers and Heralds, lying at ease on the top of one of the towers of Notre-Dame. At home there was the dinner at two o'clock and a supper at night; and although we were far from Puri- tanical there certainly weren't any dinner parties on Sun- day nights. The first time we dined out formally at a private house over there was on a Sunday. Octave Uzanne, a clever writer of frivolous books and, next to Carolus-Duran, whose cousin, Maurice de Brunoff, intro- duced me to him some years later, the greatest poseur I ever met, was the lion of the evening ; and there was a young lioness invited, as it presently appeared, especially as an attraction for him. She was an expatriated Amer- ican, very dashing and beautiful, of a type that was then made the fashion by that Madame Gauthereau whose 23 MY LOG portrait was painted by Sargent and by Courtois, a bril- liant talker, very decollete, as decollete went in those days, and most artistically enamelled. She and Uzanne had some fun with my French and saw risque jokes in it — well, there are many pitfalls in a language that uses the same word for host and guest and in which an le for a la makes such a difference. Our jolly old hole, Emile Terquem, did not laugh until I put Gil Bias on a moule instead of on a mule, and then he explained so that I could join in the laugh. He laughed and joked with the expatriated one in a bantering way, while her French husband devoted himself seriously to our hostess. If it had been a week night the champagne, the gaiety, and the enamel might not have seemed so unusual. All this seemed very French and, with the novels in mind, I scented a romance. Well, afterward it turned out that there had been one, and, by the way, the only serious one, so far as I can recollect, that I ever came across in France. Some years later, in the salle des fetes of the casino of Cabourg, I again met the husband with his lovely and refined daughter, who had just finished her education in England. Old Emile whispered to me not to speak of the wife — she had run away. Not with Octave, however, as I was afterward told. The next day as we were all at dejeuner — a magnificent langouste with mayonnaise and cidre de Normandie — in the villa garden under the trees it seemed to me as I watched the man that under his apparent cheerfulness there was the heavy 24 SARGENT'S PORTRAIT OF MADAME GAUTHEREAU WANDERJAHR mark of tragedy, but I thought to myself that he still had the gay and happy girl. God help him ! A few years more and I learned that she had followed in her mother's footsteps and had eloped with a man who could not marry her. This little histoire does not mean that I think Sunday night dinners in Paris, or anywhere else, lead down the broad path to destruction, or that more tragedies of the sort occur in France than elsewhere. Perhaps it was then thought that they did there, but nowadays there is no need to go abroad to run across them. In those days we found that plenty of Europeans ex- pected Americans to be strange sort of people, and their ways and manners to be different. Europe had not been invaded by hordes of English and Americans as in these days. France and Italy were accustomed to seeing the English, but even in Berlin and Vienna people in the streets seemed to find something different in us, and in Prague and Buda-Pesth they would often turn and stand looking after us. The boot was on the other foot there, and it was we who were the objects of curiosity. And this feeling that we were the foreign people was not confined to the lower classes. In Holland when we visited, at Apeldoorn, old Mr. Van Gelder, a privy councillor and head of a firm that had been making paper for two hundred years, and he took us to the club to meet the old king, it was the young American gentle- men who were the subject of interest. And when, at 25 MY LOG Amsterdam, we dined with his son and his charming young wife, and their boys came in to have desert, the boys were disappointed in us, and one, who afterward was a page at the young queen's wedding, said, with evident regret, that we looked just like Dutchmen. They had expected redskins, or, at least, Buffalo Bills. Now it is otherwise. Recently, when we visited them at their interesting old country place "Die Hartenkamp" near Haarlem, formerly the property of a British Ambas- sador who had entertained Linnaeus there, these same youths, educated at Oxford, said they found us just like people of their own class and country. And my wife and girls said that a party of girls and young men we saw there were in no way, either in manners, looks, or dress, different from those that would be seen in a similar party at home. So the greater foreignness that we boys felt was not merely apparent, but real. Armed with letters of introduction that carried us across Europe and would have taken us to Madame de Bakhmetoff at Moscow if there had been time, we wan- dered about for nearly a year. How it comes back to me ! On the long film of memory the cathedrals, the palaces, churches, and galleries are blurred and dim com- pared with the bright sharp pictures of life in Paris — Paris of the 'eighties when General Boulanger was in the saddle and every band and orchestra was playing "En revenant de la Revue ! "; and the doings of the divine Sarah, among 26 «*■< *y§B A'V T? : | t3v 'P*sl If , ^■*r* M*OL ■ WkU^^h m gxmt *=rl . ..._.lBHfc£! w c s " s o ™ o OS 5 WANDERJAHR her other pranks being photographed alive in her coffin, were the gossip of the cafes on the boulevards; when "toppers " were in vogue and I wore my first; and when the cart with the hot water told everyone in the street that a citizen was going to take a bath. Those were the days when mirrors shattered by bullets of the Commune could be seen in the little restaurant on the rue St.-Honore where we lunched, and in the Grand Hotel, then still new, two or three hundred people would sit down at long tables at the same time and be served a la russe to a true " host's table " such as is never seen nowadays, when table d'hote has lost its true significance ; when the bal de l 'Opera was in its prime; when I could stand on the Pont Sully and watch, astounded, a victoria with two men in the tops on the box drive up before the statue of Henri IV and a tall Frenchman with Van Dyke beard, all in black and with wide mourning band on his hat, spring out and stand cursing and shaking his fist at the statue of bon Henri. Those were the days when the Quartier Latin was the peaceful Bohemia where Du Maurier was to place his Trilby and her three mus- keteers of the brush, instead of the feverish fin-de-siecle one where, in later years, the artist's cortege allegorique, with Sarah Brown, the beautiful model with true Titian hair, clothed only in mock jewels, was to raise a riot. And then London — London of the days when we went, as was the fashion, down the Thames through the miles of ships to Greenwich and had whitebait dinner at 27 MY LOG " The Ship," and lunched with old Mr. Merry, of Punch, at the club, and met old friends of the Governor, and haunted the theatres. And there are pictures of loafing around the yacht builders, and swimming, and sailing at Cowes; of the waving floor of our bedroom in the old " Mitre " at Oxford; the Great Eastern and the ships on the Mersey, the rope bridge at Carrick-a-Rede ; sailing and fishing in Scotland ; lying in bed in the observation hut on top of Ben Nevis while our clothes dried and the ham and eggs were sizzling ; rambling through the Stadtheatre at Leipsic, behind the curtain, above and below the stage, and in the property rooms ; the trip down the Danube ; the gipsy violinist and the Hungarian who spoke English with an Irish brogue ; old Queen Victoria, at Aix, with her red face and black cap, and John Brown in his kilts tucking the lap robe about her ; the Empress Eugenie in a very dashing victoria at Naples ; the everlasting honey and chocolate of Switzerland ; the saucy girl in the Hof- brauhaus at Munich ; pottering along the Riva in Venice watching the queer little vessels with the Greek names ; or kicking our heels for three days in Trieste while the bora blew itself out. I have been over often enough since, but the sensations have never been the same. All this sounds as though we had simply idled about, whereas, as a matter of fact, we spent a good deal of time studying the ways of the men of our trade. The Gov- ernor was a good customer of Lemercier and of Goupil in "Paris and his relations with them were so close that 28 WANDERJAHR we were welcome. At Lemercier's old lithographing establishment in the rue Jacob we saw how lithography was done and, incidentally, saw Whistler, with the famous eyeglass and the pumps, but looking rather shabby and worn, fussing over some proofs and talking in a queru- lous way. When he was gone the man in charge threw up his hands in burlesque despair. There was even some talk of our taking positions in Goupils. Valadon, the junior partner, said we could begin at the foot, but Reid, a young Scot who had a position there, told us that Berne-Bellecour's son had done so and was wrapping packages. For several years the Governor had been making a good deal of money with intaglio photo- gravure plates, which were then a novelty, made by the Goupil firm. When we visited their workshops out at Asnieres I met Charles Scribner there looking into a good thing. Blackie's, of Glasgow, and Nelson's, of Edinburgh, were places full of hints for us. In London were many old trade friends of my father who gave us information and . help. I there tried to " place," among other things, the two thick volumes of the autobiography of Samuel Gross, a celebrated Philadelphia surgeon who had had an inter- esting life covering the first three-quarters of the century, but the English publishers had their own celebrated surgeons with interesting careers, and, besides, in those days they rather looked down on American books over there. Since then I have succeeded in selling sheets to 29 MY LOG them : things are different now. In Holland we gained knowledge of the paper industry. Berlin then had little to show, but Leipsic, Stuttgart, and Vienna were good hunting grounds for us. So it was time well spent, and probably better educa- tion for fellows who had to earn their living at our trade than could have been had at Oxford. 30 IV A CARAVANSERAI— AND SOME OLD LETTERS If the score of Austrian, Italian, and Greek gentlemen, who used their knives so freely the first night out on the tiny Achille, no longer recall with terror the three days' voyage as she staggered in the bora down the Adriatic, it must be because they have since had very great troubles — or are dead. I sympathized with them; very sincerely and truly; in fact, felt like Mark Twain who, when on Rogers' yacht in heavy weather in the West Indies, being asked by the sympathetic steward if there was anything he would like to have, replied that he would take a little island. If I had then been asked I would have said : " Make mine Corfu." Its placid harbor filled with feluccas and tiny square- riggers from the other isles of Greece, the brilliant land- scape, somewhat parched by a long summer and dry autumn, and the picturesque buildings of this miniature Gibraltar, which so much resembles the town of the Spanish Pillar of Hercules, struck me as something never 31 MY LOG to be forgotten, like one's first Amalfi drive, for instance. To be sure, the market place, crowded with sellers of long white grapes, pomegranates, and nougat, had little to remind one of the golden age, but there were enough of Byron's lot, in the national costume with the white skirts, to satisfy us. The snow-clad mountains on the Albanian shore could be seen from the citadel and the little Hotel St. George offered refreshment for the weary mariners. We knew that we had only ourselves to blame for not going and presenting our letter of introduction to the Hon. Walter Fearn at Athens, but there was still the thought that, being in Greece, we should have felt some- thing of the spirit of the bygone ages. However, we got into the atmosphere and experienced the feeling that perhaps the shade of old Homer was hovering about that night as we passed within thirty yards or so of the island of Ithaka, black and silent as death as it lay in the shadow, while Cephalonia on our starboard, bathed in the strong moonlight, was cheerful with lights from the shepherds' houses. What a change from the flashing blue sea and the sunny shores of the Morea to a foggy November morning as the ship creeps through the muddy waters into the harbor of Alexandria. And what a chilling disappoint- ment to the heart full of hope that finds a long, low shore like that of New Jersey with a row of Dutch wind- mills where a string of camels should be, and a long shed 32 SARAH BERNHARDT PHOTOGRAPHED ALIVE IN HER COFFIN. HER TOMB IN PURE LA CHAISE WHICH SHE HAD BUILT YEARS AGO. A CARAVANSERAI— SOME OLD LETTERS with " Petroleum Store House " in giant letters on its sides. But, like many persons we all know and like many of our own cities, Egypt shows her worst to the newcomer. Alexandria still showed the scars of Charley Beresford's bombardment, and there were still some of Arabi Pasha's unused shells in the forts. When I think of the vileness of the pretentious hotel I wonder there wasn't another revolt. The British were not popular : in a bazaar a native asked of our guide, " English ? " The guide replied, "American," and the native grunted, " Good ! " All, of course, in their own language. For all I know motor-cars are now travelling along the road, lined with date palms, that parallels the railway to Cairo. Then there were long strings of camels with heavy loads, donkeys, blue-robed women, men in white, and children eating sugar cane. Perhaps steam plows now take the place of the primitive wooden ones drawn by oxen, or gasoline driven pumps raise the water from the ditches in place of wheels driven by almost naked men. I once wrote forty pages about Cairo and what we saw and our adventures there, but, wiser then than now, I had the sense to destroy them. Now it is all an olla podrida in my mind — the bazaars, the mosques, the howling dervishes, the pyramids, the little Coptic church where Mary is supposed to have prayed, the shudder as the guide dropped the stone nearly three hundred feet down Joseph's well in the citadel, the Nile with the native craft, a sail in one to Bulak, the ladies of the ex-Khedive's 33 MY LOG harem in the palace garden on the island of Ghezireh, the expedition in the Mokattan hills, trips in the country, Island of Loda, Sakara, the newly found colossal statue of Ramses II, the tomb of Ti, the catacombs of the Bull- Apis at Serapeum, and the impassive sphinx. It was all intensely interesting, but I am glad I did it in my youth, for it was work, hard work, that helped later on to bring us both down with Egyptian fever that seems to have stayed in my blood ever since. As I now remember it, the pleasantest part of it all was the life in Shepheard's Hotel. The wide flagstone terrace in front of the old, low building fronting a busy street where a long string of camels might be followed by a spick and span victoria with its gorgeous syce, and British redcoats mingled with white robed Arabs, was one of the most fascinating loafing places in the world. I got acquainted with an old habitue of this delectable spot who had lounged away on it the best part of eight visits to Cairo. He had never been to Sakara but was to go in a couple of weeks. I doubt if he was ever able to tear himself away. And I knew a Lord Esme Gordon, then on his first visit to Cairo, who spent most of his time in a wicker chair on the terrace of this great caravanserai, where West and East meet, watching people come and go, in and out, and whose only exercise seemed to be occasional saunters out into the gardens at the back. Here was an entirely different aspect of Shepheard's. From the constantly shifting scene on the terrace, where 34 EARLY PORTRAIT OF WHISTLER. Painted by his pupil and companion , Walter Greaves, whose father, a boat builder at Chelsea, had rowed Whistler about the Thames. Reproduced by Permission of the Toledo Art Institute, A CARAVANSERAI— SOME OLD LETTERS a snake charmer might be beating a tom-tom or a con- jurer wiping the blood of the boy in the basket from his sword, to the calm of these gardens, broken only by cries from the tennis court — " vous etes ready?" "Elk etait out!" "C'est game!" — was striking. We played, but in a languid way, and with a small Egyptian to hand us balls. The building itself seemed almost to ramble about and was bare and ill-furnished, except for a multitude of divans scattered about in a haphazard sort of way, and the people in it took life in the same casual holiday-like spirit that had something unconventional and al-fresco about it — the sort of well-to-do al-fresco that allows white flannel trousers with dinner coats in the evening. There was no ceremony; no one stood upon dignity. Even the English shed their customary reserve. The Prince d'Orleans, sauntering along the upper hall in his bath- robe, apparently free from every care, stopped me in mine to gossip about a dog. And yet I am not exactly right about the lack of ceremony, for one day there was a great scurry and flurry when the prince, in frock coat and shiny hat, made a visite de ceremonie to the Khedive and the Khedive, with foaming and lathered horses, returned the visit almost before the prince was ready for him. The whole thing from start to finish was over in forty minutes. During the month we were there we met, as people do in hotels, a nice old gentleman and his wife, who seemed to take a liking to us : it was rather a shock to our faith 35 MY LOG in the idea that only in free America were people truly democratic to find that this kindly, unassuming pair, who were concerned when they learned that Al. had fever, were a noble lord and his lady. While we were both laid up Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Ismay arrived from Venice on their way to India, and when Mrs. Ismay heard that two lonely boys were sick she came to our rooms and made the absolutely unnecessary excuse that she had boys of her own, and mothered us, and talked with the doctor, and ordered about the servants, and cheered us up, and helped to get us well. And while this was going on we sent daily cables to the Governor, and he, with a sinking heart, had to go home each evening and keep a cheerful countenance as though nothing was wrong. This dear, kind woman took us under her wing and made her husband do likewise. He was a great big and great hearted Englishman, president of the White Star Line, " one in authority," with a great bunch of gold directors' seals in his hand bag, and when he knew that we had lost our steamship reservations, he said : " Never mind, come along with us, and we'll fix you up." And they kept us with them for nearly three months. We, of course, paid our own way, but they got us things money could not buy. I think we amused them. At any rate, in an old yellow, closely written four page letter, dated Mandalay, — a letter such as one gentleman sat himself down to write to another in the old days, — he tells the Governor " we found both your sons exceedingly pleasant 36 * R. B. PHOTOGRAPHED BY A. B. ON THE BRIDGE OF THE BEARS, BERNE, 8 OCTOBER, 1887. A CARAVANSERAI— SOME OLD LETTERS travelling companions ; they were favorites with all they came in contact with and their presence added greatly to the enjoyment of our trip." Among other old letters I find : Dawpool, Thurstaston, Birkenhead. Dear Bob: On our return from Ireland a few days ago we found two lovely water-color drawings awaiting us and feeling that they must have come from you, write to offer our best thanks for your beau- tiful present and your kindness in remembering us ; they will be much appreciated and serve to remind Mr. Ismay and myself of our journeying together. We enjoyed our visit to Burmah and Southern India very much and often wished you and Al. had been with us. We rather expected you would have written saying as to how you got on in Japan and of your passage across the Pacific. I am sure you would find much to interest you there. Mr. Bibby lunched with us a little time since. He has started again to winter abroad, sailing from Plymouth on the 19th of this month for New Zea- land. We also saw Mr. Wolff when in Belfast, he was very well and in good spirits as ever. He intends staying home this cold weather. Our eldest son is to be married on the 4th of December to Florence Schieffelin and they hope to leave for Liverpool on the 1 2th. He is anxious to bring his wife home to spend Christmas with us. Mr. Ismay will, if his many business engage- ments will allow of it, go to New York for the wedding, but the season is too bad for me to cross, or I should much have liked to be present, 37 MY LOG however, we much look forward to welcoming them here. Liverpool is to be quite gay this week owing to the Channel Fleet being in the Mersey and the officers are to be entertained both at private and public balls, to several of which we are going and taking our eldest daughter who has only just finished her education. Please remember us most kindly to Al., also to your father and mother, and hoping you are all well, believe me, Yours sincerely, M. Ismay. And again : My Dear Bob: Thank you so much for your kind letter which I received about December 20th. I scarcely know how to thank your mother for sending such a beautiful book — it has been so much admired. We have had our house full of friends during Christmas and all our children are at home with the pleasant addition of our eldest son's bride, and I am pleased -to tell you we all like her very much and she has made a most favorable impres- sion, and has endeared herself to us. The new steamer Teutonic was successfully launched on the 19th of this month and will probably make her first trip about the end of May. Mr. Ismay hopes to go out in her and it is just possible our eldest girl and myself may also go, but of this I am not sure, for if the other children should be at home for their holidays I would not like to leave. Our good friend Mr. Wolff left for Egypt three weeks since ; he did intend going to Ceylon 38 K A CARAVANSERAI— SOME OLD LETTERS but at the last moment changed his plans. You will possibly see him in America during the spring for he intends to be one of the party on board the Teutonic on her first passage. I had a letter from Mr. Bibby on Saturday, he found it so cold in New Zealand so on landing took a passage to Rio where he hopes to find warmth. His plans from there are not fixed but he thinks either by the West Indies to the States or down to Buenos Ayres — how strange it would be if we were all to meet in America. Mr. Ismay joins me in kindest regards to Mr. and Mrs. Barrie, Al., and yourself. With all good wishes for a " Happy New Year." Yours sincerely, M. Ismay. And she wrote telling me how sorry she was that she could not come over to my wedding. Certainly those were the good old days when people had time to write gossipy letters. I lunched with Mr. Ismay on the new ship when she made her maiden voyage and he urged me to go back on her as his guest, but business prevented. Thank God ! the fine old fellow did not live to know of the loss of the Titanic. The Times of India evidently thought that voyage of the P. & O. Peshawur, on which Mr. Ismay got for us, from one of the officers, a fine airy stateroom up by the bridge, was an unusually gay one, for it devoted several columns to an account of it. She was a funny old ship with a long saloon, with cabins entered from it, ventilated 39 MY LOG only by skylights and by Lascars working punkas, but she and her commander were popular. The Viceroy's sister, the Duke and Duchess of Montrose, Lady This and Lady That, a brace of native princes, and a native princess who taught me some Hindustani, were on board. The officers were a fine lot; and the commander was a great " Buffalo Bill " and the chief officer an excellent " Clown " in the fancy dress ball. And there were sports, charades, concerts, and minstrels. As the only Amer- icans on board we were thought to be something unusual and met everybody. It did not seem very hot, but every night, about twelve, stewards laid long rows of mattresses on the after deck under the awning and fellows not so lucky as ourselves slept on them. The poor women must have suffered in the morning as they were not expected on deck before eight. With the Ismays was Gustave Wolff, shipbuilder of Belfast, and at Suez they found on board another friend, Edward Bibby, of Liverpool, the son of a man who had made a fortune with the Bibby Line of ships. He had the unruffled air and all the graces of his class, he was never hurried, yet he was the most active man-of-leisure I have ever known. He had been to India several times. We were friends at once, but it was not until we were in Calcutta that I learned that he was supposed to be a confidential, yet unofficial and volunteer representative of the queen. We were constantly together for over two ■• months, but during that time I never heard a word from 40 EDWARD BIBBY. A CARAVANSERAI— SOME OLD LETTERS him that would lead one to suppose that this was so. I did notice in India that invitations that we got came through him and that when we shook hands with princes, or rode their elephants, he was the god behind the machine. He was always immaculately dressed and well groomed, but he was not a dandy, and he had twice gone home over the Himalayas. It was characteristic of him that at the end of one of these journeys he was so ragged and disreputable looking that when the captain of the little steamer that took him across the Caspian Sea sent word that he could not be allowed to come to the dinner table, Bibby astounded him by appearing in a suit of very thin evening clothes that he had taken over the roof of the world rolled up in a little copper cylinder. He and Al. became very chummy. I suppose at first because they were both particular about their clothes — Al. admired his. And Bibby liked Al.'s Americanisms — how he used to brag that Al. had addressed the Duke of Montrose the first time with, " Say, duke." Bibby's old letters for years after are full of inquiries about him — asking how he is, and why doesn't Al. write, and another time regretting that he missed him in London, and in another raging because Al. didn't leave his address the second time he passed through London — "What afellow Al. is ! I have been unable to find him, although I went the day after to 'round all the big hotels. I shall be ' real savage' if I don't see him." And finally he becomes sarcastic : 4i MY LOG The English Club, Mustapha Superior, Algeria, March 3, 1891. My Dear Bob : I have just got your letter forwarded from England and can assure you that my congratula- tions are not the less sincere because they are late. Good luck to you both — all our friends have been getting married last year except myself and nobody will take pity on a poor old man like me. I went out to India as usual for the winter and was then persuaded to come on here with some cousins of mine. I like the place very much but we have all been laid up with colds. There are some "awful" Chicago people stop- ping at the hotel — about as bad as you make them. I think they would even beat the Eng- lish bounders on the continent. If your brother is still alive remember me to him. I will send you a wedding present when I get back to London which I hope you will accept from Yours ever, Edward Bibby. And in another : " Give my best love to Al. I often think of our morning's visit to the Taj — he was the only one who properly appreciated the sight of the world. Bye, bye, yours ever." This last about the Taj is a dig at me : Bibby would not let any of the party go to see it the first day we arrived, insisting that it must first be seen in the early morning. He, and AL, and I went very early the next 42 A CARAVANSERAI— SOME OLD LETTERS morning and I did not appreciate it as they thought I should. Well, I was hungry and wanted my breakfast. He was an indefatigable traveller: all his letters are written when he is just in from somewhere or just going somewhere — Norway, Vienna, Buenos Ayres, India, India, and again India. His last letter told me that he had been pitched out of a London hansom on to the top of his head, and that he was getting all right ; but I never heard from him again. He was a gallant gentleman. 43 V EAST OF SUEZ At the end of this gayest of voyages, as I stood at the rail, like the other fellows in overcoat over pajamas, with teacup in hand, and watched the sun rise over Bombay Island I felt excited, but also depressed, for I naturally thought that all the friends we had made would, of course, go off about their own affairs, and I rather dreaded the mysterious land that was going to swallow us up. It was the fear of the unknown. But Norman and Howard McCorquodale, sons of a great printer in Lancashire, a few years older than our- selves, known on the ship as " The Crocodiles," said they were going to stay at Watson's, as we had planed ; and Bibby said we must come and breakfast with him at the Byculla Club, which turned out to be one of the clubs of the world, where in a great open room birds fluttered about and even ate off our plates. Then Wolff had us in his luncheon party at the Yacht Club, which had only two yachts that race together Saturday afternoons for the benefit of the three hundred members, and where ladies sit on the broad verandas and watch the mail-boat 45 MY LOG go out — after which all business in Bombay ceases until the next mail arrives on Tuesdays. After that the party all went in a launch to see the curious temple cut in the solid rock on the island of Elephanta. So that by dinner time Bombay seemed a very cheerful place. " Patrons are requested not to beat the servants," read a sign in the hotel. We didn't need to, for, like all ,our friends, we engaged a private body-servant. Dahara was a great tall imposing bewhiskered Mohammedan in flow- ing white robe and pink turban two feet tall, who called us Sahib and who would no more think of entering the room with his shoes on than Jean, the butler at home, would with his hat on his head. He acted as valet and would hardly let us dry our own faces, and stood behind us at table, whether we dined at the club or in a private house. We were proud of him as he was the swellest ser- vant of the lot, but alas ! when I gave him an advance on account of his pay he got drunk, and we changed to a little fellow from Portuguese Goa who wasn't much for looks but a wonder for efficiency. He stayed with us to the end and wanted us to take him to America. How we all roared with laughter one morning up country when, after a long delay and none of the six servants appeared, Pedro first burst forth from the kitchen, pretty well splat- tered with eggs, but triumphant, and with some scrambled eggs still on the platter, and explained : " Dam big fight in kitchen ! " We were quite proud, as we received con- gratulations, that our little fellow had been able to cross 46 EAST OF SUEZ the line a winner. — " For it is these little things in life that are momentous" as John Fiske, the historian, once said to me in Billy Park's chop-house in Boston, after telling me that his shoemaker, the most important man in his life, had moved to New York and that he, Fiske, only went there when he had to see him. Anyone who knew Fiske's short over-all length and great beam can appre- ciate his feeling this way. Among the men we met in the Byculla Club was a Bostonian, William Clark, who with other Americans had had the courage to build tramways in the town. The Britishers had warned the Yankees that caste would not allow the thing to succeed, but there were the natives of all creeds jammed together like a baseball crowd, and rupees pouring into the company's coffers. Clark showed us the offices, stables, hospitals, workshops, etc., of the company: all very up-to-date. We felt an almost per- sonal pride in the Yankees' success. It was a busy week. The seething streets, horse races, polo on the Maidan, sunsets on the esplanade when the wives and daughters of the rich Parsees drove in gorgeous array; the Towers of Silence, where the keeper tried to get us to wait as he expected a dead Parsee soon; and luncheon parties — one in the wonderful bungalow of Mr. and Mrs. Percy Bates out on Malabar Hill. Among the dinners was one given by Bibby where, in honor of the Americans, they had what they called cocktails. 47 MY LOG Coming home one night from one of these dinners we were taken to a wedding. A very dignified old Parsee led us up a palatial stairway, while a native brass band played " God Save the Queen," into a great hall, around the sides of which were three rows of gold and crimson chairs, and on each of these chairs a Parsee in gold and crimson dress. At the far end was a dais on which was a throne with a large chair on each side of it. I was given the throne, Al. got one of the chairs, and the old gentle- man, who seemed to be giving the feast, took the other. In the centre of the hall were three nautch girls and three other maidens singing to an accompaniment of tom-toms. As I was making the necessary compliments to the old gentleman a servant sprinkled us with perfume from a silver watering-can, another put wreaths around our necks, and another offered betel nut. The girls began to sing at us a song with gestures that made the guests smile, but there was nothing for us to do but take it with a grin. After we had made our adieux the band again played for the safety of the queen as we went down the staircase. As no bride was in sight I suppose it was a sort of bachelor's dinner affair. During the selfsame month and year that young Rud- yard Kipling, of Allahabad, was travelling along the line and writing those early articles and tales of Indian life that were appearing in the Pioneer, Ismay's gold seals won private cars for the party, — albeit, we had to provide our own bedding, — and we made the first long journey of two 48 if I i - » EAST OF SUEZ nights and a day on the Bombay, Baroda, Rajputana, and Malwa Railroad to Jeypoor, where the Maharajah, who rules independently of the Queen, made us free of his palace with its three hundred horses, splendid tigers, fighting elephants, and secret rose gardens, but forgot to let us see the harem. He gave us elephants for the journey to Ambar, where we' rambled about this strange city, which had been deserted in bygone years at the word of a rajah, and lunched in the Durbar hall of the deserted palace, where Al., in a little temple, found and photographed a lone, fat, and lusty mando- linist. Rudyard may have been in Jeypoor during the three days we were there, but I did not see or hear of another European, except the British Resident, being in the place. Or he may have passed us on the run to Delhi, or we may have passed him any time during the days we were there — in the Dwan Khas, greatest of Durbar halls, or in the Jumna Musjid, greatest of mosques, or at the tomb of Hunayoons, or at that of the poet Khusso. Or per- haps he had got only as far west as Agra and may have been loafing about the great fort built by Akbar. I know he wasn't at the Taj-Mahal, which, by the way, is really the most beautiful building in the world and interesting as being the tomb of Nur Mahal, the wife of the great mogul Shah Jahan, " who had no other wife while she lived," in the early morning when Bibby, and AL, and I went there long before breakfast, because there was not 49 MY LOG another soul there. And we didn't see any white man on the long drive of twenty-five miles, with four changes of horses, when we went to the other great deserted city of Futtipore Sikri. I don't remember that Rudyard tells anything about Cawnpore and Lucknow: the Mutiny hangs over them, but I remember Lucknow best because we had an exciting moment there one morning when we awoke and found that the little railway carriage occu- pied by Wolff and ourselves had been cut off by mis- take and left on a siding, and that we might miss having Christmas with the rest of the party at Allahabad ; but we made it Christmas eve and the next day sat in a church that probably held every Englishman, or woman, in the town. Speaking of Kipling reminds me that when we got back to the States I was surprised to find an absolute lack of interest in India, other than the mild interest people take, say, in Saturn. When Kipling's work came to be known some people must have felt an interest, and H. Price Collier, who by the way married me, may have done some little service, but still I find no genuine inter- est. Perhaps the Germans with their 'round the world tours have introduced India to some Americans. I won- der if any of them nowadays have seen sixty-one coolies carry the luggage of six people to the station as our party did the morning we left Allahabad. Nineteen of them carried ours: five walked under our big Amer- ican trunk and the biggest and strongest walked at the 5o x a z D C fe. a H n 2; c WHISTLER IN LATER DAYS. From the etching by Helleu. ARCADY was a big "45" overhead and back through a court cluttered up with the monstrous failures, one a hideous green, of some poor sculptor, and up a stair and knocked on a black door, and after a loud "Entrez ! " you went in, and the great tall and big fellow, in his old sweater, would come forward with a smile and outstretched hand and say, " Good-bye ! " — his only English — and then relapse into his mother tongue. At that time he had painted his Manon Lescaut and was at work on his Aurore with the girls in the foreground and the ghost-like chasseurs down on the plain by the Marne ; and I, and Georges Scott, and the others who used to come to the studio, thought then that he would become great and famous, but in 1900 when I went back he was painting his Summer Evening, without the chasseurs but with the same girls, or others very much like the other models, and putting in the same Marne, so I think he only became happy. He then had a wife and children in a most up to date apartment, with electric elevator and I' air calorife, in the Avenue de Tourville. Near Sinibaldi's was a very little, very good, and very cheap restaurant, Les Phares de l'Ouest, where I used to lunch after a morning at the near-by plate and block makers' places, and where students and models, more like those to be seen in the days before the quartier thought it necessary to change the name of the Boulevard d'Enfer, used to congregate. It was purely French ; of a French- ness greatly exceeding Lavenue's across the place, where English was to be heard. Here I met Louis Marold and "5 MY LOG some of the younger men. Marold had a little studio not far away in the Boulevard Raspail, with a tiny kitchen where he used to cook his midday goulash when he didn't go home for it — and where he hid his model when callers came. He was a nice fellow and I felt the world had lost an able one when his wife, nee Zdenka Makovska, sent me her lettre de deuil from Prague in 1 898. A few steps further on, in the Impasse Boissonade, in the coquettish little nest of studios surrounding a little garden and fountain was the pleasant studio, with a large window overlooking the gardens of the Hospice des Enfants Assistes and of a large convent, of Auguste- Francois Gorguet, who did a lot of work for us, and where other young painters used to gather. Gorguet was very clever with the nude, using as models young Italian or Provencal girls. He painted full-length por- traits (one of which I bought) of most of them in the " altogether," and repainted these grouped in his Paphos. Afraid of offending the supposed Puritanical spirit of America he had painted the prettiest of these — " wasted her " as he put it — as a madonna, which he called Con- templation and sent to Chicago, but without any marked success. I see, however, that now he has a string of medals, is a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur, and Hors Concours. It was in his studio, I think, that I met Georges Scott, a very clever illustrator. Scott married Mile. Nelly Martyl, a charming singer of the Opera-Comique, and after the ceremony there was a most unusual surprise reception 116 PS < X H ^ K a o u o o w a ARCADY given by his friends, headed by Edouard Detaille, all in costume, at Scott's atelier in the rue Denfert-Rochereau. All of which was duly " featured " by his old friend Rene Baschet in L Illustration. Yes they play, these Frenchmen, but they also work hard, and in the quartier just as hard as elsewhere — when they do work. My experiences there proved to me that the painters certainly do not lead the wildest of lives or that their morals are very different from those of other people, or that their Bohemianism was other than that forced upon them by circumstances, generally financial. The novelists capitalize the glamor of the vie de Boheme there, and it is true that there are voyages en Cythere, but I found these men usually of a sobriety in life and thought that was rather remarkable. The poetic feeling, so strong among them, showed itself in unaffected and unconscious ways. Life over there taught me that the women of France and America, as types, have each their own distinctive charms, and the balance between them hangs very nearly equal, so even, indeed,- that it is only in individuals that the difference can be determined. One great quality, of course, that the French woman has is that while she may very often be artistic to her finger tips she has at the same time a genius for thrift and an astounding flair for business. The French man very often has the artistic spirit and may lack the " sense '' of business that the American admires so much, but, after all, there is 117 MY LOG not a great difference between the business men and artists of America and those of France. Where there is a great, very great, difference between the peoples of the two countries is in the class that we look upon as work- men — perhaps a better word would be artisans. The artisan at Dujardin's or Rougeron's might not, indeed very often did not, appear promptly on Monday morn- ings, or even until Tuesday, but he generally worked energetically, and with a vim and elan, when he was at work. And even the humblest seemed to display a most intelligent interest in the work I had for them. A typical example was that of an old and poor engraver of lettering, which is the handmaiden of all the arts that have to do with engraving. Alary, designer for the Banque de France, who had designed the lettering of a large title page for me, sent me to an address up behind the College de France where, in an old black narrow street and up a mediaeval winding stone staircase, I found old, indeed very old, Monsieur Cackebeck, who had done engraving for the bank in years gone-by, but was now much too old to go out to work and who now made what I suppose must have been pitiably small earnings by engraving at home such few jobs of lettering as are nowadays wanted. The place was tiny arid he seemed to my mind like a prisoner, say of the Bastille ; certainly with his flowing white beard and antique clothes he filled the part to perfection. Yet in spite of his years and his prisoner- or hermit-like existence this old Frenchman, 118 D < u a w D O D O a ' ARCADY humblest worker in the arts, displayed the keenest interest in the work I proposed to him, and showed, too, in a cheer- ful, courteous way a most intelligent interest in the exposi- tion and the work I was doing in connection with it. I feel very certain that anyone who has had to do with the true life of the French people must have noticed this great difference. This thought reminds me that the reading of some French novels before I went to France as a youngster had given me, as I think it is bound to do unless leavened by some knowledge of French life gained at first hand, the utterly false impression, shared probably with multitudes of persons who have not lived and worked in France, that a very large proportion of the people there are frivolous or debased. Even a great artist like Zola, unless read with an understanding of the fact that, like a scientist, he dis- sects under a microscope a very small portion, and that often diseased, of the body of the French people, is bound to mislead. Even the tourist is misled by journals such as La Vie Parisienne, or by surface conditions, such as the Moulin Rouge, the Casino de Paris, the Moulin de la Galette, and is prone to think so. These places, and the cabarets and cafe chantants, the theatres of high and low degree should, of course, be seen by everyone — if seen with eyes that have also seen not only Fontainebleau and Versailles, Compiegne and Pierrefonds, Chantilly and Mal- maison, Saint-Germain, the Louvre and the Luxembourg, Cluny and Carnavalet, but also the workshops and the people in them ; for all work and no play make Jack. . . . 119 MY LOG We played too. Baschet pere, who published the illus- trated catalogues of the Salon, sent us a card for varnish- ing day, where we saw the personages, and afterward tried to dejeuner at Ledoyen's, but couldn't get a table, so had to go to another establishment nearby, where, as Montaigne said of certain donne of Rome, " they charged extortionately." Then we all thought we had to hear Aristide Bruant, and I had to have my paper-covered copy of Dans la Rue, with Steinlen's illustrations, which I still have — neglected. At the Chat Noir, after the guests were gone one night, we saw Rudolphe Salis in the very ple- beian act of going about to the tables picking up neglected dominoes of sugar. In those days, too, the Parisians still believed in the fetes of Mi-Careme, and the bals masques at the Opera still had vim and snap, and the costumes and their wearers an abandon that a more sedate Paris not long after allowed to languish and die. We were invited to one of them, went at midnight, stayed until after the battle of confetti and spiralle at three, were then carried off with a large party to supper at a friend's house, where the festivities lasted until daylight, and drove home as the milk-carts were rumbling up the rue Boccador. There were other balls, and at one of them occurred the adventure of the black tie. At a ball at the Hotel de Ville we had found to our surprise that people of all sorts and conditions, from maires to petty office-holders and their wives were there, and that the dress was as varied as the company. So when Baschet got for us an 1 20 6? 5 -i ARCADY invitation to a ball at the Elysee I supposed it would be pretty much the same sort of an affair, and when dress- ing, in a fit of economy, put on a black tie. Of course, my wife when she saw it said I must change, because, I supposed, for the reason that she had on her best evening gown, but I was obstinate and hurried, and said it was " good enough for them." When we arrived it became evident, with ambassadors galore, that the elite of Paris was there. We were caught in a great crush ; the stream moving us slowly through endless corridors to the escalier d'honneur. Imagine the consternation when half way up it a magnificent huissier whispered to me : " Pardon, Monsieur, but one cannot enter with a black tie." There was nothing to do but obey this angel with the flaming sword and make our way back to the coatrooms where, after explanation, a foot- man led me through endless underground passages until we came to his room where I exchanged un piece de cent sous for a white tie. So we finally reached the entrance to the grand salon where the president was receiving. Here fate was again against us, for there was an interruption of some sort, and the major-domo had great difficulty in understanding my name and had to have it repeated several times, so that when at last he shouted, "Monsieur et Madame Parre ! " the delay had caused a great long gap in the stream, so that when we entered the enormous room, now empty except for the presidential party and a suite of a dozen 121 MY LOG gorgeous generals, I felt as though the eyes of the whole world were gazing on us alone. I bowed to Madame Carnot and she shook hands with my wife ; then a bow to Carnot, but he would have none of it and insisted on shaking hands with both of us. Determined to end the matter I polished off the generals with one bow for the lot, and we marched away with as much dignity as pos- sible. We then danced and supped and enjoyed the rest of the evening immensely, and said, as has often been repeated since Sterne's day, that they do these things very well in France. But I have never again economized on white ties. We were young and light-hearted then and the world seemed a very gay place. Nothing came amiss to us : from heavy Ruy Bias at the Comedie Frangaise down to frisky Rejane in Lysistrata; from afternoon-tea in Bridg- man's elaborate studio in the Boulevard Malesherbes or a very formal dinner in the rue de Luxembourg to the Abbey de Theleme or the Rat Mort; from the Opera- Comique to the naughty revues ; or from Voisin's or the Cafe de Paris to a chop-and-kidney at a jockey's rendez- vous — all were the same to us. So in an Arcady where life was bright we bowled along the smooth, level road of youth on high, careless of the dim future with its steep hills of middle age when you must shift back into second, or of the rocky places of old age near the summit that force us back into the hard grind of low. 122 X c < H S X CHIT-CHAT The trained writer, I suppose, can set himself almost any subject and bustle along in an assumed spontaneous way that is cunningly deceptive, while a poor amateur, such as myself, can, I find, only jot down the rambling thoughts as they choose to come along. When I started this little book I thought a good part of it was going to be about boats and cruising, but it has turned out quite different. And when I began this chapter I set down Ars et labore as a heading, thinking that it was going to be all about the art and industry of the French people as exemplified in their greatest of expositions, but scratched it out when I found that the little that my mental equipment and poverty of expression gave could be of no importance to anyone but myself. And then, when I thought the chapter would be something about my work over there, I decided to change it to Labore et ars, if that should be good Latin, for, of course, there was more labor than skill in my activities. Now that I have reread it, I see that neither will do, for I find that it is only some chit-chat about some 123 MY LOG passers-by and a few of some scores of old friends, so many, alas ! now gone that it may seem as though, with old " Goldie," I " have friendships only with the dead ! " In the winter of 1 899 I went over to see what progress was being made with the exposition to be held the next year, where we were going to exhibit our wares, and to decide whether we should publish a series about it. When I went down to dinner the first night on the old St. Paul, the second steward, to my surprise, told me that the cap- tain had had a letter from Mr. Griscom, who was then president of the line, asking a place at his table for a former fellow flag-officer. There was a thoughtful com- modore, such as few yacht clubs have had, a fact "which nobody " — especially those who have eaten reedbirds and grilled oysters on the old Alert — " can deny ! " I found the table was one of the little ones in an alcove on the port side of the saloon, and that the others there were a Mrs. Roosevelt and her daughter, Mrs. Adolph Ladenburg, who had a small daughter, John Jacob Astor, and that Mrs. Astor who was Miss Willing, and one of the chosen people who had with him a rag, a bone, and a great hank of hair that looked golden. The next morning when it was a bit fresh and Captain Jamison, a fine, frank unassuming sea-dog, and I were alone at breakfast he asked me if I knew who they were and how they got there. I told him who they were, but he had to ask the steward about the rest of it. The steward made the gesture of taking money in a hand held behind his back 124 CHIT-CHAT and said : " Well, you know . . .," and Jamison laughed. Mrs. Astor surprised me by her interest in old books and asked me about the dealers in Paris — Damascene Mor- gand and some of the others may owe me commissions for having given their addresses. I have seldom seen in one human being a stranger mixture of absolutely oppo- site traits than were to be seen in John Jacob — one side of his character gravely interested in serious matters, with a strong leaning toward mechanics, the other, so it seemed, almost foolishly frivolous — before the hank, for example. He showed his true metal, however, when with Frank Millet and the other noblemen on the deck of the Titanic he stood aside while the women and children went first. After a few days in London I crossed and found that Paris had not only acquired a new Maxim's but had taken on added beauties in the two fine new palais for the fine arts, had also acquired a sea of mud, a multitude of unfin- ished buildings, some very ugly, and was suffering from turmoil that it seemed could not possibly be conquered by May. However, I made my arrangements, caught the St. Louis at Cherbourg, and also caught a February north- west gale as we neared home that drove us off our course sixty miles in a night. The next month William Walton, who was to write for us, and I went over on the Kaiserin Maria Theresia. On board her we found Elmer Garnsey, who had painted the interior decorations for the United States pavilion (and got medals for them), and who was going over to see 125 MY LOG them put in place. One evening while we were at dinner the Maria carried away her steam steering gear. It was so rough that two men got broken arms or legs, and several were knocked out trying to keep he,r on her course with the hand wheels, but this was abandoned and we lay all night wallowing in the trough of the sea. Next morning Polack, the chief officer, a powerful Polish giant, who afterward got command of the Kronprinzessen Cecilie and brought her back very skilfully to Bar Har- bor in 1 9 14, did some daring work among his men while getting heavy tackles from the tiller to steam-winches, and steered her, by signals from the forward to the after bridge, up the channel and into Cherbourg, two days late, with this very clever seaman-like arrangement. Poor old Walton ! One October day nearly two years ago he wrote to me that he was going to return some books he had borrowed, and added : " I am going away and may be gone for some time." I wrote back that there was no hurry for the books, never suspecting what he meant. Shortly afterward Carroll Beckwith wrote asking if I knew where he was, and then Mrs. Beckwith wrote to me that he had dined one night with Kendall at the Century Club and seemed well and perfectly normal, but did not say a word about going away — yet the very next day he had written to me. The mystery was sadly solved when his body was found in Sheepshead Bay. I, with all his friends, was, of course, shocked by this dreary ending for one who, although inclined to be quiet, 126 w Q P H 3 < O M ti < S ^ c/3 P if r< ■u ^ c/} ft « P B t-i =j -J 8, ks; P ■5 ^ < O 3 CHIT-CHAT retiring, and solitary, and in later years lived almost as a recluse in his studio, had many friends in the world of painters and writers. He was both a painter and a writer, perhaps not great, but he had the genius of originality and the courage to make use of it. His life-size portrait, painted many years ago, before he carried a Van Dyck beard, by Beckwith, his old friend and atelier companion, with his palette and a palm, was shown in a memorial exhibition held at the Century Club in New York. His collected work shown there made a deep impression on those who saw it, many who probably never heard of him must have been amazed at the fanciful and poetic quality of his imagination — and many must have found difficulty in understanding his aim. Miss Louise Sim- mons sent the following to The American Art News : WILLIAM WALTON Good friend and true and noblest of thy kind, We are the band of mourners left behind, To chant, in broken cadences, thy dirge. O may a gladlier song arise to purge Our hearts of bitterness ! Thy memory Of comradeship enjoyed must ever be Our solace. Nay, what though thy brush and pen No longer bear their messages to men? The message of thy soul is higher still. Shy spirit, rest thee quietly until We meet again. Would we might learn of thee — Thy kindly ways, thy matchless loyalty ! In God's own sunshine, far from wind and wave, We lay the laurel on thy new-made grave. L. S. 127 MY LOG Although he was born the same year as my father we were always congenial companions, even great chums. How he enjoyed the joke, and how heartily he laughed with the others when one night, or rather early morning, at an artist's cortege allegorique in Paris, I saved myself from a seductive little bacchante who urged me to dance with her, by putting my arm through his and saying to her, in mock alarm: "Pas possible, vous voyez,je suis avec papa!" And she enjoyed the joke as much as anyone. To be near the grounds and the south side I had a room in the Continental up near the roof, with a little balcony overlooking the gardens of the Tuileries, where one Sunday afternoon during a balloon ascension I saw real ballons d'essai sent up before the actual flight in order to learn just how the wind was acting. Here Walton and I often worked together at nights. He and Garnsey for a while had rooms in an old, very staid, and very French hotel in the rue Louis-le- Grand that differed from a pen- sion in that it had a whole concierge to itself and the words Hotel Louis-le-Grand in gold over the great door. Afterward he had a studio over in the Avenue de Saxe, where he did some work on his Lame de la Tapisserie, which showed the figure of a nude woman in a tapestry materializing into a living one as she stepped out of the tapestry hanging on a wall above an old chest. I took a great interest in this and thought that it would be a fine thing but, alas ! I think it never got beyond the oil sketch stage. 128 U 5? ^ "? -* ■^ ^, "? ^ '3 3 8 5 f o C) | ^ s t« -5 5 to 3 1 a. ■■■J s -S> to' •^ -> 5 k ^ -S 1-s •a 3 l! CHIT-CHAT Our first night in Paris he and Garnsey and I dined at Maxim's, where Garnsey got his first glimpse of " straight fronts " and marvelled greatly thereat, and was especially impressed by the novel spectacle of women drinking cocktails at a real bar. One night when I went up to the Louis-le-Grand for them I found there, in rooms adjoining, Frank Millet, who had with him a tall, good- looking fellow, Charles Allerton Coolidge, a disciple of Richardson, who was the architect of the United States pavilion. They had worked late and were changing clothes. As I went in Millet burst out genially, " Hello ! Barrie, how are you? We're all going to dinner together." And "what tie shall I wear; what do you think of this one?" as though we had been friends for years instead of having met just twice. The tie was a red one, and, judging by the number of times he afterward wore it, must have been a great favorite. Garnsey reminds me that we, and Robert Reid, the painter, all went off to have a look at and have dinner in the new Elysee-Palace hotel, where, as he writes me in a letter referring to " our halcyon days in Paris," the table d'hote "with knee-breeched waiters and orchestra obligato was fourteen francs per person, and much patron- ized by the American aristocracy. We gamins took the nine-franc dinner, sans breeches (sans culottes, mats pas sans cotelettes), sans orchestra, and sans millionaires. And after dinner we had coffee in the lounge, served by a coon in Egyptian costume whose Arabic was less than nil, and who privately confessed to Millet that he came 129 MY LOG ' from Norfick, Vaginy, sah, and don't like dese dam fool clothes, nohow.' Ah, Barrie," he ends up, " dem was de happy days, eh ? " I had forgotten all about this evening. One night I gave a party at the Continental, but the dinner I remem- ber best was that one when, after we had all been working late, we sauntered, about nine o'clock, down to a restau- rant in a corner of the Palais Royal that Millet claimed used to be a good one, and it was good that night, for Millet made it play up, consulting with the proprietor about the dishes and the wines. After hunger was gone we sat drinking old burgundy, Millet, to the evident delight of the proprietor, insisting on fresh glasses for all with each dusty, crusty bottle, and once sending away one, with its attendant glasses, that was not so smooth as it should be. He kept us interested and merry with jocund stories of his experiences as a war correspondent. He had his dig at me when he said in his jocular way that I was a very decent fellow for a publisher, for they were all knaves ; and then told as proof positive of this fact how when the Harpers failed the receivers could not pay him royalties due him, yet had written demanding that Millet pay a charge of three hundred dollars, paid for work not authorized by him done by some literary expert who had revised a manuscript of his Philippine adventures for publication. There was genuine wrath and scorn in his voice as he wound up saying: "And the fellow butchered it ! " 130 FRANCOIS FLAMENG AND (ABOVE) JOHN SARGENT. From the painting by Sargent. CHIT-CHAT I had them come over to my diggings late that night. As we came out of one of the short-cuts on to the rue de Richelieu we passed the house where Moliere died. I said we had made some money with the old fellow's works and proposed a cheer ; Millet said it seemed only fair and we gave some Hoorays and Vivas opposite his statue in the dark and silent street. At the Continental, as Millet and Walton played billiards, Coolidge and I sat on the divan, and he sang praises of Millet's executive abilities and told of the good work he had done in get- ting the delayed pavilion ready on time — how he could put his arm over the shoulders of an Italian or French plasterer and spur him on to willing and greater efforts. Coolidge, in appearance and manner, was as different from Millet as day is from night, yet there seemed to be great camaraderie between them ; certainly Coolidge then worshipped the ground Millet walked on. These dinners of the workers together, each man always paying his share, kept up for a while, but as the time for the opening of the exposition got nearer we all got busier and more absorbed in our own affairs, and then many new American faces appeared and there were more func- tions and evening clothes worn oftener, and things became more formal and we drifted into other habits, so I did not see Millet so often but he always had a cheery word whenever we met in the bustle. Along with other painters of any importance Millet had been sent the usual circular letter from Philadelphia to his I3 1 MY LOG home at Broadway in Worcestershire asking for permis- sion to reproduce his work, but no response had come. I thought there might be some special reason, such as having given permission to a rival publication, and be- cause of our friendly relations hesitated to embarrass him by asking. But as the time grew shorter I finally had to ask. There was no reason whatever — he had never received any request. He asked me to send him another blank, but in the bustle he forgot all about it. And I learned that the letter to Broadway, short postage, had been refused and wrote him again and he replied : United States Pavilion, Sunday. Dear Barrie: Of course I'll sign the paper, didn't I say I would ? Cauldwell has been so near out of his mind that I haven't dared approach him yet. Since I paid 2/^8 for an underpaid letter and found it an advertisement of a corset manufac- turer I have steadily refused all underpaid letters. Wouldn't you ? Do drop in to see me here when you are passing. The confusion is growing less every day. Yours very truly, Frank Millet. He finally sent the authorization, and later wrote from his home in England : " I hope your book will pay like a brewery." The Cauldwell he mentions was the commis- sioner for the United States exhibit of fine arts who 132 ,#-o FRANCIS DAVIS MILLET. Drawn by George Du Maurier, CHIT-CHAT seemed to be interested — not financially, I suppose, for his mother was said to be very well off — in the success of an illustrated catalogue of the section and seemed jealous of any other work. He had annoyed me by unkept promises, keeping my photographer out of the section, and other delaying tactics, so to avoid a row I had asked Millet to drop him a hint. Although I had the good will and the assistance of Hobart Nichols, who was the second in command in the American section, no progress was made until in exasperation I told Cauldwell that he was only a public servant, that the paintings were not his private property, that the painters had not surren- dered their rights over them, and that my written author- izations to have them reproduced must be recognized. He gave in sulkily after I had finally said I would go to Horace Porter, the ambassador, whom, fortunately, I had met years before, but even then he harassed old Thie- baut, my photograper, in all sorts of petty ways. How- ever, time squares most scores — I happened to be in the section when the international jury came there to do their judging, and Millet, Willy Martens, Edelfelt, Alexander Harrison, and Saint-Gaudens came up and shook hands with me and made pleasant remarks, while none, so far as I could see, noticed Cauldwell. This day I got an insight as to how medals are awarded to artists at these international expositions. When I took Willy Martens, the Hollander, who, by the way, was born in Java, over to look at a landscape in low tone, 133 MY LOG painted by Henry Dearth, a friend of Walton's, who had asked me to do what I could for him, Martens said : " Yes, yes, it begins, but, my dear fellow, your men have not put him on the list for us." Millet had more the manner and appearance of a busi- ness man than that of the popular ideal of an artist — but then Hop. Smith looked like a banker or a broker, so you never can tell. Millet was gay and full of humor and would joke in a kindly, whimsical way when the day's work was over and we were all together at table. He also had his sombre moments. One night as we two were walking home after dinner he fell into a melan- choly mood ; things were not what they used to be, Paris was not the same, the restaurants were not so good, life of the studios was not what it was in his younger days, the models had degenerated — in place of the piquancy of the past days the girls were now simply gross, the romance had gone out of it, there was not the same air, the same charm about it all. I thought at that time that he was right and that it all must have changed for the worse, and perhaps it has, but I now suspect that it was the heart and mind of Frank Millet that had changed the most. I found Augustus Saint-Gaudens of a very different type physically, and in characteristics and manner ; quite the antithesis of Millet, who was bluff, hearty, genial, and bustling. There seemed to be an air of wistful regret for the past and thoughtfulness for the future about Saint- Gaudens that must have been habit with him. He had 134 BR1DGE.MAN IN HIS STUDIO. MR. MORGAN IN FRONT OF THE HOTEL BRISTOL. CHIT-CHAT the same reserve that struck me in John La Farge, but there was strong underlying kindness. I wanted to reproduce the plasters of the Shaw memorial and the Sherman statue in the Grand Palais, and to have them just as good as could be made; so as Millet had told me that the best time to have a satisfactory talk with Saint- Gaudens about them would be in the morning before he started work, I called early one bright morning at the big chantier-like atelier in the rue de Bagneux, a short, sunny widish street only a block long, running between the rue du Cherche-Midi and the rue de Vaugirard, quiet and peace-- ful for all that it was so near the busy rue de Rennes and the Gare de Montparnasse. He was not busy ; in fact gave quite a lot of time to showing me some of his maquettes and sketches that were being packed to go back with him to America. He was slender in body, and a lot of hair and a long straight nose and deep-set eyes made his face seem thin and careworn. His manner was very quiet, almost diffident; and he was most kind. His interest in the pro- posed plates surprised me and I was still more surprised when he told me that he would like to be present when the negatives were made in order to choose the point of view. I pointed out to him that the photographer could work only early in the morning before people were about, and that it would be very inconvenient for him to have to be on hand then, and suggested that he show me the position he wanted. But he said he would meet me at eight o'clock in the Grand Palais any morning that I would fix. 135 MY LOG The morning came and he and my old brigand Thie- baut fraternized together and they got an excellent plate of the Shaw, which I was very anxious to have, as to my mind it was the better of the two, indeed, I think it the best of all his work, even the best of all American sculp- ture. But, alas ! they were not able to get a satisfactory one of the Sherman because a lot of great packing cases were in the way, and another morning, although I got Andre Saglio to have some pieces moved, they never got a suitable plate of the Sherman alone. Saint-Gaudens was pleased, however, when I finally took one to him which showed it pretty well dominating the whole of the sculpture section ; in fact, it shared the honors with Barrias's Hugo. I remember being struck by the fact that in seeking for his point of view he seemed to be more interested in the victory than in old Sherman. Andre Saglio, son of the conservateur of the Musee Cluny, was a fine example of the young men typical of modern France. Brisk, dashing, courteous, obliging, with a sense of humor, and an ability to get things done were his qualities as I remember him. He liked to have me tell him that he had the American genius for making things move. I liked him immensely and was always grateful to Monsieur Emile Molinier for making us ac- quainted. It came about in this way. Molinier, who was the conservateur of the Louvre, was also chief of the fine arts section of the exposition and I had to have his consent before any photographing could be done in the 136 SIR HENRY IRVING. CHIT-CHAT Grand or Petit Palais, where everything was still in con- fusion and under lock and key. His office hours were from j.gj p.m. to 6 p.m. I called on him nearly every day for a month during these sacred fifteen minutes, for I was curious to meet the man who had the courage to set such office hours. I never did see him in his office, but when I met him at a function he enjoyed my telling about the many calls. On my third call I had got acquainted with Saglio, who was his chief of staff and the real worker, and who gave me a carte de service so that at once I had the freedom of the galleries, introduced me to all the more important foreign art commissioners, including Count I. Tolstoi, secretary of the Imperial Academy at St. Peters- burg, and many other interesting persons, and to some of his friends, among them Rene Menard and Cottet, who, with Lucien Simon and Dauchez, he was firmly convinced were the only younger French masters worthy of mention — and was good-naturedly disgusted that I could not see that his " only " was right. He also intro- duced me to Lenbach, who in turn introduced me to his daughter, the best looking and most attractive German woman I ever met. Saglio smoothed all my paths and in turn I paid him a very good price for the manuscript of a volume. Mention of Saglio reminds me of another of several of these beau gargons, as the expressive French has it, that I knew — Rene Baschet. I first met Rene and his brother Marcel, the painter, years before at their father's 137 MY LOG publishing office in the rue de l'Abbaye, opposite the picturesque old St. Germain-des-Pres. Rene " arrived " and is now editor-in-chief, or directeur as they put it, of L Illustration. Paul Ollendorf was another of these typi- cal dashing young Frenchmen — richer than the others and known in the greenroom at the Opera Comique. Still another who comes to mind as being of this type was Maurice de Brunoff, general manager at Lemercier's, a Protestant, of an old Huguenot family, tall, fair, well set- up, with a delightful manner and a politeness most sincere. At the time, when Lemercier's was doing a lot of litho- graphs for us, and when I saw most of him, he was happily married, prosperous, with an apartment overlooking the gardens of the Luxembourg, and owner of champagne that can only be described as superb. He was a great admirer of J.-J. Tissot and interested in the reproduction of his Biblical pictures. Sad to relate, Maurice lost a great deal of money trying to get the American public to admire them. The last time I saw him he lunched with me at Martin's in New York after he had been over here long enough to learn how little the American public appreciated Tissot and to see how badly things were going, and I could see that he did not face life with the courage of yore. That June the Circle de la Librarie gave a fete that was very chic : Baschet and Ollendorf, with whom we had a partnership arrangement, were on the entertain- ment committee and gave me a great evening. They 138 THE DANSE HISTORIQUE ET ARTISTIQUE OF A GENERATION AGO. {Louise and Blanche Mante). CHIT-CHAT had the Mante sisters in their Directoire dances, and Rejane and Huguenet in a naughty playlet called Chose Promise and a lot of others, and a great collation. Monsieur Fleury, the president, an old friend of my father, introduced me to many interesting men and made me free of the club house. Everyone I knew was in great spirits : Paul Dujardin relaxed, Maurice de Brunoff was even more radiant than usual, and dear old Emile Terquem, who knew absolutely everyone there, was as gay and happy as could be. Millet's letter with the reference to the skirmish with Cauldwell reminds me that experience has taught me that it is always easier and pleasanter to deal with a really big caliber man than a small one. When I learned from Saglio that there was going to be a collection of British old masters in the British pavilion I called on Spielmann, their commissioner in charge, who was affable and court- eous but who told me that I would have to get permis- sion from the owner in each case. In the list which he gave me I saw Hogarth's Lady's Last Stake, owned by J. Pierpont Morgan, and Turner's Nore, owned by George J. Gould. I at once wrote to both, but Mr. Morgan had left for Paris before my letter reached New York, and Mr. Gould, when his reply came, said in it that he had already sent permission to the Governor at Philadelphia. I called at the Bristol several times without being able to see Mr. Morgan, but one day about noon I was taken up to the 139 MY LOG first floor by a valet who opened the door of a salon, said I would find Mr. Morgan aufond, went out, closed the door after him, and left me alone in the room. I was rather surprised, but walked through two long salons and found that the valet's " background " was the third one, at the corner of the place Vendome, in the far angle of which sat Mr. Morgan, all alone, at a writing table facing a window looking out on the rue de Castiglione. He was sealing a long, formidable looking envelope. He got up, came forward, shook hands, and said : " How do you do, Mr. Barrie, what can I do for you ? " " We make books in Philadelphia, and — " He laughed, and said : " Oh ! I know very well that you do." I suppose he did, for he had been a very good customer. " Well," I went on, " We are making one on the ex- position and would like to include a plate of your Hogarth." He then said very firmly but very pleasantly that he didn't care to have it done. I suppose I looked down- cast ; I certainly felt so, and said that I was disappointed and how important I felt it was that we should have it. So then he consoled me without deeply committing him- self by saying : "All right ; if the others are willing, I am." These others were principally British noblemen who had also loaned old masters for the collection. I con- quered him by saying it would be a lot easier for me to get their permission if I could show them that my own 140 CHIT-CHAT countryman had confidence in us. He smiled, thought for a moment, and then said : " Very well ! you may do it." And seemed to think the matter was ended. But I was not out of the woods, and I had to explain to him that Spielmann wouldn't be satisfied with my word alone and that I would have to have a line to him authorizing our photographer to make a negative. He explained that he was busy, as he was going to Aix that night, that he had an engagement just then, but that he would send me a note if I would give him my address. He walked with me to the door into the next salon and said good-by with another smile. As I walked around the corner to the Continental I became more and more impressed by the simple and very democratic way in which he had received me and the patience he had displayed when I reasoned with him after he had refused. But after dejeuner, when I happened to see him leaving the Bristol, I thought the chances of his remembering to send the note before he left for Aix were very slim ; to my delight, however, I found it in my room when I went back at night. My confidence in human nature had had a great tonic. I called the next morning with a note of thanks and was told that he had gone. I had had a similar experience in Chicago some years before when I went one night to the theatre where Sir Henry Irving was playing Becket to try to get permis- sion to make a plate of Sargent's portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth which belonged to Irving. At the 141 MY LOG box office I found Bram Stoker, his manager, who said he would see later what could be done, but that he always liked to see the " house " come in. So I stood with him in the lobby and watched a " good house," with plenty of people in evening dress come in ; and Bram was in great, good humor and took me behind the scenes, where I found Irving quiet and simple, and with no evidence of his stage manner, and when the first act was over, I satis- fied them that the plate would be satisfactory, and Stoker told me he would get the necessary writing — and he did. And, again, a few years ago I wrote ex-President Taft asking him to write for us and enclosed a cheque; he wrote back saying that he was sorry but he was too busy, that anyhow the cheque was too big, but that he hated to return it because he needed the money; then I went up to New Haven and told him I had helped to elect him and that it was the lion's turn to help the mouse, and after keeping me in his room in the Hotel Taft while the class-day parade went by, he finally said he would try to do it — and he kept his word. I have drifted across the ocean, and must return to Paris, where, by the way, I feel more at home than in New Haven. Paris, during the summer of 1900, was so full of Americans and English that it seemed almost to have lost its characteristics as a French city, and in the march of time even the Latin Quarter seemed then to have become more sedate and conventional, perhaps because I and the men I knew had become older, and 142 ■R- B. £.. B. Mrs, Cooper. MASTERPIECE BY COLIN CAMPBELL COOPER DONE AT CHANTILLY. CHIT-CHAT probably because, as I had now a little more change in my pocket, I lunched and dined oftener at Foyot's than at the old Phares de l'Ouest or Lavenue. Even Lave- nue's would take on an almost aristocratic air when the immaculate Harrison came around from his studio. Of course, there were still Strang, the Scot, and Johnny Flanagan, the American, and a few others to be found in talk after dinner in the little back room there, but the bloom was off the rose. Besides, summer was coming on and the quartier is not so interesting then as in winter, for all the painters who can get away go to the sea or country. By and by my wife came over and I deserted the old haunts without a pang, and after she had had a look around we were glad to get away from the hot and crowded city to Normandy and England and to Jersey, where we saw the Lily, in a sunbonnet at the door of her little stone cottage, prettier, and perhaps happier, than she had ever been on the stage. But I had to be back in Paris again to keep an eye on the exposition and my workmen and, above all, on the jury. So we returned to the rue Boccador, and except for again occasionally try- ing the old Laperouse and having duck a la presse and puree of potatoes served to us by the old Ibsen-like proprietor of the Tour d' Argent we saw little of the south side. We found life in the Champs-Elysees district is very much like life in a similar neigborhood in London or New York. Indeed, a Rip van Winkle waking up now after a ten-year nap inside the Ritz in any of the three 143 MY LOG cities would find it difficult to say in just which city he was. One could go to Voisin's, or the Cafe de Paris, or any of the non-priced carte places and find a different air, but the novelty of such places soon wears off. We had days " off" at Saint-Germain, on the banks of the Marne, at Marly, at Compiegne and Pierrefonds, and at Chantilly with its fascinating maison de Silvie, where we met our old friend Colin Campbell Cooper, the painter, and his wife a-bicycling through the beau-pays of France. As a rule, however, we lived the same sort of more or less quiet life that the other seventy thousand Americans who make their home in Paris have settled down to. To be sure, we heard Mary Garden in her first season of Louise, and saw the silent L Enfant Prodigue and the other novelties at the theatres, and tried every restaurant of any interest that we had ever heard of, even again, for the sake of the early days, the Cafe Anglais, now, alack ! gone to seed, but were very, very glad when the great day, near the end of summer, drew near and we were invited in the name of the president to assist at the Dis- tribution Solennelle des Recompenses, which we attended, and sat just behind Jean-Leon Gerome in his dark-green costume with the gold embroidery of a member of the Institute, and knew, for Paul Ollendorf had already whis- pered it to me, that we had got the Grand Prix and a gold medal. Then, armed with our invitation to the fete, we again drove to the Elysee — this time to shake hands with 144 to o ■kl << to t« Q K So CHIT-CHAT Monsieur and Madame Loubet in the beautiful garden. The brilliant audience was itself a spectacle. There were many ballets, and Javanese, Japanese, Cingalese, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and even Egyptian dances, and music by Roumanian tziganes, and Sada Yacco and her company of Japanese gave the Ghesha et la Chevalier and, as an extra, not on the programme, there was Cleo de Merode with the Cambodian dancers. Best of all, in the twilight as we strolled about the lawn under the great trees after the shows were all over, the band of the Garde Repub- licaine played the national airs of the guests, and when they had played ours we scampered off to dinner and to celebrate — happiest of all with the thought that soon we could go home to America. I was back in Paris in the winter of 1908, and again with my wife, daughters, and boy in the summer of 191 1, when Jean Terquem, whom I had held on my knee when he was a tot and who had splashed me in the sea at Cabourg, gave us a dinner in bosquet No. 1 at the Pavilion d'Armenonville. Poor Jean: he, who was so gay and full of life that evening, died nearly three years ago, at the head of his company in the battle of the Marne. Other old friends in France, England, and Scot- land are gone ; when I think of them it seems as though these lands could never again be the same to me. 145 O •J o XI INDIAN SUMMER Lucky for me that, like Izaak Walton, " I write not to get money, but for pleasure," otherwise the cupboard now would be bare indeed if my bread depended on what I can recall of the later years ; for my early note- and scrap-books, — my pigmy Pepys and puny Boswell with their hints to recall the past, — that have carried me up to 1900 as I have scribbled these pages while playing in- valid, now have their revenge for being thrown aside, and the half empty pages of the last one mock at me. And I am left without even old letters to help keep me ahead of the compositor and printer now close at my heels, for these were destroyed as age made me more careless. It does not really matter, to my reader, or even to me. The earlier years, as must happen with most of us, are those we are most inclined to look back on with interest and pleasure, for distance, of course, lends enchantment and usually only the good things are recalled. At any rate, as I glance back over these pages I am reminded 14; MY LOG of old Septimus Winner, whose mind, when he gave me lessons on the violin, used invariably, before the lesson was half over, to drift into reminiscences of the days of his youth and he would spend the best part of the hour tell- ing me how he came to compose Listen to the Mocking Bird! — and in playing it in every sort of variation. Like him, and perhaps with his repetition of variations, and like the painters with their love reverting to their early sketches, these earlier days have here interested me much more than those of middle life, spent mostly at home and at work — that middle age so often without a history, which, like the nations without one, may perhaps after all really have been the happiest. Besides, like the little house we lived in when newly married, which was so small that I couldn't get into it the cask of Bordeaux I had ordered from France, — and had to send it to my father's cellar, — I find that all I had hoped to put into my little book will not go there. Life is so full of " multitudinous affairs that prevent," as Grover Cleveland once wrote to me when I asked him to write for us, that I see I must end here ; for after filling a hun- dred foolscap pages and with years yet to cover, — and almost well again and my need of amusing myself gone, — I find that although I might go on and tell how, in Paris, I saved a director of a great Chicago corporation from a golden-haired vampire ; or tell why the long arm of the Kaiser did not, as the newspapers in black scare- heads claimed, reach from his palace at Potsdam over to 148 //. L. S. G. B.,Jr. MY ALTER EGO AND HIS FID US ACHATES. INDIAN SUMMER our office in Walnut Street to prevent the publication of the memoirs of a dame du palais, one Ursula, Countess of Eppinghoven ; or tell the secret of the Marquise de Fontenoy, or such gossip, nothing would be gained, for I see more clearly than ever that Emerson was right, and that, after all, what I have here is nothing but the frame- work of a life with little or nothing in it of the emotions that every human being experiences. Nothing of the joys, — as when my three children, like avions from the sky, made safe landings on earth. Or of great grief, as when my mother died. Or even of the petty mishaps of life, as when I was nominated chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the Ministere du Commerce as a reward for what we had done to introduce French art and letters into America — but never wore the red ribbon because Monsieur Cambon at Washington demurred as I was the junior in the firm, and although the Governor generously sent over a protest and an "abdication" to Monsieur Mollard, the minister of foreign affairs, the matter slept, was forgotten, and died in his bureau. Or of mistakes made, as when I declined a perhaps greater honor — and was sorry afterward. Or of characteristics, such as the fact that the coat I wear was made by the very same tailor who made my first pair of long trousers, the shoes came from the man who used to sell them to me when I was a schoolboy, that my few dollars are still kept in the bank where I put my first ones. Or of great friendships, as that with my brother George, — "Jarge," — who has 149 MY LOG made a large part of this cruise of life with me, who has for years been my alter ego, and who must know my soul better than I do myself. At times I find myself these fine, late spring days thinking of Mitchell and his farm at Edgewood. The which, so my wife says, is a sure sign of old age coming on. And so it may be, or perhaps it is a return to youth — I really cannot decide which. And in this mood I have thoughts of again taking up rose-growing, and there is a growing resolution to reread the Bucolics and Dean Hole. And finally I find myself wishing that I might, like Gilbert White, of Selborne, or some of the placid fellows of his ilk, be Blest, who can unconcern' dly find Hours, days, and years slide soft away. Well, after the sturm und drang, after the fight has been fought, after the cares, after the disappointments that must come, sooner or later to everyone, when our little ship that set out so briskly on the voyage of life has sailed gaily through the spring of childhood, through the summer of youth, and has passed safely, but perhaps a little battered through the equinoctials of the 'forties, ac- cording to my almanac of life the Indian Summer should be at hand. In this happy season, before the winter gales of dark days and death set in, I find myself inclined to loaf, that is mentally, as in the warm, hazy ones of that second summer, to sit in the setting sun of life and take 150 INDIAN SUMMER count of the harvest of riches of memory that thieves cannot steal or the severest buffets of adversity destroy. These last few pages of my chronicle of small beer will be false if they give the impression that, like Frank Millet, I find the world changing for the worse, or that I am in the habit of singing the old popular song: Nothing is Like it Used to Be! Nothing would be farther from the truth, for although after thirty years I still have the cart and even the tandem harness in the loft of my garage I know I will never again drive it, a-courting, down Broad- way — or anywhere else. Or again come home from the bal masque as the milk-carts are rattling up the rue Boccador; or circumnavigate Long Island or do other foolish things in small cutters; or on old Blunderbtiss munch sandwiches behind coverts on wintry fox-hunting mornings. Or, indeed, do any of the many things that need youth or energy to enjoy, for much as everyone looks back with longing eyes to the youth which is the time for such follies, we all know, as the immortal R. L. S. said when the Oise carried him, in the Arethusa, away from the young ladies of Origny, that there is no turning back on the stream of life. I suppose just such thoughts as these must come to everyone along in the 'fifties — when there is danger of drifting into a sentimental poetic sadness or into a sort of tender melancholy. Millions must thus be living in their past. It is one of the privileges of the old, and one that the young can't enjoy — and don't need to, for they 151 MY LOG look forward. Thank God ! there is a lot of truth in the old platitude that age has its compensations. Greatest of all, as has been discovered by billions before and will be discovered by billions after me ; daughters and a son. There is still our love of the sea, and we can, like a Darby and Joan, enjoy placidly pottering about in small craft, free from the crew cares of the eighty-ton yawl. Then there is the poor man's joy of reading that, like Gibbon, I would not barter for the wealth of the Indies. And in this Indian Summer as I look back I find myself thankful that I lived in my age, which now seems to me to have been a particularly good one, and glad and con- tented when I recall how pleasant a place the world at peace was as I found it, and, at times — as hope eternally will rise in the human breast — even hopeful of once more seeing France, nobler even and as gay and sunny as it was when I first went there only thirty years ago. For it does seem but a short time ago. The little French verse is right — life is brief, and the time, sooner or later, always comes when we must, with the best pos- sible grace we can summon, at last say Bonsoir! 152 OLD "blunderbuss: CRUISES MAINLY IN THE BAY OF THE CHESAPEAKE BY ROBERT BARRIE and GEORGE BARRIE, Jr. " Fourteen little sketches written by two men who clearly know how to get the most of marine life along shore. They set forth their adven- tures in an easy unpretentious style that brings readers close to the scenes described . . . there is also a quality of enthusiasm about it that is an inspiration to every one to indulge in yachting. . . . The authors have done a service by showing at close range things of historical interest along and near the Chesapeake Bay, and in addition have set forth, perhaps more clearly than any one else, the pleasure to be obtained in cruising along the coast of our own country." — Boston Evening Transcript. " This fascinating narrative will come to every lover of the sea like a whiff from the briny itself." — The Herald, Boston. " Good reading for yachtsmen, indeed for any man or woman who loves the sea. The authors, experienced and ardent yachtsmen, have managed to convey by the printed page a full measure of the charm of cruising . . - exceptional among books of its kind.' ' — The Boston Globe. "All these sketches are full of the true boatman's love of his boat and of the water, and the authors' enjoyment of the sport gives them a go and a liveliness that make for the reader's entertainment, whether or not he be a boatman, too."- — The Times, New York. " There is a good deal of antiquarian and historical information, with details of the people and land." — The Publishers' Weekly, New York. "A companionable book . . . these cruises have a refreshing tang of the salt air in them. . . . The Barrie brothers have caught and con- veyed to their readers some of the subtle and compelling influence that broods over the rivers, creeks, and inlets." — The Evening Telegraph, Philadelphia. "A delightfully discursive book, with an elusive but grateful literary flavor."— The Press, Philadelphia. " Point and pith in the authors' breezy descriptions." — The North American, Philadelphia. "Will do much to make the beauties of Chesapeake Bay known. The writers evidently know the Bay with an intimacy undreamed of, perhaps, by members of the Maryland Yacht Club." — The Sun, Baltimore. "All lovers of boating will enjoy these pleasant sketches. The authors are good observers, skilled story-tellers, and pleasant companions." — The Daily Picayune, New Orleans. "An easy, sprightly, ingenious style." — The Record-Herald, Chicago. " Much that is attractive . . . written in an easy familiar style." — The Post, Chicago. " Sketches of yachting life by two enthusiasts who love the water and know how to enjoy a boat." — The Inter- Ocean, Chicago. "Have that wonderful quality of enthusiasm that carries the reader along with the writer . . . breezy, cheerful, bright, sunny, and should delight all those who love the open air." — The Journal, Chicago. " Much pleasant reading in it." — The Plain-Dealer, Cleveland. "A collection of wonderfully absorbing tales giving a good deal of historical information." — The Marine Journal, New York. ' " Has proved the best reading we have blundered across in many a day . . . fills one with envy ... an easy and familiar narrative. We advise all those who love a good yarn and a good ship to read the book." — Yachting, New York. " Very pleasantly written, these cruises do not pretend to yachting in the sense of the word that means to many people only large vessels, large crews, and much luxury." — The Field, London. "An interesting book, pleasant reading to lovers of the sea." — The Motor Boat, London. " Readers will remember those interesting logs, not only for their value as records of cruises, but also for the many items of gossip and history con- cerning the wonderful coastline passed. They give delightful thumbnail sketches of those American people one seldom hears about, but which constitute » very strong factor in the country and its social life." — The Yachting Monthly, London. " A book of much originality and cleverness . . . long cruises, the descriptions of which they make so interesting indeed, and the whole of which they treat with so much sportsman-like and seaman-like freshness and skill. These excellent descriptions are most fascinating impressions of inexhaustible profusion, invaluable, and never to be forgotten. Both the Barries are sportsmen par excellence . . . the pleasure of reading is de- cidedly increased by the large number of exquisite pictures." — Allegemeine Sport- Zeitung, Vienna. " Charmante et interessant ouvrage." — Le Yacht, Paris. Octavo, 276 Pages, with 96 Illustrations and Chart, $2.00 THE FRANKLIN PRESS 1 3 10 Sansom Street Philadelphia, Pa.