Class X)^^7^ 
 
 Book - 37 
 
 Copyright))'^ 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
GLIMPSES OF EUROPE 
 
 This Edition is limited to 500 copies, printed from type^ 
 
 and the type distributed 
 
Glimpses of Europe 
 
 A SERIES OF LETTERS WRITTEN FROM 
 ABROAD TO THE "STANDARD- 
 UNION" OF BROOKLYN, 
 NEW YORK 
 
 BY 
 
 JESSE JOHNSON 
 
 FORMERLY JUDGE OF THE NEW YORK SUPREME COURT 
 
 ^^ 
 
 s 
 
 ^^ 
 
 THE GRAFTON PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK MCMVI 
 
Library of CONGRESS 1 
 
 Two Copies 
 
 D£C8i 
 
 Received 
 
 »906 
 
 Cepyri^ht Entry 
 
 CLASS ^ XXc, No. 
 
 COPY B. 
 
 J) 
 
 .T 
 
 4-, 
 
 1 
 
 Copyright, 1906, by 
 Jesse Johnson 
 
BEDIC A TED 
 
 to my dear wife, 
 who accompanied me in this journey 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I From New York to England ... 1 
 
 II The Ancient City of Chester ... 9 
 
 III The World's Metropohs .... 15 
 
 IV Westminster Abbey 20 
 
 V The Heart of Midlothian .... 29 
 
 VI The Land of " The Lady of the Lake " 37 
 
 VII London Again, and Windsor ... 42 
 
 VIII In the French Capital 48 
 
 IX Some Residences of French Royalty . 55 
 
 X Railroad Traveling in the Swiss Alps . 63 
 
 XI Across the Snow-clad Alps .... 68 
 
 XII Mont Blanc as Seen from Lake Geneva 72 
 
 XIII Napoleon's Tomb in Paris .... 85 
 
 XIV French Peasants on Market Days . . 93 
 XV From Geneva to the Riviera ... 97 
 
 XVI Cheerfulness of the French People . .104 
 
 XVII How Soldiers are Made in the French 
 
 Army 108 
 
 XVIII Monte Carlo, the Cancer Spot of Europe 112 
 
 XIX Venice and Other Historic Cities of 
 
 Northern Italy 116 
 
 XX The Homes of the Caesars .... 124 
 
GLIMPSES OF EUROPE 
 
GLIMPSES OF EUROPE 
 
 I 
 From New York to Engiland 
 
 Old Chester, Eng., July 14, 190 — . 
 Mindful, of the promise you secured from me just be- 
 fore I left Brooklyn, I will now try and give you a 
 little sketch of my journeyings since then. 
 
 Saturday, July 4, was the day on which the good 
 ship Umhria, on which our passage was secured, was 
 to siail from the Port of New York. 
 
 As we were leaving the St. George we met an old 
 friend who, wishing us bon voyage with a smile that 
 might have been a foreglow of the millennium, assured 
 us that, with the progress of the ages, seasickness, with 
 other ills, had been abolished. Having our apprehen- 
 sions as to mal-de-mer thus happily allayed, we pro- 
 ceeded to the street, where we met many friends who 
 were there to give us good-by and good wishes. And so, 
 entering our carriage with the pleasurable warmth and 
 glow which always comes from the greetings of friends, 
 we left our hotel to proceed to the Umhria. There we 
 met my son, with his charming wife, evermore a daugh- 
 ter in affection, who had come to give us a last good-by 
 and Godspeed for the journey. 
 
 At 12 o'clock the great ship moved out from the 
 
br^W' 
 
 
 
 From New York to England 
 
 dock and our voyage to Europe had begun. Neither 
 Mrs. Johnson nor I had ever been abroad before, and as 
 we moved down the broad and beautiful harbor, under the 
 glow of the July sun, our hearts were filled with the 
 happiest anticipations and imaginings of the land 
 across the water which we expected to see. We recalled 
 the lines of Tennyson : 
 
 " All experience is an arch where thro' 
 Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades 
 Forever and forever." 
 " It may be we shall touch the happy isles." 
 
 He would be cold, indeed, whose heart would not be 
 warmed by the thought that at last he was actually 
 sailing across the great ocean to visit the old and his- 
 toric lands which had been to him history and poetry 
 for fifty years. 
 
 The good ship carried out to sea about three hundred 
 and forty first cabin passengers, and these, with the 
 passengers of the second cabin, officers, seamen, waiters, 
 and attendants, made about one thousand people, who 
 were putting out into that waste of waters, trusting 
 to the seaworthiness of the Umbria and the skill and 
 care of Captain Dutton and his accomplished officers 
 and brave and hardy sailors. 
 
 I had spent many years on the south shore of Long 
 Island, and had thought that, as we sailed by, I should 
 see some of the old familiar places, and note how they 
 looked from my new point of view. We were called to 
 lunch at 12 o'clock, and as we came again on deck, I 
 looked for the familiar places on the Long Island shore. 
 But we were already so far out that the shore was 
 
From New York to England 3 
 
 barely visible — a mere line of dark blue, fringing the 
 horizon — and, as the good ship moved on at the rate of 
 twenty miles an hour, even that view was soon lost, and 
 we knew that we were on the Atlantic, not again to see 
 a sign of land until we had traversed three thousand 
 billowy miles. 
 
 Except for a little chill, Sunday morning was beauti- 
 ful, the sea calm, and the ship moving almost as steadily 
 as though moving up the Hudson. The service of the 
 English Church (Episcopal) was read by one of the 
 officers of the ship, and all day long the beat and throb 
 of the great engines continued, and the ship with the 
 freight of one thousand lives pushed out Into the At- 
 lantic at the rate of twenty miles an hour. In the 
 afternoon we were told that perhaps we might expect 
 fogs, as we were off the Great Banks. Our captain had 
 selected a course which took us well south of the Banks. 
 This course, we were told, was about four hundred 
 miles longer than the more northerly one, and that It 
 had been selected because the captain had Information 
 that there were icebergs north of us, drifting along the 
 fishing banks. 
 
 As all day long we felt and saw the rush of the great 
 ship, and, knowing we were not yet midway on the 
 ocean, we realized how vast and broad is the great waste 
 of water that till 1492 had kept what is now America 
 from the view and knowledge of the Old World. 
 
 Wednesday we learned that the Etruria, which had 
 sailed from Liverpool about the same time we left New 
 York, had passed us, and that the ships had exchanged 
 greetings and salutations by the Marconi telegraph 
 system. The Etrwria did not come within our view, and 
 
4 From New York to England 
 
 was said to have passed us forty miles to the north. 
 The passing the Umbria's sister ship, which had com- 
 menced her voyage from the other side at about the 
 same time as our own voyage, made more noticeable the 
 fact that with three days of fast saihng we had only 
 reached midocean. 
 
 But how wonderful and marvelous it seemed; those 
 messages coming to us from a ship far down beyond 
 the horizon line. It set us imagining what would 
 be the future of this wonderful wireless telegraphy, 
 and the lines of the old song came to us: 
 
 " We onlj know she sailed away, and the ship was never heard 
 of more." 
 
 Many years ago, as I remember, one of the finest ships 
 in the United States Navy, which had been beaten and 
 seasoned by many voyages, sailed out of port, with 
 banners flying and guns booming, and passed out be- 
 yond the horizon line, and from that day to this no 
 message or tidings of that good ship have ever come 
 to land. How strange it will seem when some day some 
 such ship, battling with adverse storms and seas, and 
 about to sink in the unsounded ocean, from out of the 
 darkness and the unknown, by this new telegraphy, 
 sends some last message, revealing at once its fortune 
 and its fate. 
 
 Thursday the sea was still calm, though it continued 
 cool. The throb of the engines had continued day and 
 night, and more and more we began to realize how vast 
 and broad is the great Atlantic. 
 
 That evening there was a fine concert given in the 
 dining saloon. The chairman of the entertainment was 
 
 s 
 
From New York to England 5 
 
 the Right Honorable the Earl of Dunmore. The ac- 
 companist at the piano was Mrs. Leith MacGregor, of 
 Scotland, who charmed all on board by her spirited and 
 sympathetic performance. Among the other perform- 
 ers was Mr. George B. Penny, who gave us a selection 
 from Chopin on the piano, and Mr. Edward O'Mahony, 
 of the Carl Rosa Opera Company, and Mr. Tom Daniel, 
 of the Dolly Varden Opera Company, both of whom 
 are fine artists, and with their deep and sympathetic 
 voices broke the stillness of the mid-Atlantic on that 
 starlight night. 
 
 After the musical entertainment Dr. Burland, the 
 ship's physician, gave us a few incidents of life on 
 board an Atlantic liner. On the programme his remarks 
 were put down as " A Few Chestnuts." He commenced 
 by telling that the appellation " chestnuts," given to 
 old and well-worn stories, was entirely of American 
 origin, and that in England they called such stories 
 " church bells," because they were " tolled " so often. 
 He told us of an Irish emigrant woman, 103 years of 
 age, who was going to America with her " little " 
 daughter, 75 years of age. 
 
 At the close of the performance the Earl made an 
 appeal for contributions toward the seamen's orphan 
 institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, and we were 
 told that since the establishment of the orphanage at 
 Liverpool, 85,000 seamen on English vessels had been 
 drowned. The proceeds of the concert were about £32 
 ($160), and the following evening a similar concert 
 was held in the second cabin. P. A. Simpkin presided 
 and appealed for charity, the proceeds of that concert 
 being about £17 ($85). 
 
6 From New York to England 
 
 The sea was still calm the next day, broken only by 
 the swash and swell made by the great ship as she 
 drove her way through the water, and by the waves, 
 like ripples, which hardly affected the motion of the 
 ship. 
 
 We were told that on the morrow we might expect 
 to see land at Queenstown, and with this again came 
 to us the pleasurable excitement of the unknown — 
 hidden friends down below the horizon line,, toward 
 which we were so rapidly hastening. 
 
 Saturday morning we found ourselves in sight of 
 land just south of the Irish coast, and making our way 
 in toward the harbor of Queenstown. 
 
 I happened to stand on the forward deck as the ship 
 was slowly making its way, stopping occasionally for 
 soundings or other information. Near me were a party 
 of gentlemen, one of whom made some remark indicat- 
 ing impatience at the slow progress of the ship. One 
 of the party remarked, " It is better to be sure than 
 sorry." The remark seemed to me so appropriate and 
 just that, half unconscious of the act, I repeated, 
 " Better to be sure than sorry." As I did so the 
 gentleman who had made the remark turned to me and 
 said, " Are you Mr. Johnson, of Brooklyn .^ " I con- 
 fessed that I was. He said, " Perhaps you know my 
 father? " I then learned that the gentleman whose re- 
 mark I had thus taken up was F. E. Finnigan, the son 
 of my old friend, the Hon. Michael J. Finnigan, of 
 Brooklyn. 
 
 He told me he was going abroad on a business mission 
 for a structural iron company, and left his wife with 
 a little son but six weeks old; that his wife urged him 
 
From New York to England 7 
 
 to go, because it was his duty to do so, and he added 
 " she was a brave httle woman," a remark which seemed 
 to be quite as appropriate and true as that which I had 
 first heard him make. 
 
 It is one of the beautiful incidents of travel thus to 
 meet the kindred and acquaintance of old friends, and 
 when we do so we know each other at once. I was 
 rejoiced to meet Mr. Finnigan and to send, through 
 him, words of kind remembrance for his respected 
 father. 
 
 Slowly we proceeded up these land-locked waters 
 toward Queenstown harbor. We there had our first 
 glimpse of the Irish coast — rocky headlands rising 
 abruptly from the waters. 
 
 Just before we reached Queenstown there was a break 
 in the headlands, and we saw green fields on the Irish 
 shore, looking as " fair as the gardens of the Lord." 
 
 About noon a tender ran out from Queenstown and 
 took about sixty of our passengers, who desired to make 
 a landing there, and brought us papers, letters, and 
 telegrams from many. Leaving the tender, the ship 
 pushed on northward toward Liverpool. 
 
 We had been told that our voyage north from 
 Queenstown would be in sight of the Irish coast, and we 
 had hoped to get a further glimpse of the Emerald 
 Isle, but as we proceeded north toward Liverpool the 
 fog shut out the shore from our view, and we were 
 constrained to go below without any further view of 
 Ireland. 
 
 About 9 o'clock, on some rocks near a lighthouse, we 
 saw the masts and smokestack of a wrecked steamer. 
 We were told that this was the steamer Manchester * 
 
8 From New York to England 
 
 Commerce, a ship as large as the Umbria, which had 
 run on the rocks in a fog about six weeks before, and 
 then lay there, battered by the waves and fast break- 
 ing up. 
 
 When we awoke Sunday the throb of the machinery 
 had ceased, and the ship was lying at rest in the great 
 harbor of Liverpool. As we came into Queenstown 
 Tom Daniel said to me: "When Englishmen come to 
 New York they are met at quarantine by a reporter, 
 whose first question is, 'How do you like America?' 
 and so I ask myself, ' How do you like England? ' " 
 
 I will answer such question now by telling you how 
 it seemed to me as I looked through the porthole that 
 Sunday morning. It ! seemed to be a commercial city, 
 for the first thing I saw was a huge board sign, on 
 which was printed in hues visible across the bay: 
 
 > 
 
 I said to myself, how would a puppy laugh that hap- 
 pened to see that sign; but then I remembered that a 
 notice had been posted in the ship, that no one would 
 be allowed to take a dog ashore unless accompanied by 
 a license from the English authorities, and I thought 
 this was another case of a puppy's blasted hope; an- 
 other item to the long account against our English 
 cousins. 
 
 At 8 o'clock our ship came to the dock and we went 
 ashore. 
 
 At 10 o'clock our trunks were through the Custom 
 House and placed in charge of the agents for the rail- 
 
The Ancient City of Chester 9 
 
 way, and marked for this old City of Chester, to which 
 we came on Sunday morning. 
 
 Our voyage, altogether, was delightful. The state- 
 ment of our old friend, that seasickness had been 
 abolished, seemed true; and, now, stopping at this 
 frontier city of old England, we dream of the wonders 
 and excitements that lie beyond, and again wonder 
 whether " we shall touch the happy Isles, or greet the 
 great Achilles, whom we know." 
 
 I would only add that I would like to say to all my 
 friends, " Come to Europe ; and if you are able to do 
 so, sail by the good ship Umhria/' 
 
 II 
 
 The Ancient City of Chester 
 
 Oxford, England, July 20, 190 — . 
 When I first wrote to you I was at the old city of 
 Chester. Since then I have come to Oxford, the city 
 of ancient universities and churches, about seventy 
 miles from London. To-day we expect to go to Lon- 
 don, and from there to Scotland. 
 
 At Chester we found what appears to be an old 
 Roman wall. Perhaps it may not be entirely the same 
 material of which the wall consisted two thousand years 
 ago, but there can be httle doubt that its location and 
 general appearance is as it was during the time of the 
 Romans. We learn that the Roman legionaries here 
 built a wall, the circuit of which is about two miles, 
 with a gate called the East Gate, passing through 
 and under the wall, and another gate down by the 
 water, called the Water Gate, which at that time 
 
10 The Ancient City of Chester 
 
 was doubtless reached by the triremes and hghter 
 draught boats of that era. Through this enclosed 
 place were sunken streets through which marched the 
 Roman legionaries, and the whole place was a border 
 camp, or fortress, convenient to a hospitable port, by 
 means of which supphes and reinforcements might be 
 obtained, and located in the forests of ancient Britain, 
 surrounded by wild and hostile people. The sunken 
 ways then built for the convenience or safety of the 
 garrison are now streets of the city, and the houses and 
 shops appear to have been built on the original higher 
 level, and to have been carried out so as to project over 
 the sunken way, being supported by columns rising 
 from the level of the present street. These overhang- 
 ing buildings present a very curious appearance. They 
 are called Rows. In one of them is a building called 
 " God's Providence House." On it is an ancient in- 
 scription, " God's Providence is Mine Inheritance," and 
 it is understood that this building stood there in the 
 seventeenth century, in the time of the plague. The 
 tradition is that no one in this old house was then 
 stricken, and that that was the only house in the place 
 that did not yield a victim to the terrible plague, and 
 that the inscription was put there by its pious owner. 
 
 But it is not alone in the relics of Roman conquest 
 or of Roman domination that we see proofs of the 
 antiquity that has given Chester the sobriquet of " The 
 Ancient City." 
 
 Here is an old cathedral whose steps are worn by the 
 feet of generations of pious worshipers. Its walls are 
 adorned with pictures in mosaic, giving evidence, in 
 their fading colors, and in their antique characters, of 
 
The Ancient City of Chester 11 
 
 the many years they have been on those walls. The 
 cathedral, venerable in style of interior decoration, and 
 in its exterior Gothic points and pinnacles, is said once 
 to have been a monastery, and it still has the old clois- 
 ters, fairly preserved, imbedded in massive walls. 
 These cloisters are grouped around a small piece of 
 green turf which, doubtless, was once a garden for 
 the monks who here sought a retreat and refuge from 
 the fierce encounters of those warlike and tempestuous 
 times ; and here, we may beheve, they found peace and 
 happiness in worship. 
 
 The old Church of St. John the Baptist, now partly 
 in ruins, is another testimony to the antiquity of Ches- 
 ter. We approached this church through a yard in 
 which the numerous graves were marked by stones, some 
 broken or leaning, and nearly all covered with moss or 
 mold, and so much had the "tooth of time " eaten 
 into them that their lettering was hardly legible. As 
 we approached the church we saw a tower of brown 
 stone about as high as the walls of the church. A guide 
 or attendant, whose loquacity seemed to be stimulated 
 by the hope of a " tip," soon joined us. He informed 
 us that the upper part of the tower crumbled and fell 
 about twenty years ago, but not so as to injure the 
 main structure of the church. The roof is supported 
 by two rows of heavy columns, and the columns lean 
 to one side and have been tied together by iron bands 
 to give them support. The loquacious guide informed 
 us that the arches between these columns were of the 
 type known as " Old Norman," and I suppose they were 
 constructed at least 1000 years ago. Behind the chan- 
 cel were ruined and broken walls, extending twenty or 
 
12 The Ancient City of Chester 
 
 thirty feet, the remains of chambers in which, at one 
 time, Thomas De Quincey hved, so were told. 
 
 The guide next pointed out to us a neat brick house 
 on a pleasant slope a mile or two away, the house being 
 almost hidden by the overhanging and intervening 
 trees. In it, the guide informed us, Thomas Hughes 
 passed his last days. Thomas Hughes's principal dis- 
 tinction in America is that he wrote the story of " Tom 
 Brown " — " Tom Brown at Rugby " and " Tom Brown 
 at Oxford." The guide informed us that Mr. Hughes 
 returned from America an old man, broken in fortune, 
 and was then appointed to a judgeship in that locality. 
 
 I remembered hearing, some years ago, that Thomas 
 Hughes had purchased a large plot of land in Tennes- 
 see for the purpose of establishing a colony to be popu- 
 lated and conducted according to his ideals. And as 
 we looked at the modest cottage where Thomas Hughes 
 had lived and died, my heart warmed toward the man 
 who had left us such a fine story of schoolboy life, and 
 who gave us his ideals in the story of Tom Brown — 
 honest, truthful, generous, and brave. Perhaps it was 
 because Thomas Hughes had high ideals, and loved to 
 find and reveal the best in his fellow-men, that he at- 
 tempted in Tennessee what proved to be a failure. But, 
 after all, is it not much better to be an optimist, and to 
 have high ideals, and, in striving to hve up to them, to 
 fail, than it is always to keep to the safe middle ways 
 of life? 
 
 Taking a drive through one of the many fine macada- 
 mized roads that lead from the city into the surround- 
 ing country, our carriage stopped in the center of a 
 high stone bridge, from which we looked out on a river 
 
The Ancient City of Chester 13 
 
 which, from that point of view, did not seem much 
 wider than the Erie Canal, but it was fringed with 
 bushes and bordered by smiling fields which were dot- 
 ted with stately trees and luxuriant with verdure, and 
 which, with the river, made a most attractive picture. 
 Our driver told us, " That is the River Dee." " The 
 River Dee ! " The name seemed to revive some old 
 memory, faint and far, like the music of a dream ; but, 
 near or far, it still pursued me, and seemed somehow 
 to remind of some old ballad melody. And what was 
 the music, the echo of which was awakened or half -re- 
 called, as our stolid and prosaic driver, pointing with 
 his whip over the side of the bridge, told us that the 
 stream below was " The River Dee " ? 
 
 The next day we went to Grosvenor Museum, where 
 we saw a picture and a bust of Charles Kingsley, who, 
 we were told, while he was a Canon of the Enghsh 
 Church, officiated at the Cathedral, and lived in Chester. 
 As I saw the face, and heard the name of that great 
 divine, novelist, and poet, to me came spontaneously the 
 words of Kingsley's lyric poem, " The Sands of Dee " : 
 
 " O Mary, go and call the cattle home, 
 And call the cattle home, 
 
 Across the sands of Dee. 
 
 They rowed her in across the rolling foam, 
 The cruel, hungry foam. 
 
 To her grave beside the sea: 
 But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home, 
 
 Across the sands of Dee! 
 
 And England is full of such reminiscences and re- 
 minders. The same day we drove to Hawarden Castle, 
 
14 The Ancient City of Chester 
 
 where Gladstone spent his last days, and where he died 
 but a few years ago. Near by is the old church where 
 he worshiped, and his son still officiates as rector, and 
 the beautiful hbrary building, erected as a memorial 
 of the great Commoner. 
 
 In the other direction from Chester is Eaton Hall, 
 the ducal palace of the Duke of Westminster. The 
 grandfather of the present duke was the first of that 
 line who held the ducal title and honor ; it came to him, 
 as we are told, through Mr. Gladstone when he was 
 Prime Minister. Gladstone, himself, so I recollect, more 
 than once refused a title and a coronet ; and how much 
 greater is the name of Gladstone than any paper title 
 royalty could have conferred upon him ! 
 
 Chester lies near Liverpool, and I would advise all 
 Americans who come to England by way of Liverpool 
 to visit Chester. To me the impressive thing in Eng- 
 land is the age of the country, shown in its macadam- 
 ized roads, its beautiful hedges, and large and mag- 
 nificent trees, and when I look out on these fields, 
 which have been tilled for a thousand years, and see 
 the herds of sheep and cattle, the luxuriant fields of 
 waving wheat, and its verdant hills, I think this is a 
 fair and beautiful land, and as we Americans rejoice 
 in the glories and beauties of our own country, we can 
 understand how Englishmen love Old England, and 
 why England was known in song and story as " Merrie 
 England." 
 
 Leaving the " Ancient City of Chester," we came to 
 Leamington, whence we drove to Warwick Castle, 
 understood to be the home and seat of the great king- 
 maker. From there we went to Kenilworth, which is 
 
The World's Metropolis 15 
 
 now a ruin, and in its ruins seems to be touched by the 
 sad and pathetic story of Amy Robsart, and of the 
 revels and rejoicings of Queen EHzabeth. 
 
 Now we are in Oxford, in which are twenty-two his- 
 toric old colleges. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The World's Metropolis 
 
 London. 
 A WEEK ago to-day we left Oxford and came to 
 London. The distance was about seventy miles ; we 
 made the journey in about one hour. Here I should 
 like to say something of the English railways, and Eng- 
 lish traveling. 
 
 Their cars, it seems to me, are distinctly inferior to 
 our American railway cars. They are called carriages, 
 and they are, in general, more like a carriage than they 
 are like the cars or coaches used for passenger traffic 
 on our American railways. 
 
 The cars are divided into compartments extending 
 from side to side of the car, and, say, about six feet long. 
 There are two seats in each compartment, so arranged 
 that the passengers sit facing each other. When the 
 cars are in motion, on most of the cars, there are no 
 means whatever for communication between the con- 
 ductor and the passengers. These cars impress me as 
 though they were constructed from the old-fashioned 
 stage coach. Take an old-fashioned stage coach and 
 take away the seat for the driver and have the seat on 
 the top of the coach removed, and put on low wheels 
 and flanges on the wheels, and the result would be some- 
 
16 The World's Metropolis 
 
 thing very similar to English railway carriages. But 
 if their cars are distinctly inferior to ours, it seems to 
 ^ me their railroads are distinctly superior. As I ob- 
 served, these railroads are carried under and over the 
 intersecting highways or railroads. Sharp curves are 
 avoided, and much of the way on our journey from 
 Oxford the railway was laid considerably below the 
 surrounding country and in an open cut. 
 
 On such a road the speed is about one mile per min- 
 ute, and seems to be easy of attainment. We have a 
 few roads in America which have recently been brought 
 to as high a state of perfection. I should say the 
 Great Western Railway is about in the same class as 
 the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and 
 Washington. Coming by such a train and at such a 
 rate of speed without crossing any intersecting road, 
 without making any grade crossing we arrived at the 
 Paddington station, which is well within the compact 
 portion of London. 
 
 When about half an hour out our attention was 
 called to a beautiful river, not far from the railroad, 
 along which were many boat houses, groves, and other 
 places which seemed to be fitted up for pleasure. I was 
 told that this was the Thames, the great river always 
 associated with the name of London. 
 
 I had supposed that the Thames was principally an 
 arm of the sea, and so principally made up by tide 
 water. This beautiful river which we saw ghding down 
 from these pleasant valleys seemed even there to be a 
 stream of considerable importance. It seemed to me 
 about as large as the Hudson River above Troy. 
 
 England is comparatively a flat country, and water 
 
The World's Metropolis 17 
 
 from rainfalls does not go into the streams in such 
 deluges as it does in our more mountainous country, 
 consequently the rise and fall of their streams is less 
 frequent, and the amount of each rise much less than 
 in our country, and the banks of the English streams, 
 instead of presenting the bare, denuded appearance 
 which we so often see even on our most beautiful rivers, 
 very generally are covered with turf, or other vegeta- 
 tion, so that the banks are not readily distinguishable 
 from the green and gently sloping fields that lie back 
 from the water. I noticed this particularly on the 
 Thames, which seemed to flow full between beautiful 
 banks, with the grass coming right down to the water's 
 edge on both sides. 
 
 And so we are at last in London, historical and gi- 
 gantic London, almost weird and strange with its 
 throngs of memories, history, and associations. To one 
 stopping here, there is no need to study history or guide 
 books to inform oneself that this is a great city. As we 
 sit upon the banks of a great river there comes to us 
 a sense of the power of the great interior fountains that 
 are sending their waters to supply and replenish the 
 volume that is rolling by, and as I gaze on these 
 thoroughfares, crowded with thronging life, I can but 
 feel that I am in the center of one of earth's greatest 
 congregations of sentient and throbbing life. The 
 guide book tells me that London has a population of 
 six and one-half millions ; and not only is it the largest 
 city on the globe, but it is the largest city that has ever 
 been put on this earth. Its population is more than 
 twice that of Paris, a little less than twice that of 
 Greater New York; if my recollection serves me right, 
 
18 The World's IMetropolis 
 
 about the same as that of the great Empire State. 
 When Brooklyn was compelled to give up its individual 
 existence, and was merged into Greater New York, we 
 believed that, in itself, it was a city of very considerable 
 importance. Yet, as I recollect, its population, accord- 
 ing to the then last preceding census, was not quite a 
 million people. Imagine six such cities and business 
 merged together, and the result would be a city of about 
 the size of London. 
 
 I am not trying to describe all that I see in my little 
 journeyings; the guide book and photographs and the 
 Stoddard lectures, with their moving pictures, will do 
 that work much better than can be done by any letter. 
 I am only trying to tell you how what I see and hear 
 from day to day impresses one who has spent his whole 
 life on American soil; and, to me, the vastness and 
 gigantic proportion of this great city continually im- 
 presses and makes my wonder grow. 
 
 I called at the American Embassy. I had known Mr. 
 Choate in New York, and also in our Constitutional 
 Convention, of which he was president. I saw in West- 
 minster Abbey, on a marble bust, the words " Rare Ben 
 Jonson." I should say of our American Ambassador, 
 " Rare Joe Choate," a simple American gentleman, with 
 all the culture of the schools and rich with the learn- 
 ing which comes in a generation spent at the bar in 
 busy, alert New York. Mr. Choate received me kindly, 
 and naturally made me feel that though wandering 
 far from home I was still an American' citizen, and still 
 in some degree under the protection of the American 
 flag. As I left I thanked Mr. Choate for his courtesy 
 and kindness, and could but say to him that his courtesy 
 
The World's Metropolis 19 
 
 to me was as if I had seen the American flag dipped to 
 me as I was passing by. 
 
 Through the kindness of Mr. Choate I was permitted 
 to be present at a session of the House of Commons, and 
 so to listen to an exciting debate in relation to sugar 
 bounties and countervailing duties. That is one of the 
 measures brought forward by the government, and is 
 generally credited to Mr. Chamberlain, the Colonial 
 Secretary. The debate clearly showed that, in the opin- 
 ion of the House, the United Kingdom is on the eve of 
 a general election that is to be conducted on economic 
 issues, and that the question of protection, or, as it is 
 called here, preferential duties, is to be a leading issue 
 in the campaign, and that the leading argument in 
 favor of such protection or preference will be drawn 
 from the history of our great republic, which, adhering 
 unshrinkingly to a protection policy, has solved suc- 
 cessfully the most difficult problems, and attained a 
 degree of prosperity which is the wonder and admira- 
 tion of Old World statesmen. 
 
 And always America, her career, history, and destiny, 
 are in the forefront of every problem which comes to 
 the European statesman for attention. 
 
 Of course, I went to see Westminster Abbey and St. 
 Paul's Cathedral, neither of which I shall attempt to 
 describe, but I feel satisfied if I am able to put into 
 words a little of the impression which those mighty 
 monuments made upon my mind. But when I approach 
 topics such as those, I would wish that I had nothing 
 else to consider, and so for another letter I shall re- 
 serve St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. 
 
20 Westminster Abbey 
 
 IV 
 
 Westminster Abbey 
 
 Edinburgh, Aug. 13, 190 — . 
 We came to this place from London, and find it a 
 beautiful and historic city, very rich in memories of 
 its great men. The place interests me so much that I 
 should like to say something about it to you and your 
 readers, but I have promised to give you my impressions 
 of the great Abbey and great Cathedral of London, and 
 I feel that I should do so before undertaking the nearer 
 and more inviting task of writing of Edinburgh, 
 " Royal Edinburgh," as Mrs. Oliphant correctly names 
 it in her book. 
 
 Westminster Abbey is an ancient and stately build- 
 ing, but it is the use to which it has been put, and the 
 long continuance of that use, that makes its name sig- 
 nificant and makes it known as one of the most dignified 
 and impressive structures on the face of our planet. 
 From the days of the early English kings until now 
 Westminster Abbey has been used as the burial place 
 and mausoleum of great or distinguished men, and it 
 is the long continuance of that use, and the good judg- 
 ment and fairness with which the selection of those to 
 whom such place of burial and sepulcher should be 
 allotted, that, I think, give it that dignity and im- 
 pressiveness which makes it clearly one of the wonders 
 of the world. 
 
 Perhaps because the space in the Abbey is so nearly 
 occupied, the Cathedral, in some respects, is becoming 
 a similar mausoleum; and, perhaps, in that respect it 
 
Westminster Abbey 21 
 
 might be deemed an annex to the Abbey. Very im- 
 pressive, indeed, is that old Cathedral, with its towering 
 dome and spires, ever climbing heavenwards. Someone 
 has said that architecture is a poem in stone ; following 
 the simile, St. Paul's Cathedral, symmetrical and ar- 
 tistic in windows, pinnacles, and dome, all seeming to 
 aspire and climb upwards, is like a prayer and aspira- 
 tion to divinity cut in stone ; and standing beneath the 
 great dome, and passing from there down the great 
 nave and transept, with drooping flags and speaking 
 marble on either side, each a memorial of some great 
 man, or of some great deed of daring or of sacrifice, the 
 Cathedral seemed to be more and more impressive, per- 
 haps more like the imagined Hall of Valhalla than any 
 other earthly structure. 
 
 But, after all, perhaps the most impressive part of 
 the Cathedral is the crypt. To reach the crypt we 
 descended about twenty feet through a carefully locked 
 door, which is opened for us, and find ourselves on 
 another level, and on another marble floor about twenty 
 feet lower; from this floor rise the great walls, but- 
 tresses, and columns which sustain the enormous weight 
 of the soaring structure above. Near the foot of the 
 stairs is the grave of Sir Christopher Wren, the great 
 architect of the Cathedral. Near the grave is a slab 
 with an appropriate inscription in Latin, ending in 
 the familiar phrase which we may construe, " If monu- 
 ment you seek, look around." Passing down the long 
 nave, with monument, grave, or tablet on either side, 
 about in the center of the nave and, I should judge, 
 nearly under the center of the great dome, we see a 
 structure of marble and metal, rising nearly to the floor 
 
22 Westminster Abbey- 
 
 above ; on the top is a metal casket, which is said to have 
 been designed and made by order of Cardinal Wolsey: 
 and inside, in a plain wooden coffin, constructed from 
 the mast of a captured ship, are the remains of one of 
 the greatest men of history, viz., Lord Nelson. Before 
 we entered the crypt we had read the grand lines of 
 Tennyson on Wellington and Nelson. 
 
 These lines I must reproduce here; they are as 
 follows : 
 
 " Who is he that cometh, like an honour'd guest, 
 With banner and with music, with soldier and with priest. 
 With a nation weeping, and breaking on my rest? 
 Mighty Seaman, this is he 
 Was great by land as thou by sea. 
 Thine island loves thee well, thou famous man, 
 The greatest sailor since the world began. 
 Now, to the roll of muffled drums, 
 To thee the greatest soldier comes; 
 For this is he 
 Was great by land as thou by sea." 
 
 Passing further down the nave we come to another 
 structure, like the other, rising nearly to the floor above. 
 There, in a casket of marble, beautifully cut and 
 tightly closed, we are told are the remains of Welling- 
 ton — the Iron Duke — and, going still a little further 
 down the nave, we come to a great metal carriage, 
 which, we are told, is the gigantic triumphal car on 
 which the body of the great duke, enclosed in this 
 marble casket, was brought to the place where it now 
 rests. This carriage, we are told, was made from can- 
 non captured by Wellington, and was drawn by a great 
 number of white horses attached to a pole or shaft, 
 which has now been removed from the car; and, stand- 
 
Westminster Abbey 23 
 
 ing there in that dim hght, between those two great 
 tombs, we could almost feel, with Tennyson, that per- 
 haps the waking ear of the great Admiral became for 
 a moment sensitive as the gigantic car bearing the dust 
 of Wellington entered that place of shadows and of 
 graves. 
 
 Surely, if aught could touch the " dull cold ear of 
 death," a nation's wailing and the nation's homage over 
 the remains of their great soldier should have reached 
 the spirit of the great Admiral, whose dust is so 
 grandly enshrined beneath the soaring spires of the 
 great Cathedral. 
 
 The Abbey had its first use as a mausoleum from the 
 fact that it was the burial place for kings ; but the 
 English are a very practical and sensible people, and 
 by-and-by it seemed that it should be made the burial 
 place of those greater than monarchs, whose brows had 
 worn no diadem; and so, by-and-by, there were placed 
 in the greater Abbey the dust, statues, and memorial 
 tablets of Milton, Newton, and other great but untitled 
 dead, whose names give dignity and impressiveness even 
 to Westminster Abbey. 
 
 Nor is the right of burial there dependent on rank 
 or on position, except the rank or position given by 
 great thoughts or by great deeds. It seems to me that 
 there is no young Englishman who resolves to do an 
 act of great daring or sacrifice for his country but may 
 ask, and fairly expect, that his remains shall find a 
 resting place in those dim shadows, with the flag of 
 his country drooping over him. One of the finest me- 
 morials in the Abbey, gigantic in size and done in speak- 
 ing marble, is that of three captains, all young men, all 
 
24 Westminster Abbey 
 
 of whom were mortally wounded in the same great bat- 
 tle. And the monuments to soldiers and sailors, not 
 high in rank, who have died for England on the slip- 
 pery deck or in the battle front in India at Waterloo 
 are very frequent. 
 
 In one of the niches of the Cathedral is a monument 
 to those of the cavalry division who died during the 
 Crimean War, which carries the names of generals, 
 colonels, privates, and drummer boj'^s ; and over the 
 memorial hangs the drooping flag, as though in con- 
 tinuous salute to those loyal dead. 
 
 Nor are the monuments confined to martial heroes. 
 In the Abbey or in the Cathedral — for to me they 
 seem one in purpose and effect — are monuments or 
 inscriptions to Dr. Samuel Johnson, to Newton, and to 
 Darwin, to Lyell and Locke, to Richard Cobden, the 
 great champion of the policy of free trade ; to Howard, 
 the engineer, and to Cooper, the famous surgeon. 
 Among the most attractive portions of the Abbey is 
 what is called the Poets' Corner. 
 
 Here are monuments of Tennyson, Browning, Dry- 
 den, Landor, and William Wordsworth, and to our 
 own Longfellow. Nor are the favorite heroes and 
 heroines of the dramatic stage without memorial and 
 remembrance here. We find in the Abbey monuments 
 to Garrick, Kemble, and Mrs. Siddons ; while in the 
 Cathedral, near the grave of Sir Christopher Wren, 
 is a stone inscribed with the name of Arthur Sullivan, 
 the genial musical composer, known in America princi- 
 pally as the author of the music of " Pinafore " and 
 " The Mikado." I was told by the guide that Sullivan 
 was buried in the Cathedral at the request of Queen 
 
Westminster Abbey 25 
 
 Victoria. Sir John Franklin, the great Arctic explorer, 
 and General Gordon are both remembered and honored 
 among the stately monuments of the Abbey. To me 
 there is a strange parallelism between Sir John Frank- 
 lin, the Arctic explorer, and General Gordon. The lives 
 of each were prominently identified with works for the 
 uplifting of their fellow-men, and yet how different the 
 story of their long labors, and how alike their tragic 
 endings ; the one sailed into the snow and frost and dim 
 twilight of the Arctic seas, and there died in that in- 
 tolerable cold, no one knows exactly how or when; the 
 other took his last mission to the torrid Soudan and 
 there died at the hands of the fanatical Dervishes, how 
 or when we only know from the story and confession 
 of his murderers. 
 
 Each of those great men has there his marble bust 
 and an epitaph written by the great poet, whose marble 
 bust is not far away. The laureate's epitaph on Frank- 
 lin is as follows: 
 
 " Not here : the white North has thy bones ; and thou. 
 Heroic sailor soul. 
 Art passing on thy happier voyage now 
 Toward no earthly pole." 
 
 His epitaph on General Gordon reads : 
 
 " Warrior of God, man's friend, not here below. 
 But somewhere buried in the waste Soudan, 
 Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know 
 
 This earth hath borne no simpler, nobler man." 
 
 ' This is, indeed, the great burial monument of the 
 English-speaking people of the world. Here, side by 
 side, in speaking marble, stand Disraeli and Gladstone, 
 
26 Westminster Abbey 
 
 their long rivalries ended ; and here in marble are Grat- 
 tan, the Irish orator, and Fox, Pitt, Peel, and the other 
 great ones, whose policies he championed or resisted in 
 the name of Ireland. 
 
 But what most, and most happily, impressed me was 
 the thought that America and Americans have a part 
 in the honor and monuments of the great Abbey. 
 
 There are few finer monuments and few monuments 
 more conspicuous or better placed than that of General 
 Wolfe, who fell in the moment of the victory which 
 secured Quebec and a great continent to the dominion 
 and ascendency , of the English-speaking race, and 
 gave a death stroke to the dominion of France in North 
 America. Our War of the Revolution came so soon 
 after the French and Indian War that the magnitude 
 and importance of the former war has been lost sight 
 of. We call the latter war the War for Independence ; 
 but very justly might it be said that the former war 
 was a war for existence. It was a war fought under 
 most adverse conditions. Battles were fought on snow- 
 shoes, in wliich the wounded and weak were frozen, and 
 in which the healthy and unwounded barely escaped. 
 There were marches made through the untrodden snow 
 in unexplored forests. Parkman was our first historian 
 who understood and placed in their proper perspective 
 the events of that long war; and, as I read of the ter- 
 rible sufferings and daring of those winter campaigns, 
 Napoleon's advance to and retreat from Moscow seem 
 in comparison a very little thing. 
 
 It was through William Pitt the elder (afterward 
 Lord Chatham), and through the splendid military 
 genious and daring of General Wolfe, that the Enghsh 
 
Westminster Abbey 27 
 
 colonies triumphed, and that North America was given 
 to the Enghsh-speaking race rather than the French, 
 and equally fine and equally well placed with the monu- 
 ment to Wolfe is the monument to the Earl of Chatham. 
 
 I know nothing more dramatic in the history of great 
 men than the last entry of the Earl of Chatham into 
 the House of Lords. He was no longer a member of 
 the House of Commons, or of the Ministry, and he had 
 retained his place in the House of Lords only because 
 the tenure there is for life. Our War of the Revolution 
 had begun, and many battles had been fought and 
 much blood had been shed. 
 
 In April, 1778, the Earl, then an old man, sick and 
 worn with his long service, made his last appearance 
 in public life. That appearance was in the House of 
 Lords, where he had come to plead for the American 
 colonies, and to enter his protest against the policy of 
 the King and of the Government toward these colonies. 
 What he was then doing was but the carrying out of 
 a line of conduct to which he had long been committed. 
 Very frequently he had spoken in relation to the policy 
 of the King and of the Government toward the Ameri- 
 can colonies, and had uniformly, strongly, and forcibly 
 opposed and protested against the policy of the Gov- 
 ernment, and had espoused and vindicated the course 
 taken by the colonies. 
 
 When he made his last entry into the House of Lords 
 he had arisen from a sick bed, and he entered the House 
 swathed in flannel, leaning on his crutches and sup- 
 ported, and almost carried, to his place by members of 
 his family circle. In such a condition he made his 
 speech, which is historic in America, and which, I think. 
 
28 Westminster Abbey- 
 
 is found in almost every book containing extracts for 
 declamation at schools and academies. As he spoke his 
 strength seemed to return to him, and his voice came 
 clear and strong as in the old days. Soon after, aris- 
 ing to speak for the second time, he fell back apparently 
 lifeless, and in a fit ; and in this unconscious condition 
 he was carried out of the House, never again to enter 
 it. He never recovered his strength, but died about a 
 month later. Chatham was a great man, a friend and 
 defender of the American colonies, and, as it seems to 
 me, we should reckon him as one of our martyrs fallen 
 in; the Thermopylae of American liberty. 
 
 And over the great west and principal entrance of the 
 Abbey, in speaking marble, stands the monument to 
 Chatham. It represents him as I would imagine him 
 standing as he made that last and most famous speech 
 against the policy of the Government in relation to the 
 American colonies ; and right by him is the monument 
 erected by Massachusetts to the brave General Howe, 
 who was killed in the French and Indian War on the 
 march to Ticonderoga. 
 
 And so, as it seems to me, Westminster Abbey, in a 
 large and just sense, is, in part, for us, citizens of the 
 great Republic beyond the sea: and if within those 
 portals, among kings and princes, those that held the 
 scepter " and wore the crown, there could be placed a 
 plain marble statue of Abraham Lincoln, it would seem 
 to me, to be an act on a par with the many that have 
 made that Abbey a mausoleum, not only for the great 
 dead of England, but for the great dead of the English- 
 speaking people. 
 
The Heart of Midlothian 2^ 
 
 The Heart of Midlothian 
 
 Edinburgh, 17th August, 190 — . 
 We came to Edinburgh direct from London, making 
 the journey in eight hours by the Great Northern Rail- 
 way. We had intended to stop at Cambridge, which, 
 next to Oxford, is one of the greatest unversity towns 
 in England, and at York and Durham, where are old 
 cathedrals which we had promised ourselves we would 
 see. But we had seen much of abbey and cathedral in 
 London, and in the roar of great London we had seemed 
 to hear the voice of the north hills calling us to the 
 land of Scott and of Bums ; and so swift and direct 
 past college, abbey, and cathedral we came, without 
 stopping, to old and historic Edinburgh. Here we 
 learned that this city is situated in the country of 
 Midlothian, that the house where Gladstone's father 
 lived is still to be seen in one of its old streets ; and 
 that when Gladstone made his last great contest for a 
 seat in the House of Commons — ^the contest that made 
 him for the third time Prime Minister of England — 
 the contest was for the right to represent this Mid- 
 lothian district. 
 
 In a small square, in an old part of the city, set in 
 a dark blue pavement, are some tiles of brighter color 
 representing a heart, and that heart in that somber 
 square they call here the " Heart of Midlothian," and 
 it is in this old historic city of Edinburgh that the plot 
 and action of Scott's " Heart of Midlothian " was laid ; 
 and a little red-tiled cottage, in an obscure street, was 
 pointed out to us as Jeanie Deans's cottage. 
 
30 The Heart of Midlothian 
 
 Straying out from our hotel, on the morning after 
 our arrival, about half a mile to our right we saw Edin- 
 burgh Castle. It is the most conspicuous object in or 
 around Edinburgh. From its highest peak we see the 
 British flag always floating. The castle is usually oc- 
 cupied by a regiment of British troops, and custom as- 
 signs this honor to a Highland regiment. This Edin- 
 burgh Castle is more rock than castle. Stevenson, the 
 novelist, whose birthplace was here, calls it a " Bass 
 Rock on dry land." It is about three hundred feet high 
 and rises precipitous and almost perpendicular on three 
 sides. One of its three sides is nearly as steep and clear- 
 cut as our Palisades, and around it, wherever the cliffy 
 breaks a little, high, perpendicular stone walls have been 
 constructed, and within these walls are towers and heavy 
 stone buildings. Edinburgh Castle, like most of the 
 castles of this country, was originally a fortress — a 
 fortress built before the days of gunpowder, and con- 
 sequently with steep walls and high towers made to 
 resist the onrush of bowmen or spearmen, rather than 
 the assault of artillery or rifles. We had visited War- 
 wick Castle before going to London ; that was the castle 
 of the old " King-maker," and presented sharply the 
 appearance of a fortress built for the days preceding 
 gunpowder. As we were leaving Warwick we passed 
 a party of young ladies, apparently school girls, and 
 one of them, I suppose a teacher, was pointing out to 
 her companions the openings in the walls of the castle 
 above us, apparently formed for the convenience of de- 
 fending bowmen, and pointed out the place where great 
 stones were rolled down so as to rebound and crush 
 assailants. At Kenilworth, a short distance from War- 
 
The Heart of Midlothian 31 
 
 wick, the same general characteristics appeared again; 
 through one of its crumbling towers we saw the iron 
 lining, or ribs, of an old well, going down through the 
 central tower into the xock beneath, so that in times 
 of siege its defenders should have the necessary supply 
 of water. And in one of the towers of Kenilworth 
 Castle we saw a deep pit, encased on all sides by rock 
 or stone, and that, we were told by the voluble guide, was 
 the old dungeon ; and he named to us princes and kings 
 who had been held prisoners within the dark and forbid- 
 ding walls of that old dungeon. 
 
 Edinburgh Castle, like Warwick and Kenilworth, is a 
 remainder and reminder of those troublous and cruel 
 times. In castles such as these the kings and rulers 
 usually resided, apparently to secure their own personal 
 safety. If we could imagine a condition of society which 
 would make it desirable, there should be a fortress on 
 Fort Greene hill where our Mayor and other city officials 
 should retire at night to secure themselves against cap- 
 ture or slaughter, we should probably imagine the state 
 of society indicated by these old castles. These pic- 
 turesque ruins are interesting and historic ; but as places 
 of residence they are cold, damp, and dark, and, in 
 my opinion, repellent rather than attractive. 
 
 And such is Edinburgh Castle, a few stone buildings 
 perched on a steep and rocky hill ; and so, regarding the 
 castle as a fortress, it is easy to see why that high rock 
 was selected as the place of this border fortress. 
 
 We visited the castle the first morning after our 
 arrival here, and driving up to it, we came upon a little 
 parade ground large enough for the evolutions of a sin- 
 gle regiment, and which had been constructed for that 
 
32 The Heart of Midlotliian 
 
 purpose. As we came to this parade ground we saw a 
 re^'inieut luarchiiio- and counterniarclilno-, l)ein<2^ drilled 
 by its colonel. We were very fortunate in this, for the 
 regiment, the famous Black Watch, was in full High- 
 land costume; in other words, driHing in full-dress uni- 
 form, with kilts and tartans, their brawny and bare legs 
 taking the Highland quickstep over the parade ground. 
 We were told that this regiment had just come from 
 South Africa, that it had been on foreign service for 
 twenty years, and that when it marched back there were 
 but two men in its ranks who were with it when it went 
 away. We thought of the refrain of Kipling : 
 
 " We have salted it down with our bones, 
 (Poor devils) — have salted it down with our bones; 
 We have bought her tiie same, with the sword and the flame. 
 And salted it down with our bones. 
 Salted it down with our bones." 
 
 Passing this parade ground, we came inside the walls 
 and among the stone buildings that crown the hill. 
 There we saw the half-moon battery, from which a gun 
 is fired every day at 1 o'clock. A little further up, on 
 the highest part of the rock, we were taken inside a little 
 stone building, bare and cold and entirely without orna- 
 ment ; this, we were told, was St. Margaret's Chapel, and 
 while it may not be the ver^^ stones and material which 
 stood in the days of Queen Margaret, it is doubtless a 
 reproduction of the little chapel where Queen INIargaret 
 worshiped nearly a thousand years ago. I know no 
 prettier story in history or fiction than the idyl of the 
 coming of Margaret to this castle. Here lived Mal- 
 colm Canmore, King of Scotland, mentioned as Malcolm 
 
The Heart of Midlotliian 88 
 
 in the play of " Macbeth." He was of Gaelic descent, 
 doubtless witli the coiirao-o and stern, but ru/:]f^ed, virtues 
 of Roderick l)hu. Into the Firth of Forth — four miles 
 away — one moniing came three vessels. Going down 
 to the harbor, the Kin<]^ there met a Saxon princess, 
 most of whose life had been spent in the luxury of the 
 court of her grandfather, in southern Europe. She had 
 sailed from London attended by her ladies and royal 
 retinue, intending to go to the court of her grand- 
 father, but had been driven northwards by a great 
 storm, until they hnd been forced to come into the Firth 
 of Forthi for refuge and shelter. We have no story of 
 the wooing, but we know that in a few days, in a little 
 chapel, between this rocky castle and the bay where 
 these strange vessels lay (still called St. Margaret's 
 Bay), the King and the Saxon princess were married, 
 and that she came to this rocky fortress to dwell, bring- 
 ing into Scotland much of the softer niid more cultured 
 life of England and southern Euro})e, and that ]\vr 
 gentle nature so prevailed that, in these rough, troub- 
 lous times, she was beloved and revered by all, and that 
 she left many children, who, with their descendants, suc- 
 ceeded to the Scottish throne, holding it for many 
 hundred years. From this little cliapel we passed 
 through a large room filled with ancient weapons, spears, 
 and swords, and armor for men and for horses, and on 
 men and horses of wood or wax was placed or ;ir ranged 
 this heavy armor. On the horses were the knights 
 armed with heavy swords, and around tlu\se horsemen 
 were foot soldiers, also cased in steel, carrying pikes 
 which consisted of strong poles about 15 or 20 feet long, 
 at the end of which were long, sharp knives, or daggers. 
 
34 The Heart of Midlothian 
 
 From this array it was easy to imagine, and we seemed to 
 see, the front of " grim visaged war " in those rough 
 and rugged .days. From there, still inside the fortress, 
 we went to a room called Queen Mary's Room. This is 
 the room where Mary Queen of Scots is said to have 
 lived, and in a little communicating room, certainly not 
 larger than a small hall bedroom in a Brooklyn house, 
 we were told the Queen bore James VI. of Scotland, who 
 became James I. of England, and under whom the crowns 
 of England and Scotland were united. 
 
 The next day we went to Holyrood Palace. There, 
 also. Is a room called Queen Mary's room, and in con- 
 nection with it a small room, called Mary's bedroom. 
 Leading to those rooms were dark stone stairways, wind- 
 ing upward within the circular walls of the palace. In 
 one of these rooms, we were told, Queen Mary was sitting 
 when a band of conspirators, headed by her husband, 
 entered the rooms, and, in her presence, demanded the 
 life of Rizzio, one of her attendants, a musician, who 
 had come from the French court. 
 
 The next day, In the National Picture Gallery, we 
 saw a picture of this old room, with Rizzio lying just 
 outside, dead from fifty dagger wounds, and the con- 
 spirators, In full armor, with swords and daggers drawn, 
 standing over him, while In the next room her dastard 
 husband, the coward Darnley — ^who was soon to die from 
 a similar conspiracy — appears, as though striving by 
 caresses and excuses to comfort the grief-stricken and 
 affrighted queen. And so In two days we saw the 
 historic reminders of two queens of Scotland, each of 
 whose lives runs through and through the web of Scot- 
 tish history and Scottish romance, both beautiful, both 
 
The Heart of Midlothian 35 
 
 reared in the court-life of southern Europe, each the 
 mother of long lines of kings — the one, altogether fortu- 
 nate, with a grace and sympathy that caused her to 
 plead with her sterner husband to release captive pris- 
 oners of war, and through all her life 
 
 *' To make mild 
 A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees 
 Subdue them to the useful and the good," 
 
 and who ended her days in that old chapel, surrounded 
 by her ladies, and enriched by the love of a warm- 
 hearted people, whose descendants still love and venerate 
 her as Saint Margaret. The other queen, altogether 
 unfortunate, was to leave a memory and history running 
 through scenes of blood and tragedy, and was at last 
 suddenly, and in the gloom and chill of the early morn- 
 ing, to meet her death by the headsman and the ax. 
 Such reminders and records, though they may be in- 
 teresting, are certainly not pleasing. These scenes of 
 the castle and the palace seemed to us much too somber ; 
 and so the next day we strayed through a little park 
 running along the side of Princes Street — the principal 
 street of Edinburgh — where we found a marble statue 
 of Sir Walter Scott, the great " Wizard of the North." 
 This statue represents Sir Walter sitting, attended 
 by one of his favorite hounds, and is placed underneath 
 the central portion of a great monument of brown stone, 
 rising with gothic spires and pinnacles SOO feet above, 
 and, after the castle, the most conspicuous object in 
 Edinburgh. In the same park are bronze statues to Dr. 
 Livingstone, the great African explorer ; to Allan Ram- 
 say, the early Scottish poet, who preceded Burns; to 
 
36 The Heart of Midlothian 
 
 Professor Wilson, known in literature as " Christopher 
 North," and to Adam Black, the publisher, all of whom 
 were citizens of Edinburgh, and a little further down is 
 a monument to Robert Burns, and a statue to Abraham 
 Lincoln, the great poet and the great commoner of the 
 common people. 
 
 This statue to Lincoln is of bronze, and represents 
 him standing on a base of polished granite, from the 
 foot of which a freed slave looks up gratefully toward 
 the great emancipator. This statue of Lincoln is said 
 to be the first statue to him ever erected in Europe. 
 This monument was erected by Scotsmen and Scotch- 
 Americans as a memorial of the Scotch- Americans who 
 fell in the Civil War, and is spoken of in the guide 
 book as 
 
 " Another clasp of loving hands, 
 Another link across the sea." 
 
 The statue and monument to Scott are directly in 
 front of our hotel, and we find ourselves under the spell 
 of the wizard of the north, and we read again the " Lady 
 of the Lake." We are told that less than a day's 
 journey to the north is the land of the " Lady of the 
 Lake " — Ellen's Lake, the country of Roderick Dhu and 
 the wild and rugged Trossachs — the hills and lakes for- 
 ever populous with the characters and imagery of that 
 most beautiful poem. And so we haste away to the hills 
 and the lakes forever touched by the rich imagery of 
 Scott, and sounding wdth the wild strain of his " Harp 
 of the North." 
 
 While staying here we met Judge Vann, of our Court 
 of Appeals, who, with his charming wife, is utilizing his 
 
Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 37 
 
 summer vacation by taking a journey to the land of 
 Scott. It chanced that we were stopping at the same 
 hotel, and I found it very pleasant, indeed, to meet him 
 after traveling so long and so far among strangers. 
 They left a week ago, hastening back so that the Judge 
 might have a week in Albany before the beginning of 
 the fall session of the Court of Appeals. 
 
 VI 
 
 The Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 
 
 The Trossachs, Scotland, Aug. 22, 190 — . 
 This is regarded as a central point in the " Lady of the 
 Lake " country. We came by rail to Callendar ; from c» 
 there we took stage to this place. The stage ride is 
 about ten miles, and we found ourselves in a party of 
 five, riding on top of a stage running from Callendar 
 to the Trossachs. 
 
 Shortly after leaving Callendar it commenced to rain, 
 and in a short time it became a perfect downpour, driv- ^■ 
 ing in our faces and starting little brooks which came 
 flashing down the steep hillsides along the road ; but as 
 no one travels in Scotland without a waterproof gar- 
 ment, we were prepared with the necessary wraps, and, 
 cheered by the opening and nearer views of the great ^ 
 mountains, we faced the pelting rain in cheerful and 
 almost joyous mood. Sitting at my right was an old 
 gentleman, who, I afterward learned, was in his ninetieth 
 year, a hale, hearty, healthy, fine specimen of the Eng- 
 lish yeomanry. As we rounded one of the lesser 
 mountains the old gentleman said to the driver, " Where 
 is Coilantogle ford.? " The driver said, pointing to a '^ 
 
38 Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 
 
 gate and a few sticks of timber, " That is it over there " ; 
 then, in the pelting rain, the old gentleman answered : 
 
 " ' For this is Coilantogle ford. 
 
 And thou must keep thee with thj sword.' " 
 
 From there our ride carried us along the shores of 
 Lake Vennachar and Lake Achray, beautiful lakes about 
 half a mile wide, lighting up the wild, rugged valley 
 through which we were passing ; and in that pelting rain 
 the lakes looked about as dry as the hills or anything 
 around us. So we progressed onwards and we did not 
 hear again from our yeoman friend until we came to a 
 heavy stone bridge carrying the road over a little 
 stream, which, swollen to a mountain flood, poured 
 swiftly down to the lakes. The driver said, as we came 
 to this bridge : " That is the Brigg of Turk " ; when 
 our yeoman friend repeated: 
 
 " ' And when the Brigg of Turk was won. 
 The headmost horseman rode alone.' " 
 
 The next day, when the sun was shining and we were 
 able to see better than in the rain of the day before, we 
 saw that the stage which we rode that ten miles on was 
 named " Roderick Dhu," and another stage running on 
 the same line was named " James Fitz-James." 
 
 A little farther on to the west is Loch Katrine, an- 
 other very beautiful lake — perhaps the most beautiful 
 of this chain of lakes stretching through these Highland 
 mountains almost from sea to sea. Near the head of 
 that lake is a little island heavily wooded, not larger than 
 three of four city lots, and that is called " Ellen's Isle." 
 
Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 39 
 
 In the hotel I found on sale an illustrated edition of 
 the " Lady of the Lake," indicating where the deer ran 
 and the hunt followed in the wild and stirring chase, 
 which is the opening incident in the story of the " Lady 
 of the Lake," and in that book is a picture of " The 
 Combat," showing Roderick Dhu, when, 
 
 "Like adder darting from his coil, 
 Like wolf that dashes through the toil, 
 Like mountain cat who guards her young. 
 Full at Fitz-James's throat he sprung; 
 Received, but recked not of a wound, 
 And locked his arms his foeman round." 
 
 Following the road half a mile toward Ellen's Isle, 
 we passed a wild mountain glen, which the map coming 
 with our new edition of the " Lady of the Lake " tells us 
 is the point where the " Gallant Gray " fell exhausted, to 
 rise no more, and, as we passed the little glen, peering 
 through the shadows among the rocks and the thick- 
 growing trees, we could almost imagine we saw Fitz- 
 James as he says : 
 
 " I little thought when first thy rein 
 I slacked upon the Banks of Seine, 
 That Highland eagle e'er should feed 
 On thy fleet limbs, my matchless steed ! 
 Woe worth the chase, woe worth the day, 
 That cost thy life, my gallant gray ! " 
 
 And so to us, and I think to all pilgrims here, these 
 great mountains, glens, lakes, and streams are made 
 populous with the characters and incidents summoned 
 to life and action by the genius of the Wizard of the 
 North, as we read this sweetest of his poems. 
 
 4» 
 
40 Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 
 
 As I followed the roads and paths about the hotel 
 I could but thank myself that, before leaving Edin- 
 burgh, we had taken a day to visit Abbotsf ord, the home 
 where Scott lived and died, and that we went from there 
 to Dryburgh Abbey to view his grave. Under a little 
 remnant of the roof of the Abbey is the grave of Sir 
 Walter Scott. Between it and the road are heavy trees 
 entirely shutting it out from view. The Abbey is said 
 to have a history running back seven hundred years, 
 and near by is a very old yew tree, which, tradition says, 
 was planted when the Abbey was constructed, and so is 
 seven hundred years old. 
 
 The remains of the old Abbey and the grave are on 
 a beautiful grassy hill, sloping gently down to the 
 " chiming Tweed," which lightens and illumines all the 
 surrounding landscape. The Abbey itself is almost in 
 ruins, but a few of the heavy walls containing the clois- 
 ters or built over the heavy entrances are still remain- 
 ing. Some of the gables, running up to a point where 
 the roof was supported, and pierced for gothic windows, 
 are also still there, and over all the beautiful English 
 ivy twines and clambers, presenting towers and pinna- 
 cles of ivy green. Taken altogether, this beautiful hill- 
 side, with the river partly visible through the interlacing 
 trees, these old ruins, covered and caressed by the crowd- 
 ing and trailing ivy, make one of the most beautiful 
 pictures I have seen in Scotland or England. It is 
 such a place as we like to think of as the last resting 
 place of the great poet of the North. 
 
 Scotland is mountainous, wild, and rugged, beautiful 
 with heather, the sheen of lakes, and the profile of high 
 mountains; but over all its rugged surface is the 
 
Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 41 
 
 glamour thrown by the genius of its poets and its novel- 
 ists. We never think of Scotland except as the land of 
 Burns, Scott, and Watson, and William Black, and all 
 its mountains, glens, ,and lakes seem populous with the 
 characters who live in perpetual youth, as conceived and 
 painted by these great authors. 
 
 We left the Trossachs with regret. Taking the 
 stage "Roderick Dhu " at 1.30, and going west over i» 
 an outlying ridge or spur of Ben Nevis, we came 
 to Loch Katrine, where was a steamer in waiting to 
 carry us to the far end of the lake, a distance of about 
 five or six miles. After the steamer swung out of its 
 dock it very soon passed the little island known as Ellen's 
 Isle, and as it went by we gazed on it earnestly and 
 longingly, for we felt that just then we were passing 
 out of the country of the " Lady of the Lake," out of 
 the region enchanted and populated by the genius of the 
 Wizard of the North, whose grave we had seen beneath 
 the ivied walls on the grassy slope of Dryburgh Abbey. 
 
 We reached Glasgow early this evening, and all the 
 evening have heard the newsboys shouting the extras, 
 giving an account of the second and most interesting 
 race between the Reliance and the Shamrock. The peo- 
 ple of Glasgow seemed greatly interested in that race, 
 because, as I understand, the Shamrock was built on 
 the Clyde, which is the great deep arm of the sea which 
 brings the Northern Ocean into the heart of the city 
 and to the great wharves, factories, and basins which 
 give Glasgow its commercial wealth and importance. 
 
 I do not think they expected the Shamrock to win ; 
 and so they accepted the defeat composedly, but had 
 the Shamrock won, I think the outburst would have been 
 
42 London Again, and Windsor 
 
 like that which came after the relief of Ladysmith and 
 the capture of Cronje; and since then the Reliance has 
 three times outsailed the Shamrock: and as we receive 
 the news here, we say " Hurrah for HerreshofF." 
 
 vn 
 
 London Again, and Windsor 
 
 London, W. C, Sept. 2, 190—. 
 We had intended to go to Oban and from there sail 
 to Skye, Fingal's cave, and the land and waterways that 
 we read of in " MacLeod of Dare," and " In Far Loch 
 Arbor," two of the most beautiful of the stories of Wil- 
 liam Black, but the summer had been cold and rainy be- 
 yond precedent. I suppose every Brooklyn man knows 
 how the cold and the rain affect Coney Island; and to 
 seek a seaside resort in the north, in the last days of a 
 cold, rainy summer, seemed hardly wise, and so we 
 whirled away nine steady hours of railway travel to 
 great and populous London. 
 
 Again we find ourselves in a great city of more than 
 six million human beings, and, again, almost as much 
 as at first, we are impressed with the size, the needs, the 
 wants, the possibilities, and the power of such a vast 
 aggregation of human units. 
 
 I suppose everyone who comes to London feels he 
 must utilize his time to see all the sights of the great 
 town. We had seen Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's 
 when first here; and so, on our second visit, we utilized 
 the first day to go to the " Hippodrome," a show which 
 is very largely advertised, has two performances daily, 
 
London Again, and Windsor 43 
 
 and claims to rank with Westminster as one of the sights 
 of London. The principal attraction of these per- 
 formances, as advertised, is " The Redskins," which is 
 supposed to give an illustration of frontier life and the 
 encounters with pistol and tomahawk between the settler 
 and the redskin. This so-called play, with a large 
 number of variety performances preceding, was given 
 in a theater specially arranged for the purpose. The 
 arrangement was similar to what we have in the Academy 
 of Music when that is made up for balls, fairs, or sim- 
 ilar entertainments. It was as though all the orchestra 
 chairs of our Academy of Music were taken out, and a 
 ring made there similar to a circus ring, and this ring, 
 at the crisis of the play, is flooded with water, its floor 
 or base apparently being let down at the same time. 
 This water, the play assumes, is a river, into which 
 plunge the pursued and pursuers, horses and actors 
 alike, men, women, and children, white and copper- 
 colored, and swim across it and then drag themselves 
 out limp, wet, and cold, and disappear round the wings 
 of the stage. The curtain then comes down quickly and 
 the play is over. It did not seem to me at all equal to 
 Buff^alo Bill's exhibitions, which we have so often in and 
 near New York. 
 
 The next day — still impressed with the thought that 
 we must see all we can while in London — we went to the 
 British Museum. This, I suppose, has the greatest col- 
 lection in the world of statuary, tombs, and inscriptions 
 from the ancient world — that is, from the world of two 
 or three thousand years ago. Here are the marbles of 
 the Parthenon, which was built 500 years b. c, and 
 burial caskets, profiles, and heads cut in beautiful, hard 
 
44 London Again, and Windsor 
 
 granite, of kings and emperors from the Egypt of 3000 
 years ago. We understood that on the floor above were 
 the mummies, the actual bodies of those Egyptian kings 
 whose burial cases and monuments we had seen cut in the 
 shining brown granite, and all this spoil of royal dynas- 
 ties had been brought across the sea to entertain the 
 dwellers in a land not known to history until 2000 years 
 after the embalmed bodies of these old kings had been 
 placed in their finely carved stone coffins. I did not care 
 for these Egyptian remains, nor did I ascend the stairs 
 to see the mummies, although I understand that there 
 is the actual body, embalmed and preserved in mummy 
 cloth, of the Pharaoh of the Oppression. I expected 
 and tried to be interested in the monuments of Greek 
 art, but they failed to interest me. Here are marbles 
 of the gods and goddesses of the ancient mythology, cut 
 by the chisel of Phidias, and set up to adorn an Athen- 
 ian temple of the age of Pericles. 
 
 The next day we went to Windsor, a royal residence, 
 and in the chapel, inside the castle inclosure, we saw 
 examples of modem marbles, and were very glad that 
 our view of the modem came so soon after seeing the 
 marbles of Phidias. In the chapel at Windsor is a 
 memorial to Princess Charlotte. Princess Charlotte, had 
 she lived, would have been Queen, but she died in child- 
 birth, and the monument to her, to my mind, is the most 
 beautiful that I have seen in England. Its lower part 
 represents a couch or bed, on which is a figure covered 
 by a sheet, save where the hand, stiff* and rigid with 
 death, droops below. Around it are figures of mourn- 
 ers, bent in grief and lamentation; this portion of the 
 monument represents, with a distinctness almost ter- 
 
London Again, and Windsor 45 
 
 rible, the victory of death. Above it is a figure in 
 marble breaking from the tomb and ascending to heaven 
 on joyous wing. The face of this figure breaking from 
 the tomb is said to be very like that of the Princess Char- 
 lotte; and in the arms of one of the angels is the little 
 child, a daughter, I believe, carried with the mother to 
 the heaven above. 
 
 Complete as appears the victory of death in the marble 
 below, no less complete is the victory over death, as 
 represented by the figure thus seen ascending from the 
 tomb. I would not be rash to say that this monument 
 of Princess Charlotte is comparable, judged by the 
 technique of the art, to those old marbles from the Par- 
 thenon, but the monument of Charlotte has a great 
 theme, undoubtedly the greatest, that can engage the 
 energy of human genius. Those remains of ancient art 
 doubtless show great skill and beauty, but they seem to 
 me to fail, because they had no high theme or purpose. 
 
 I have been in many picture galleries since being in 
 England, and in all I find the picture of the Christ, as 
 conceived and painted by the greatest of modern 
 masters, and when, in mind, I compare the finest remains 
 of ancient art with those pictures of the God-man, I 
 seem the better to understand the enormous difference 
 between the ideals and thoughts before Christ and the 
 thoughts and ideals which have filled and conquered the 
 world since He lived. 
 
 Windsor Castle is a little way outside London; the 
 distance is thirty minutes by train. This was the home 
 residence of Queen Victoria, as Osborne and Balmoral 
 were her summer residences — one at the seaside, and the 
 other in the Scottish hills. Windsor Castle was doubt- 
 
46 London Again, and Windsor 
 
 less originally a fortification, and its walls and turrets, 
 pierced for bowmen and other defending soldiery, are 
 very like Warwick Castle ; but, for many hundred years, 
 Windsor has been a royal residence, just outside a 
 great and wealthy city, and has been embelhshed and 
 enriched by all that money could buy or genius produce. 
 It is situated on a gentle elevation, from which a fine 
 view Is had of the Thames and a beautiful rolling coun- 
 try beyond. 
 
 We were taken through banqueting rooms, council 
 and presence chambers, and halls of state; there, too, 
 was the Waterloo room, adorned with pictures of Well- 
 ington, Bliicher, and the great generals and captains 
 of that tremendous battle ; but as we walked through 
 one of the rooms, on every panel of which was a picture 
 of a king or queen. It occurred to me that there was 
 another side, even to all this royal magnificence, for two 
 of the figures which stood out so richly on that canvas 
 represented persons who died on the headsman's block — 
 Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots. 
 
 Six miles from Windsor Is the little village and church 
 of Stoke Pogls. The ride there was very interesting, 
 and characteristically English. Most of the way the 
 road was lined with large and venerable trees, and 
 these trees were covered, locked, and Interlocked by 
 the beautiful, twining English ivy. We stopped In 
 front of the entrance to a little country churchyard, 
 and, walking a short distance, came to a plain wooden 
 church, on which was an Inscription saying that In the 
 tomb opposite the Inscription, and In the grave with his 
 mother, whom he so loved, lay the remains of the poet, 
 Thomas Gray, author of the " Elegy Written in a- 
 
London Again, and Windsor 47 
 
 Country Churchyard." We went into the church and 
 saw the pew which it is said Gray occupied, and, coming 
 out, found ourselves under the branches of an old and 
 enormous yew tree, with graves swelling to mounds all 
 around, and we recalled the verse : 
 
 " Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree's shade. 
 Where heaves the turf in many a moldering heap. 
 Each in his narrow cell, forever laid. 
 
 The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." 
 
 Sitting under that old tree, in the few moments that 
 we could spare, we looked round on the surrounding 
 country. The castle, with its towers and flags, for- 
 tunately, was hidden by the intervening trees, and 
 around us were the fields and farms of a plain and 
 meager rural life. It happened that it was a beautiful 
 day, and as we saw the fields and herds, and toiling hus- 
 bandmen lighted by the rays of midsummer, we felt 
 there was something in the scene consoling and quiet 
 that gave rest from labor and from the throbs of effort. 
 Whenever again I read Gray's " Elegy " it will be in 
 the setting and surrounding of that beautiful summer 
 afternoon — seated among those billowy graves, under 
 that old yew tree, with those quiet, rural, almost slum- 
 berous trees above; and I feel sure that Gray must 
 have composed that poem seated right there on the 
 evening, or more probably on many evenings, of such 
 quiet, peaceful, restful days. 
 
 We have already engaged rooms at a hotel in Paris 
 where we are told they understand and speak English ; 
 and we expect to go there to-morrow. The Channel is 
 said to be so smooth this morning that Holbein is trying 
 
48 In the French Capital 
 
 to swim across. We reckon from this that we can stand 
 the discomforts of a thirty-mile ride on a turbine wheel 
 steamboat — though we recollect that the great Napoleon 
 did not find it quite easy to get across that little span 
 of water. 
 
 VIII 
 
 In the French Capital 
 
 Paris, Sept. 7, 190—. 
 We came here four days ago, coming direct from Lon- 
 don, and had the first experience of traveling in France. 
 Before trunks could be marked through to Paris we 
 found it necessary that they should be weighed, and we 
 should pay a charge regulated by the weight for their 
 transportation on the French railroad. We left Lon- 
 don at 11 A. M., coming direct to Dover, and our route 
 brought us through the section known as Kent. It was 
 a most beautiful country, much more diversified by hills, 
 valleys, and waterways than the portion north of Lon- 
 don, which we had previously traversed by rail. 
 
 On this journey we saw the hillsides covered with the 
 most luxuriant growth of hops, and we realized we were 
 looking on the fair Kentish fields, of which, it seems 
 to me, I have often read in the song and poetry of Eng- 
 land. But the acme of this journey was the crossing of 
 the English Channel. We had very often heard of the 
 discomfort of the journey across that narrow waterway, 
 a little less than thirty-one miles wide. When we were in 
 the Trossachs a fellow-traveler almost frightened us 
 with his account of his journey across the Channel, on 
 
In the French Capital 49 
 
 a crowded deck, wet with the spray, and overcome with 
 seasickness. His story was very hke many that had 
 come to us from friends and acquaintances, even before 
 we had thought of visiting Europe ; consequently as our 
 train stopped on the Dover wharf we went on board the 
 boat with enough apprehension as to the discomfort of 
 the voyage to give zest and spice to all its incidents. 
 
 As the boat pushed out from the shore we saw the 
 high, perpendicular, chalky cliffs that make the south- 
 ern boundaries of England at that point. To the Ro- 
 mans these cliffs were albus (the Latin for white), and 
 from thence, we suppose, comes the name " Old Albion," 
 a very common appellation of England, and as those 
 chalky cliffs receded we soon found ourselves midway on 
 our Channel voyage, wondering where and when the dis- 
 comfort prophesied by our friend of the Trossachs was 
 to come in. Soon we saw the French coast, and, observ- 
 ing a point of land on our right, which, it seemed to 
 me, would soon give us shelter from any current or high 
 seas, I felt reassured. 
 
 I ventured to ask one of the officers of the boat 
 whether or not the worst part of our voyage was over. 
 He assured me it was, and we continued our luncheon 
 without further apprehension, and soon found our good 
 ship lying alongside the rickety structure called a wharf, 
 which extends into the sea from the Calais shore. Our 
 voyage and lunch were both over, and the evil prophecies 
 of our friend (like most prophecies of evil) had not 
 been justified by the event. We now, for the first time, 
 found ourselves in a country where the English lan- 
 guage, or even good American, spiced with a little 
 Yankee brogue, was not understood. Somehow, I hardly 
 
50 In the French Capital 
 
 know how, we got our hand-bags marked all right by 
 the customs officer, and were told that our trunks would 
 not be examined by them until we reached Paris. 
 
 Arriving in Paris, a porter appeared to us, talking a 
 strange language, and by energetic pantomime offering 
 to carry our bags. Overcome by this strange speech, 
 we for a moment hesitated ; he took that as assent, and 
 at once seized all our bags and similar belongings. I 
 ejaculated as fiercely as I could " Custom House officer." 
 A smile of comprehension and polite approval overspread 
 the countenance of the creature who had taken such 
 sudden possession of our bags, and bowing politely, con- 
 descendingly, and even approvingly, he ejaculated: 
 " Oui, ouiy monsieur I " Assuming that he understood 
 me, I had a short but pleasant moment of relief from 
 care, when suddenly I looked round for the bags, and 
 saw him disappearing down the far end of the station 
 with bags and all our personal belongings in his 
 hands. We followed as rapidly as we could, and finally 
 succeeded in overtaking this wild-eyed, impulsive Franc 
 as he stood negotiating with a cabman. He was exhibit- 
 ing our bags and pointing us out as we appeared on the 
 scene. 
 
 Seeing a man standing by in uniform, in my despair 
 I thought to try a little American speech on him, and 
 soon discovered that he understood what I said. I ex- 
 plained that we did not want a cab, and did not want our 
 bags carried away until we had attended to our trunks 
 with the customs officer. Thereupon our wild-eyed 
 Franc moved swiftly to another room, where the customs 
 officers were, where he deposited our bags and belong- 
 ings, and, in consideration of a small tip, vanished 
 
In the French Capital 51 
 
 from the scene, I suppose to inflict himself upon another 
 traveler just coming ashore, to whom the language of 
 France is like Greek or Sanskrit. I stood guard over 
 the bags while Mrs. Johnson was discovering the cus- 
 toms officers, who understood a little English. How she 
 managed it I know not, but her tact and judgment 
 seemed adequate, and very soon another porter, with our 
 trunks on a platform truck, stopped for our bags, and 
 in a few moments more we had the felicity of seeing the 
 whole outfit on the front of a victoria. 
 
 On the seat sat a venerable driver, who looked as 
 though he might be a veteran of Waterloo. Taking 
 our seats in the victoria, behind our luggage and the 
 veteran, I shouted " Hotel St. Petersburg." The vet- 
 eran answered " Oui, oui/* whipped up his ancient horse, 
 and in a few minutes more we found ourselves in front 
 of our hotel. Requesting a porter to settle the bill of 
 our veteran cabman, we went inside to find ourselves in 
 a hotel where most of the guests were English or Amer- 
 ican, and where the English language is understood 
 and spoken by the waiters and attendants. In a very 
 few minutes after entering we had been shown to a 
 room, and were sitting to a plentiful dinner, served by 
 English-speaking waiters, and were convinced that 
 we had actually made the crossing from London to 
 Paris. 
 
 After dinner I strolled to the front of the hotel and 
 was there saluted by a lot of wild-eyed Frenchmen, who, 
 in pantomime, were offering me the use of the carriages 
 by which they stood. In the midst of the uproar a man 
 spoke to me in the English language, offering his as- 
 sistance, and so welcome, at that moment, was the dear 
 
52 In the French Capital 
 
 mother tongue that almost before I knew it I had en- 
 gaged him — or he had engaged me, I have never been 
 able to tell precisely which — for a drive through the city 
 on the following day. 
 
 At eleven o'clock on the following day he was 
 promptly in attendance, and we found ourselves seated 
 in one of those low, open, and very comfortable vic- 
 torias with our English-speaking friend of the previous 
 evening seated by the driver, interpreting to him our 
 wishes and commands and energetically announcing to 
 us the different places of interest by which we were pass- 
 ing. Almost immediately we found ourselves on a broad 
 avenue with broad sidewalks and fine stores on either 
 side. The sidewalks were crowded with chairs and tables 
 for refreshments, liquid and otherwise. 
 
 It was a beautiful sunshiny day, the sidewalks were 
 thronged, and we were so near the bright, vivacious mov- 
 ing throngs we realized how bright, sparkling, and 
 attractive are the streets and avenues of fair, beautiful, 
 and historic Paris. 
 
 Our drive soon brought us to a monument rising from 
 the center of the avenue. This monument is about 150 
 feet high, and is a memorial to deceased soldiers, some 
 of whom are placed in the vaults beneath. 
 
 Our guide informed us that it stood on the site of 
 the old Bastille, and pointed out a series of large, 
 pecuhar stones, placed to indicate the boundaries of 
 that old prison. A part of this monument is an enor- 
 mous ballot box, guarded by crouching lions, all in 
 shiny bronze, and conspicuous on different sides of the 
 structure were the words " Egalite, Liberie, Frater- 
 nite'* (" EquaHty, Liberty, Fraternity"), and so over 
 
In the French Capital 53 
 
 the place where stood that stronghold of oppression 
 and cruelty are engraved the words which were the war 
 cry of the Revolution which swept out of existence the 
 Bastille and the kings who erected it. 
 
 From there we passed to the Church of Notre Dame. 
 This old historic church was much less imposing out- 
 wardly than we had expected ; the guide book explains 
 that the church was originally raised above the sur- 
 rounding streets, and that these streets have all been 
 filled or raised to the level of the entrance of the church, 
 which gives an effect as though the church had been 
 lowered from the original high level on which it was 
 built. 
 
 This church has a strange and curious history, typi- 
 cal of the history of the beautiful city in which it stands. 
 In the days of the Revolution its altars and sacred 
 images were thrown down, and in their place were erected 
 statues to Justice and of Reason. Under Napoleon I. 
 those statues were removed, and the church was restored 
 to its original sacred use, and it so continued until the 
 day of the Commune, when it was seized by those wild 
 rioters and used by them as a magazine for military 
 supplies. When they were finally driven from it they 
 set fire to it, but the fire was fortunately extinguished 
 before the main structure was much injured. 
 
 One side of the church is set apart, little spaces sepa- 
 rated from the aisles by an iron railing and gate. Those 
 places are called and used as little chapels, and we were 
 told that one or another of them is often selected as 
 the place where a marriage ceremony is to be solemnized. 
 In most of them we saw marbles, busts, and statues, rep- 
 resenting men in priestly garb in attitude of devotion. 
 
54 In the French Capital 
 
 These, we were told, represented different bishops of 
 the Church. 
 
 In another of these little chapels was a very interest- 
 ing and quite different monument ; it was in white marble, 
 and represented a man with all the comeliness and 
 rounded form and limbs of youth, tall and symmetrical 
 as an Apollo, with a face of great depth and beauty, 
 and very expressive — loving and sweet. He was repre- 
 sented as lying down, supporting himself on one arm 
 or elbow. The whole attitude and pose was easy, grace- 
 ful, and natural. Above that form, on a marble tablet, 
 were words in French, which the guide-book translates 
 as : " May my blood be the last blood shed." We were 
 told that this monument represented the Archbishop of 
 Paris, who was murdered there by the Communists in 
 1871. He refused to leave the church when the mad 
 mob broke in, and dying there his last words were 
 those engraved on the marble tablet. Standing by that 
 little chapel, it was easy to imagine the whole scene, the 
 fire, darkness, and fury of the Commune, demoniac 
 forms, male and female, waving torches ^and knives, 
 shrieking and thristing for more blood ; and in the midst 
 this Apollo form, calm and resigned, this (dying Chris- 
 tian, yielding there his life's blood because he deemed 
 there was his post of duty and that so he was obedient to 
 his Master's will. His story and his monument dignify 
 and enrich not only this old historic church, but make 
 life itself seem richer and sweeter for such jiobility of 
 sacrifice. To-morrow we expect to see the " Louvre " 
 and the " Palace of Versailles," the palace of Louis 
 XIV., whom the French call the grand monarch. 
 
Some Residences of French Royalty 55 
 
 IX 
 
 Some Residences of French Royai^ty 
 
 Paris, Sept. 9, 190—. 
 The third day after arriving here we made the trip to 
 Versailles, a royal residence of Louis XIV., about ten 
 miles from Paris. We discarded our guide of the first 
 day and secured a driver bom in England who had 
 lived twenty-five years in Paris and who was quite fa- 
 miliar with everything on the route to Versailles and 
 spoke French and English apparently with equal facility. 
 We found him a treasure. His information was very 
 full and apparently correct. Our route took us first 
 to the Champs Elysees, a broad avenue leading from the 
 old palace of the Tuileries to the Bois de Boulogne; 
 passing under the " Arc de Triomphe," we soon found 
 ourselves outside the old walls of Paris and in the 
 Boulogne wood. These woods occupy about 2250 acres, 
 consequently about three and a half square miles. That 
 is equal to a plot a mile in breadth and three and a half 
 miles long. This calculation, I think, easily shows that 
 this wood is more than four times the size of our Pros- 
 pect Park. The trees in it are small, but very thickly 
 set, so as to be almost impenetrable. 
 
 Through this dense wood range herds of deer. We 
 saw two small herds on a single drive through the park. 
 The wood contains lakes, fountains, and waterfalls, all 
 artificial, produced by pumping, as they are in Prospect 
 Park, and through the wood extend many fine broad ave- 
 nues. The one which we took revealed through a break 
 in the wood quite a high hill a mile or two to our right. 
 
56 Some Residences of French Royalty 
 
 This, we were told, was Mount Valerien, on which during 
 the siege was erected one of the strongest forts of the 
 French and one which they proudly say refused to capit- 
 ulate or haul down its flag until peace was declared. 
 
 Leaving the Boulogne wood and crossing the Seine, 
 a turn in the road brought us to St. Cloud, which was 
 the imperial residence of Napoleon III. This beauti- 
 ful park, fronting on the Seine, is about 1000 acres in 
 extent. As we ent-ered ^it, making a sharp turn to the 
 right, we passed along a terraced wall about twenty 
 feet high. This wall, we were told, supported the 
 ground where the royal gardens formerly were, and 
 where during the siege a German battery was placed 
 which day by day bombarded and received the fire of the 
 great French fortress on Mount Valerien. During one 
 of those fierce cannonades the palace was set on fire and 
 entirely consumed, and nothing now remains of its 
 former beauty except the park with its beautiful trees 
 and fine commanding terraces. As we drove along by 
 that terrace wall we noticed some columns or supports 
 different from the remainder of the wall, and were told 
 that at that point a bridge extended from the second 
 story of the palace to this high and beautiful terrace 
 garden. Passing along slowly between the site of the 
 former palace and this garden, we could but think of 
 the tragic changes and mutations that had here taken 
 place. 
 
 Here during the summers lived the third Napoleon in 
 his prosperous and happy days. Here was the Empress 
 Eugenie, Empress of the French and queen of fashion 
 for a world. Here had played the young Prince Im- 
 perial, heir to an empire and of the Napoleonic name 
 
Some Residences of French Royalty 57 
 
 and tradition, and here Victoria and Albert came as the 
 guests of Napoleon and Eugenie. The past had been 
 rich in successes. The eagles of France had fleshed 
 their beaks in the Russian bear at Sebastopol. The vic- 
 tories over Austria at Magenta and Solf erino were com- 
 plete and recent. Napoleon was recognized as the heir 
 to the tradition and memories of the great Corsican, and 
 the world had almost come to believe that he had in- 
 herited much of the military genius of his great-uncle. 
 Mexico, Maximilian, and Carlotta, and the tragic stories 
 that clustered round their names were then all unknown, 
 hidden behind the veil that closes the future from our 
 view. No sound of Metz or of Sedan had come to that 
 happy, sunny palace. 
 
 But how soon the change was to come. The Emperor 
 at the head of his armies was to yield himself a prisoner 
 of war; Eugenie was to fly in terror from her palaces, 
 and in the chapel at Windsor Castle we had seen the 
 marble effigy of the young Prince Imprial, at his feet, 
 all carved in marble, the helmet of a British cavalry 
 officer, to denote the uniform which he wore when stabbed 
 to death in an African forest by savage but brave and 
 warlike Zulus. Driving over the ashes of her palace 
 home, beset by the memories and the ghosts of so much 
 magnificence and glory, my thoughts went out in pity 
 to the childless widow at Chiselhurst. 
 
 It is understood by many in England, though I doubt 
 whether anyone would positively so assert, that the 
 young Prince was loved by the daughter of a Queen 
 with a love that made her a daughter to Eugenie when 
 her greatest and last bereavement came, and with a love 
 that made Victoria and Eugenie sisters in sorrow when 
 
58 Some Residences of French Royalty 
 
 the news of the tragic end of the young Prince came to 
 England. 
 
 Thoughts such as these, or dreams, if you so esteem 
 them, flitted across my fancy as we drove through the 
 beautiful park, looking at the broad avenues still lined 
 by trees, but now grass-grown, entirely unworked and 
 untraveled. 
 
 Passing still onward, we came to the old town of Ver- 
 sailles. Passing through and beyond it, we came to the 
 great park, avenues, ponds, and lakes, the palace for 
 himself and the mansion for his mistress which were 
 constructed by Louis XIV. The guide book, which 
 seems to be very reliable, states that Versailles was 
 originally a level sandy plain and that its hills, val- 
 le3^s, ponds, and waterways are all artificial, and were 
 constructed at an expense almost fabulous. Pass- 
 ing the palace itself, we went first to the Trianon, 
 which is a low frame building, constructed by Louis 
 XIV. as a residence for his mistress, the notorious 
 Madame de Maintenon. This building itself is not pre- 
 tentious, and there is very little in its history or mem- 
 ories that renders it beautiful or attractive. A guide 
 hurries us through its many large and plain rooms, and 
 shows us a billiard table where he says the first Napoleon 
 played billiards. He states that the first Napoleon 
 resided here with Josephine while he was First Consul. 
 We accept his statement as authentic history; we have 
 neither the time nor the facilities to investigate any his- 
 torical questions, and are quite willing to believe that 
 Josephine, in her fortunate and happy days, strayed 
 through these rooms and looked down through those 
 long rows of stately trees to the lake flashing brightly 
 
Some Residences of French Royalty 59 
 
 beyond. The guide brought us to another room, which 
 they say was Napoleon's bathroom, and pointed out the 
 holes in the floor, through which, he said, came the pipes 
 that brought water to supply the bath. 
 
 I did not notice that these holes were in any way 
 nailed down, and I commend them to the thoughtful at- 
 tention of any relic hunter that may pass that way. 
 
 From there we pass to the house where they kept the 
 royal carriages and there saw one on which was em- 
 blazoned a large "N." In that we were told the young 
 Prince, whose marble effigy we had seen at Windsor, 
 was carried, when a babe, to church, to receive the 
 baptismal rite. 
 
 From there, after luncheon, we went to the main 
 palace ; connected with the palace was a most beautiful 
 chapel, the walls and ceilings of which seem alive with 
 saints and angels whose figures had been placed there by 
 the master painters of the world. On the floor was a 
 matting which our guide lifted for a moment to allow us 
 to glance underneath while we saw stones and minerals 
 of various kinds, which our guide informed us are of 
 such value that they keep them covered with matting 
 lest they should be stolen. From there we passed into 
 the palace itself, a succession of rooms filled with 
 the most costly paintings and marbles to proclaim the 
 achievements and glories of Louis XIV. of France. 
 There we see Louis XIV. crossing the Rhine as the great 
 monarch would have it represented. We had seen the 
 picture of Washington crossing the Delaware and Na- 
 poleon crossing the Alps — and in each we saw a strong 
 man contending with and overcoming ,the obstacles of 
 nature. But this representation of Louis was quite 
 
60 Some Residences of French Royalty 
 
 different. There was no river there, but, instead of the 
 river, we see the old river god, ancient as the river itself, 
 with hair wet and disheveled, with limbs long, lank, and 
 cold, lying on the earth, looking up appealingly to the 
 great ruler, who steps proudly over him, placing his 
 kingly foot, clad in silken hose and slippers, on the form 
 of the prostrate and appealing god. Oh, the egotism, 
 the effrontery, the bravado, the dare, the challenge to 
 fate, of such a picture ! 
 
 We still pass on to other rooms, all filled with great 
 paintings, and we note that pictures of the crusaders 
 seemed to predominate over all other subjects. We won- 
 dered for an instant why the story of the crusaders so 
 prevailed in the palace of that voluptuous monarch, 
 but we soon discover that there is a certain Louis who 
 is always painted as being in front of the crusading 
 host, and we see that these pictures were made to glorify 
 that Louis, whom they call Saint Louis and who was 
 an ancestor of Louis XIV. many hundred years, 
 and very many generations removed. Passing rapidly 
 through these tawdry and repellent evidences of the 
 shameless egotism of Louis XIV., we pass through rooms 
 filled with paintings of later periods, principally repre- 
 senting the battle between the French and the Arab 
 shieks, battles fought for possession of Morocco and 
 the desert adjacent. Among many other pictures we 
 noticed a picture of the siege of Yorktown, represent- 
 ing an individual whom I suppose the French, after 
 Artemus Ward, would call G. Washington. This Wash- 
 ington in the painting stands a little back, as though 
 obscured and abashed by the genius of the great Count 
 de Rochambeau, who is supposed to be giving the orders 
 
Some Residences of French Royalty 61 
 
 for the final assault by which the British garrison and 
 army were made prisoners of war. 
 
 We saw but a single reminder or monument of the 
 first Napoleon there. It is in marble, representing him 
 sitting, emaciated and wasted, as though in his last sick- 
 ness and very near his death. It is called, I believe, 
 " The Napoleon of St. Helena." Not far away is a 
 picture of the deathbed of Thiers, President of France 
 in the days of her humiliation and sorrow. By his bed- 
 side is a female figure, draped in crape, representing 
 France, I suppose, while above is another figure, an 
 angel form, hovering as though expectant to receive 
 the passing spirit of the great statesman. Coming to 
 the front of the palace, we looked out on a wide court 
 and a broad avenue, extending direct almost to Paris 
 itself. Our guide pointed to a window from which the 
 queen, Marie Antoinette, is said to have addressed the 
 mob that had come from Paris down that great avenue 
 and filled the great courtyard. Just behind the window 
 is a narrow wooden door, which, being opened, revealed 
 a narrow stairway, hidden in the walls of the building. 
 We were told that when the mob surged into the palace 
 and up the broad and beautiful state stairway that is 
 directly opposite the entrance, the aff^righted queen, 
 going hastily down this dark, hidden, and narrow stair- 
 way, passed unobserved around or through the fierce 
 mob and out to the broad avenue beyond, and so, unat- 
 tended and alone through the drear darkness, went on 
 to Paris. 
 
 This unhappy and most unfortunate queen was the 
 wife of the great grandson of the monarch who had 
 represented himself as spurning with his slippered foot 
 
62 Some Residences of French Royalty 
 
 the river god, and we know that she and her husband, 
 queen and king, fled together from Paris, hoping to 
 pass the French frontier and secure immunity from 
 their own subjects, and that after a day and a night of 
 weary journeying they were captured, brought back, 
 thrown into prison, and taken thence in rough carts or 
 timbrels to a rough board platform, where their lives 
 were taken by the guillotine. This last Louis claimed 
 the kingship of France because he was the great-grand- 
 son of the Louis who spent almost fabulous millions on 
 Versailles. The French people, with a rough logic, took 
 this great-grandson at his word, saying, " If you in- 
 herit his honor you must answer for his crimes," and so 
 made bloody expiation for the crimes and follies of the 
 long line of kings of that name that had preceded him. 
 
 It is not my purpose to vindicate or condemn the 
 course of French history, but going through the pal- 
 aces where her rulers lived and erected monuments to 
 emblazon their triumphs or their crimes, their tragic 
 history and the tragic surroundings seemed to fill their 
 stately palaces and their ghosts seemed to walk unbid- 
 den in the shade of the great trees that line those 
 beautiful avenues. 
 
 All these royal residences are now the property of the 
 republic, and so with all their treasures are open to any 
 citizen of France that may ask admission. Our day at 
 Versailles was instructive and pleasant, but filled with 
 memories of the great tragedy which was enacted on a 
 stage of which these parks and palaces seemed to be 
 but the wings and entrances. 
 
Traveling in the Swiss Alps 63 
 
 Railroad Traveung in the Swiss Alps 
 
 Lucerne, Switzerland, Oct. 1, 190 — . 
 We have been at this place a week, and spent the week 
 previous at Interlaken. Our journey from Lausanne to 
 Interlaken was by rail, and we found it both instruc- 
 tive and interesting. Our train carried us westerly 
 along the northern shore of Lake Geneva. The first 
 part of our journey was along the side of hills, very 
 steep, sloping down to the lake, which had been laid 
 out in narrow terraces, each of which is supported by 
 heavy retaining walls, I should think about half as high 
 as the distance across the terrace. These terraced plots 
 were covered with low vines on which is grown a white 
 grape, which in a short time will be gathered and taken 
 to the wine presses, located at convenient distances along 
 the lake. Passing through these vineyards, beautiful 
 and inviting with their lustrous burden, apparently al- 
 most within our reach from the car windows, we soon 
 found we were passing over heavy grades, making our 
 way upward in order to reach the summit, and pass out 
 of the valley of the lake. 
 
 In the cars here the seats extend from side to side, 
 thus giving equal opportunity on each side to view the 
 passing landscape. As we sped along, on our right 
 was the lake flashing beautiful and blue in the sunlight ; 
 and it was very curious to note the diff^erence in the 
 mountains on the two sides of the lake. On its farther 
 or southerly shore the mountains were jagged, flinty, 
 and rocky, bare and hard, practically without vegeta- 
 
64 Traveling in the Swiss Alps 
 
 tion, while on the northerly shore where we were, the 
 mountains, rising frequently to 6000 feet in height, or 
 nearly 5000 feet above the lake, were covered with vine- 
 yards, grass, and waving trees over nearly all their steep 
 slopes ; perhaps it was because these slopes on this side 
 were toward the south, and so received greater heat 
 from the more direct rays of the sun. This side hill was 
 cut by ravines, between which were ridges which seemed 
 like ribs or braces supporting the great altitudes 
 farther back from the lake. The railroad was carried 
 over these ravines by heavy stone bridges. These rocky 
 ridges we crossed in deep cuts or tunnels — I think more 
 often tunnels. About ten miles from Lausanne, on a 
 rock, a short distance out in the lake, which is said to be 
 300 feet deep at that place, is a castle built more than 
 1000 years ago, in which are rock-hewn dungeons, be- 
 neath the level of the waters of the lake, in which are 
 shown the torture chamber and the various horrible in- 
 struments of torture which had probably been used there. 
 This is the castle of Chillon, and is the prison referred 
 to in Lord Byron's " Prisoner of Chillon," in which 
 occur the familiar Hnes: 
 
 " Chillon ! thy prison is a holy place. 
 
 And thy sad floor and altar — for 'twas trod, 
 
 Until his very steps have left a trace 
 
 Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod. 
 
 By Bonivard! May none those marks efface. 
 For they appeal from tyranny to God." 
 
 I am sorry to say that I am led to believe that the 
 story of cruelty and wrong as told in that well-known 
 poem is in the main correct, except that the portion 
 which relates that the two brothers of Bonivard is 
 
Traveling in the Swiss Alps 65 
 
 founded on the sometimes too vivid imagination of the 
 poet rather than on fact. We expect to return to 
 Lausanne to-morrow, and hope to visit again this old 
 castle, rich alike in antiquity, history, and poetic legend. 
 Passing through one of these tunnels we were treated 
 to a surprise and quick transition, which is one of the 
 charms of railway travel in these mountainous regions. 
 When we entered the tunnel we were in the valley of the 
 Lake of Geneva; when we came out we were in another 
 valley, and almost, so it seemed, in another country. 
 Looking to our left, instead of steep and frowning 
 mountains we saw a valley, comparatively level — sloping 
 gently down until it came to low-lying hills, which lay 
 along the horizon line. This valley lay so much below 
 us that it appeared clear as a map, dotted by houses, 
 barns, and hamlets, crossed and recrossed by hard, clear, 
 and apparently well-worked and well-fenced roads, dim- 
 pled by beautiful lakes, laced and interlaced by streams 
 and waterways. Still going onward we soon came to 
 Berne, which is the capital of Switzerland. There we 
 were given an hour for dinner. Leaving Berne, and 
 winding around hills and sharp precipices, we soon found 
 ourselves on the shore of a beautiful lake. There are 
 two of these lakes through which flows the River Aare, 
 and between the two, contiguous to both, is Interlaken, 
 where we stopped and found a comfortable hotel, in 
 which we remained a week. Looking out from our hotel, 
 the Jungfrau stood out clearly before us, nearly 14,000 
 feet high, wrapped in a mantle of eternal snow, white and 
 spotless as an angel's wing; and there were other moun- 
 tains almost as high as the Jungfrau lying thick around 
 it, while nearer, just outside the town, is the Schynige 
 
66 Traveling in the Swiss Alps 
 
 Platte, 6443 feet high, or 4600 feet — almost a mile 
 measured perpendicular — ^higher than the little village 
 in which we were stopping. On the other side of the 
 lake is another mountain, apparently as high as the 
 Schynige Platte, and on the side of it, almost at its top, 
 is a little chalet, seeming almost overhanging the valley 
 below, perched, as it were, on a height so dizzy that it 
 would seem that it would tire the eagle's wing to attain 
 to it. Below and around it were small fields from which 
 the woods had been cleared, and which were apparently 
 cultivated or used for pasturage of mountain goats, 
 while from the chimney of the hut arose the friendly 
 smoke telling us that probably there was being prepared 
 the frugal meal of some hardy mountaineer. 
 
 The first afternoon after reaching Interlaken we were 
 driven up the road to Murren, where we expected to 
 ascend by a mountain railroad, which would lift us to 
 a little village about a mile above the level of the sea. 
 By an error of the driver with whom we could hold no 
 communication (as he spoke only French), we did not go 
 up this mountain ; but our ride up that valley was one 
 of the most interesting I have ever taken. On each side 
 were mountains about 5000 feet high, and probably 2000 
 or 3000 feet above the carriage road. Back from these 
 adjacent mountains were still higher mountains, rising 
 to the region of perpetual snow, from which great banks 
 of ice and snow come down to these lower and nearer 
 mountains, making and feeding full-growing brooks, 
 which came tumbling down the ravines into the small 
 river by the side of which was the carriage road ; and 
 so steep were these mountains that in some cases, where 
 the water flowing from the top did not find a ravine, but 
 
Traveling in the Swiss Alps 67 
 
 came over the top of the cliff, it would fall sheer and 
 clear almost from top to bottom, breaking into spray, 
 and almost vanishing before it came to the rock-strewn 
 hills beneath. The farther we went the narrower seemed 
 to be the valley, and the higher and steeper the moun- 
 tains. But as we thus journeyed onward and upward 
 for two or three hours, looking up almost in awe at th^ 
 great rocky buttresses on either side, sometimes it would 
 happen that the mountains were less precipitous ; and 
 then, whenever the ascent receded but a little from the 
 apparently perpendicular, the hard rocks were covered 
 by a scanty soil, which, watered by the moisture from 
 above, broke into trees and grassy pastures ; and, gen- 
 erally, wherever there was sufficient space, appeared the 
 little Swiss chalets, perched irregularly one above an- 
 other, each with a little fenced, cleared, and cultivated 
 plot around it, while from these little huts arose the 
 friendly smoke wreaths, indicating that there were the 
 comforts and endearments of family and domestic life. 
 I could but think that in such mountain eyries were the 
 homes most typical of Swiss life and history ; and that in 
 such robust and strenuous surroundings are reared 
 the boys and girls, who are to inherit and trans- 
 mit the virtues which for so many generations have 
 made the Swiss soldiers almost invincible, and left their 
 country free and a republic, though surrounded on all 
 sides by enormous monarchical conscript armies. 
 
 We lingered at Interlaken longer than was necessary 
 to view the different mountains and places of interest 
 around there ; but walking or driving there we were be- 
 tween great, high mountains rising almost perpendicu- 
 lar, and so near by that they seemed almost to over- 
 
68 Across the Snow-clad Alps 
 
 hang and threaten the valley below. And it seemed to 
 me as though these valleys were great canons cut 
 through these mountains by prehistoric rivers when the 
 world was young; and traversing these valleys, and 
 looking up at the rocky buttresses on either side, we 
 felt we were near the mystery and heart of the Alps; 
 and sometimes it almost seemed as though in the still 
 evening we could hear these great neighboring moun- 
 tains talking or communing with each other, of the time 
 when the " Morning stars sang together." 
 
 Leaving Interlaken for this place we took boat about 
 half a mile from the hotel and proceeded to the upper 
 end of the lake, a distance of about ten miles ; and all 
 the way were the same rocky ramparts on either side, 
 rising almost perpendicularly. About half way up the 
 lake we passed the Giessbach Falls. At that point a 
 stream fed and renewed by the snow, glaciers, and ice 
 on the higher mountains, farther back, passing over the 
 top of the cliff comes down to the lake by seven succes- 
 sive falls ; a mountain railroad operated by cable takes 
 the tourist to a point opposite one of the lower falls, 
 where there is a very comfortable hotel and electric 
 lights which at night are thrown on the seven cataracts, 
 making a view wild, unique, and beautiful. 
 
 XI 
 
 Across the Snow-clad Ai.ps 
 
 Lucerne, Savitzerland, Oct. 1, 190 — . 
 As we came to the head of the lake we found a train 
 awaiting us, in which, finding a place, we proceeded on- 
 ward with the same great rocky ramparts on either side. 
 
Across the Snow-clad Alps 69 
 
 Our way was in a narrow level vaUey rich in vegetation 
 and on our right was a small but swift-flowing river 
 obviously feeding the lake we had just left, and as I 
 supposed coming from the Lake of Lucerne. Our 
 tickets gave us the option of making the latter part 
 of the journey by rail or by boat on the Lake of 
 Lucerne; and I supposed that the Lake of Lucerne 
 was little farther up the valley we were traversing, 
 and so in comfortable and complacent ease we looked 
 out on the rocky walls on either side over which 
 other and not infrequent torrents of water were fall- 
 ing, as at Giessbach, and behind which at intervals 
 we could see the higher mountain covered with snow 
 and looking cold and forbidding. As I have said, I 
 supposed we were to continue up that valley and between 
 these rocky ramparts, but I was very soon undeceived. 
 After the train made its first stop, instead of proceed- 
 ing onward its movement was reversed, and we seemed 
 to be backing away from the station into which we had 
 just come. I remarked that we were probably making 
 a switch, but I noticed the train was considerably higher 
 than the track on which we had come to that station, 
 and looking out listlessly I noticed we were still going 
 up and apparently hanging on the side of a mountain, 
 like that from which we saw the Giessbach tumbling — 
 and what was the meaning of this eccentric movement 
 of the train .f^ And where were we going .^^ Surely this 
 was not the way to Lucerne, and to what dizzy snow- 
 clad heights were we being taken? We were going back- 
 ward, and perhaps we were going to pick up a passenger 
 at the little hut that we saw perched on the side of the 
 mountain opposite our hotel ; or perhaps we were to go 
 
70 Across the Snow-clad Alps 
 
 to some snow-clad summit where we should see all the 
 Alps at once, spread like a map below. The conductor 
 came along and took our tickets as though nothing un- 
 usual were happening. I would have asked him where 
 we were going, but he did not understand Enghsh, and 
 I could speak in no other language ; and so we concluded 
 there was nothing to do but to sit still and wait 
 patiently. Of course we considered that railroad com- 
 panies were not accustomed to build useless railroads, 
 or to waste trains, and we noted that the conductor 
 did not seem at all disturbed, and acted as though this 
 excursion skyward were one of the ordinary incidents of 
 travel. And so we went on and on, higher and higher, 
 still perched on the brink of those rocky walls we had 
 so admired from the lake below; but soon the railroad 
 made a turn from the front of the cliff, and passing up 
 over a sharp ridge, the train stopped at a place where 
 we found evidences of activity, very homelike and very 
 human ; and we concluded that we had not been trans- 
 lated into any ethereal region. Getting out of the ;car, 
 we walked to a large building near by, where we saw a 
 long counter over which foaming beer was being fur- 
 nished to thirsty customers ; while around were tables at 
 which passengers were busy directing postal cards on 
 which were pictures of the railroad winding its way up 
 to that place. There was something so homelike and 
 reassuring in these occupations that we felt convinced 
 that it was all right; and someone who spoke a Httle 
 English told us that we had reached the summit and 
 were now about to go down. Perhaps some of our 
 friends will say I was frightened by this unique experi- 
 ence. I protest — ^no, indeed, not at all. I remember 
 
Across the Snow-clad Alps 71 
 
 that our eminent countryman, Mark Twain, describing 
 how he retreated when beset by brigands, protested he 
 did not run, but sidled ; and sol protest that I was not 
 frightened — but, perhaps — well, a little jolted. We 
 subsequently learned that we had crossed the Brunig 
 Pass, 1500 feet above the level of the lake and adjacent 
 valley. 
 
 And so we went, on and on, and down and down for 
 two or three hours, with a new and beautiful valley open- 
 ing more and more as we proceeded; soon we reached 
 the beautiful lake, where we were told we could take boat 
 for Lucerne, but that we could reach this place a little 
 sooner by remaining in the train. We concluded to re- 
 main in the train and soon passed Mount Pilatus and a 
 little later Rigi, and about six o'clock found ourselves 
 on a large railroad depot from which we made our way 
 to a stage marked " Schweizerhof," which carried us 
 quickly by a stone bridge across an arm of the lake, and 
 we soon found ourselves in the hotel and in a comfortable 
 room looking out on the Lake of Lucerne, or the Lake 
 of the Four Cantons, as the Swiss prefer to call it. 
 
 Yesterday we ascended Rigi by a mountain railroad. 
 Rigi is so situated that from it is obtained one of the 
 best and widest views of this section of the Alps. 
 
 We decided that with the ascent of the Rigi should 
 end our excursions and sightseeing at Lucerne. When 
 we arrived here it seemed to be too late in the season to 
 visit the glaciers ; with that exception we have, I think, 
 enjoyed and accomplished all that we expected, or 
 hoped for, in this part of our journey. With the com- 
 ing of September the trains and other facilities for visit- 
 ing the glaciers were diminished ; we have not yet seen 
 
72 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 
 
 Mont Blanc, but we expect to go to Geneva and from 
 near or far, as the weather permits, view that highest 
 pinnacle of the glorious Alps, and to-morrow we expect 
 to end our very pleasant sojourn at Lucerne and the 
 Schweizerhof . Purchasing our tickets, we learn that the 
 summer express trains have been taken off ; most of the 
 hotels here are closed ; the mountains are putting on 
 their autumn tints, and the higher are freshly capped 
 with snow, and so with the waning season we yield 
 to the joyous impulse which comes from the expectancy 
 of travel, and leave Lucerne and these grand and 
 glorious mountains, except as we may be able to see 
 one, and the highest and grandest of them all, in the 
 vicinity of Geneva. 
 
 XII 
 
 Mont Blanc as Seen from Lake Geneva 
 
 Geneva, Switzerland, Nov. 4, 190 — . 
 We came here Tuesday, a week ago yesterday, making 
 the journey from Lausanne down Lake Geneva in about 
 three hours. The lake is from two to about six miles 
 wide. On the south shore were the abrupt and rocky 
 Alpine ranges ; on the north less precipitous slopes, opu- 
 lent with vineyards, trees, and other foliage, through 
 which were seen beautiful and artistic villas. On the 
 deck of the boat was a little cabin enclosed with glass, 
 which left the view open on all sides, and at the same 
 time broke the wind, which, though gentle, at this season 
 of the year is a little cool. Our boat came to the dock 
 at Geneva at six o'clock. About half an hour before 
 our arrival we had so far rounded the near-by rocky 
 
Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 73 
 
 summit that we were able to see Mont Blanc, covered by 
 snow, high, grand, and conspicuous in its far-off outline. 
 
 The sun was just setting, and the lake and the boat 
 and all the near-by hills, though some of them quite high, 
 were in the great shadow which had come as a courier 
 of the approaching darkness. But Mont Blanc, high 
 and supreme over all, was still bathed in the sunlight, 
 which seemed to linger caressingly upon its great snow- 
 clad summit. While we were yet in the first thrill of 
 pleasure at the sight of this king among mountains, the 
 light around the summit seemed to change; purple 
 gleams seemed to dance and glide across the white 
 slopes, and to encircle and enclose in a beautiful glow 
 of alternating light the great white central cone. 
 
 I was called away for a moment by some care for our 
 baggage and for landing, and when I returned the glow 
 was less vivid in tint and less complete over and around 
 the entire summit, and in a moment more it had dis- 
 appeared, and the great white slopes stood pale and 
 clear; the glamour and the purple Alpine glory were 
 all gone, and there only remained the pale majestic fore- 
 head from which the hght and life had departed. In a 
 few moments more our boat came to the dock, and dark- 
 ness came down. The following day it was cloudy, and 
 we have not seen the great mountain but once since, and 
 that was four days later, and we looked in vain for the 
 glory of that Alpine glow, which, in its perfection of 
 beauty, we probably shall never see again. But in our 
 memories Mont Blanc will always be clothed and crowned 
 with the lambent light which played around it, when 
 first its towering summit was revealed to our view. 
 
 Geneva is a curious old city. It has a history that 
 
74 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 
 
 goes back to the beginning of the Christian era ; it was 
 known to Caesar, and is mentioned by him in his Com- 
 mentaries. On a little island near our hotel, called 
 Rousseau Island, is a bronze statue of Jean Jacques 
 Rousseau, the great French orator and writer on the 
 " Philosophy of Government." In a little villa on the 
 north shore of the lake lived and died Voltaire, one of 
 the great free-thinkers of the revolutionary epoch of 
 France. Near by is another villa where Mme. de Stael 
 lived, when driven from Paris by the first Napoleon ; and 
 there, " life's fitful fever over," she found a grave and 
 resting place among the vine-clad hills and verdant 
 sunny slopes of the foothills of the Juras, caressed by 
 the clear blue waters of Lake Leman. On these same 
 slopes, though a little farther out of the city, Byron had 
 a villa : he kept a yacht on the lake, in which, acting as 
 his own navigator, he sailed. But perhaps the best 
 known of all the citizens of Geneva was John Calvin, the 
 expounder and enforcer of a system of theology which 
 profoundly affected the Protestant world for hundreds 
 of years. The place of his abode is still shown to 
 visitors, though the house in which he lived has long 
 since disappeared, and the one on which we see the tablet 
 is a house constructed on the site of the old and long- 
 crumbled mansion in which Calvin lived. It seemed to 
 me like the house in Edinburgh, on which I saw a tablet 
 telling that there once lived the father of WilHam Glad- 
 stone. 
 
 These European cities cherish and preserve the mem- 
 ory of their great men, and Geneva is fortunate in hav- 
 ing had many great ones whose life-work and record 
 make the city memorable. Here was held the first great 
 
Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 75 
 
 Court of Arbitration, in which the award of fifteen and 
 a half millions was made for the Alabama Claims, and in 
 a little room in the municipal building, which looks as 
 though it might be a common council chamber, we are 
 told that great Court of Arbitration was held. The 
 fact that the court was organized and did its first work 
 satisfactorily and effectively, so as to settle differences 
 and establish peace between two great nations, was a 
 victory greater than Waterloo or Leipzig. And as I 
 stood in that little chamber it seemed to me that I was 
 at one of the benignant chapels and places of rest which 
 sometimes appear on the cold mountain ridges of his- 
 tory. And not unlike in significance is the fact that in 
 this little city was the birthplace and is the home of the 
 Red Cross Society, and it is because of a convention 
 which was held here that wherever that blood-red cross 
 is seen the storm of battle is turned aside, and immunity 
 is given to the wounded and dying who lie beneath its 
 protecting signal. Is it not as though, above the war- 
 fare of nations, the clash of creeds, and all the winds 
 and waves of angry strife, there was still heard the 
 gentle voice, " Peace, be still ! " 
 
 Geneva is situated at the lower end of the lake, which, 
 fed by the Rhone at its upper end, discharges its waters 
 into the Rhone again, just below the city, where it soon 
 meets the Arve, fed and swollen by the great glaciers 
 that lie around Mont Blanc. And the Arve and the 
 Rhone, the first gray and the latter deeply and distinctly 
 blue, in joint compulsive flood, sweeping onward to join 
 the blue Mediterranean at Marseilles, seem to preserve 
 the distinctive coloring of the two separate streams, side 
 by side, in the same bed, far below the point of junction. 
 
76 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 
 
 Coming from Lucerne we rested a couple of weeks at 
 Lausanne, the point at which we first entered the Alpine 
 region. The day before we came here we took the train 
 along the shore of the lake to Montreaux and Chillon, 
 and went over the famous Castle of Chillon, the scene of 
 the action of Byron's " Prisoner of Chillon." There 
 we saw the rock-hewn chamber where Bonivard lan- 
 guished for seven years, most of the time in chains. 
 Going down a steep narrow stone stairway we entered 
 a small chamber which is called the condemned cell, and 
 just beyond that, and between it and the chamber in 
 which Bonivard was confirmed, is another chamber in 
 which we saw a projecting beam, which we were told 
 was the rude but effective gibbet used for executions ; 
 and in front of it was the high, narrow window, through 
 which, it is said, the corpses were thrown out into the 
 lake. 
 
 All these chambers are rock-hewn, with rocky base 
 and sides ; and the castle is altogether gloomy, sad, and 
 cruel. Near by we were shown some photographic views, 
 one of which, representing the monument to the Austrian 
 Empress, caused us to see that monument, which is not 
 far from the little railway station at which we took the 
 train back to Lausanne. Going down past the station, 
 just outside the little cemetery we saw a beautiful statue 
 cut in stone, representing a lady, tall and stately, the 
 very embodiment of a sweet and gentle dignity, with a 
 royal, richly wrought, and decorated cape falling from 
 her shoulders, the figure, robe, and decorations all being 
 cut in clear white marble; and this we were told repre- 
 sented the Empress who, spending her summer at Mon- 
 treaux, took boat to Geneva to visit a friend and was 
 
Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 77 
 
 there stabbed by a miserable miscreant, who, ^escaping 
 capital punishment because the death penalty is abol- 
 ished at Geneva, still lives to pollute the »air of the city 
 of the Red Cross Society. And is it not time that 
 the United States passed some law for the punish- 
 ment of Presidential assassins which will place such dire 
 offenses within the jurisdiction of Federal law and no 
 longer leave them to the accident of local law or local 
 prosecution ? 
 
 I have read somewhere, I think probably at the time 
 of the poor lady's death, of the romance of her mar- 
 riage, and the story, as I recollect, was that a marriage 
 was contemplated between her elder sister and the 
 present Emperor, then the Crown Prince of Austria, and 
 that the Prince, coming to meet his prospective bride, 
 was riding through the grounds that surround the castle, 
 when he saw a beautiful young girl walking beneath the 
 old trees. And that on coming to the castle he asked 
 who she was, and requested and procured that the girl 
 should be presented to him ; and this was the younger 
 sister of his prospective bride — a romping, careless, 
 beautiful girl, who had no thought of marriage, and 
 least of all a marriage that should call her to the Impe- 
 rial throne of the Hapsburgs ; but it was a case of love — 
 mutual love — at first sight, and the young Elisabeth — 
 the younger sister — became Elisabeth Empress of Aus- 
 tria. And her life was a long benefaction to her lover, 
 to the Empire, and to the poor who came within her 
 knowledge. The poor lady was almost heart-broken 
 when her son Rudolph was found dead, the victim, ap- 
 parently, of a love stronger than his love for life. Poor, 
 sweet lady, I still see her as she was revealed to me by 
 
78 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 
 
 the marble in the lone churchyard, and I, a stranger, 
 would, if it were permitted, lay a wreath of American 
 wild flowers upon her grave. 
 
 We left the Schweizerhof now about a month ago, and 
 thinking of Lucerne, I feel obliged to say another word 
 about that delightful sojourn, and of the memories of 
 the great mountains that lay around us. The Schweiz- 
 erhof is a great, luxurious summer villa, the largest hotel 
 in the beautiful town ; it nestles between the lake and the 
 great hills that rise along its shores. Imagine a little 
 section of bright, sparkling Paris, or of the upper part 
 of New York, sa^^ the Waldorf-Astoria section, set 
 down amid the gorges of great mountains mirrored in 
 the cold blue waters of a glacier-fed lake, supplied with 
 all that the railway can bring or electricity furnish of 
 modern comfort and luxury, with throngs of waiters and 
 attendants willing and educated to supply every need, 
 and that is what Lucerne seemed to me — a very lotus- 
 land where we drink the cup of rest and indolent content. 
 Every afternoon and evening we had a concert from a 
 fine orchestra stationed on the piazza of the hotel. One 
 day we were discussing Venice, and whether or not we 
 should go there, when I pointed to the lake directly in 
 front and said, " What can Venice have more than 
 that.? " There were two or three great steamboats, like 
 huge argosies laden with passengers, going up and down 
 the lake, stopping near the hotel at convenient intervals, 
 reminding of the tale of the Eastern sage, who journeyed 
 to the Far West, where he saw: 
 
 " Sailless ships upon the ocean 
 On to distant regions hied, 
 Freighted like to floating cities, 
 Careless of the wind or tide." 
 
Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 79 
 
 There, too, were little rowboats coming and going, 
 shooting in and out from shore to shore, and then the 
 larger steam or electric launches, each bearing man and 
 maid, pushing farther out around the rocky head- 
 lands and away into the great arms of the lake, clasped 
 around and overshadowed by gaunt and mighty moun- 
 tains. 
 
 And have we no novelist or poet to do for that beauti- 
 ful region what Scott and Watson (Ian Maclaren) and 
 Black have done for Scotland? Some genius who will 
 people it with the creations of fancy, never to grow old, 
 but to endure, in perpetual youth, as long as romance 
 and thoughts of love and gentle valor captivate the 
 heart ? 
 
 Around the great arms of the lake are the mighty 
 mountains, and farther back and in their valleys and 
 gorges are the great frozen rivers, glaciers, pouring 
 forth the icy waters which feed and supply the lake and 
 rivers ; and beyond the glaciers are the great, gaunt 
 shoulders and pinnacles, extending two or three miles 
 into the air, robed in mantles of spotless snow, from 
 which come down the frequent avalanches feeding and 
 forming the glaciers, and so supplying the lake and 
 river. 
 
 A work on the geology of the Alps, that I am now 
 reading, tells me that when they were boring the great 
 St. Gothard tunnel, from far within the mountain be- 
 yond the tunnel, the workmen heard noises as of explo- 
 sions, and sometimes from the rocky roof above great 
 masses of rock would shake off and tumble down into 
 the tunnel. 
 
 Is there no sculptor, painter, or poet who will give us 
 
80 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 
 
 the picture of the genius or god of this great mountain 
 range, disturbed in his slumbers by the drill and the 
 blasting dynamite, rousing himself, and in a voice that 
 seems like thunder asking, " Who is it that comes to dis- 
 turb me in my sleep ? " 
 
 And is there no mountain but Pilatus that has its 
 myth or legend, strange and weird, touching on history 
 both sacred and profane? On the cloud enveloped sum- 
 mit of Pilatus there is a small, deep, dark lake, and 
 the tradition is that Pontius Pilate, torn by anguish, 
 drowned himself in that dark pool, and that at certain 
 intervals his spirit is seen emerging from it, and wash- 
 ing his hands ever and again in those mysterious waters. 
 So the story appears in the guide books, and, also, 
 though in a slightly different form, in the Encyclopaedia 
 Britannica. 
 
 Are there no stories, myth, or history of mountain 
 hardihood save that of William Tell ; and in all the fierce, 
 desperate battles waged in the dark gorges and forests 
 of these great mountains were there none besides Arnold 
 von Winkelried, who, making his body a sheath for the 
 spearheads of his foes, cried, " Make way for liberty ! " 
 What a region for poetry and song are those great 
 mountains, — with the hardy mountaineers forcing a 
 scanty sustenance from churlish soil, pasturing their 
 cattle on the upland Alpine slopes, where the avalanches 
 are breaking in thunder all around them. Longfellow 
 seemed to catch the glow, the spirit of the mountains, in 
 his lines entitled " Excelsior " : 
 
Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 81 
 
 " Beware the pine-tree's withered branch, 
 Beware the awful avalanche ! " 
 This was the peasant's last " Good night ! " 
 A voice replied, far up the height, 
 "Excelsior!" 
 
 There in the twilight cold and gray, 
 Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay; 
 And from the sky, serene and far, 
 A voice fell, like a falling star, 
 
 " Excelsior ! " 
 
 Now if the Alpine harp, when touched by the hand of 
 a master — though apparently casually and at random — 
 could produce such music, what may we not expect when 
 some great master, some Longfellow, Scott, or Tenny- 
 son, shall take up that harp to bring out all the music 
 of which it is capable? 
 
 Oh, that some such great poet would make his home 
 and lif ework in these great mountain regions ; should we 
 not then have poetry, new, original, and beautiful, as 
 though caught from the Music of the Spheres ? 
 
 And sometimes, perhaps, when we cease to build gal- 
 leries to house the works of mere mixers of pigments, and 
 to admire painters whose only title to excellence is that 
 they can represent colors that are the wonder and de- 
 spair of milliners ; when we require and have artists that 
 have more imagination than a photograph, and more 
 originality than a fashion-plate, then, perhaps, someone, 
 looking down into one of these great gulfs between the 
 mountains, when it is smitten by the first ray of the 
 rising sun, reflected from some far-off snow-white pin- 
 nacle, will see, in the vanishing gloom, the defeat and 
 rout of the demons of Darkness ; and in the Alpine glow 
 
82 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 
 
 will see the trailing of celestial garments or the glow 
 and radiance of a celestial city. 
 
 And, though I leave the Alps, I shall not leave their 
 memory ; but that shall go with me, clear and roseate as 
 an Alpine glow, to be called back to mental vision " when 
 days are dark and drear ! " 
 
 When I came here my letters from home had been 
 delayed, and I had a feeling almost perhaps of home- 
 sickness. From reading the Paris edition of the New 
 York Herald, which we receive here the day after it is 
 published, I had been able to obtain little glimpses of 
 information from Brooklyn and New York, and knew 
 who were the candidates for Mayor, and had learned 
 how the betting stood on Low and McClellan, and that 
 was about all that I could learn of the great conflict 
 that was going on over there. When I came to this 
 larger city it seemed to me I should be able to obtain 
 some American papers, and for that purpose I called 
 on the American Consul here, thinking there would be 
 some American papers that I might have the oppor- 
 tunity to read ; but I found no American papers there 
 except — well, papers that I do not read at home. Sit- 
 ting in my room that afternoon there was brought to 
 me The Standard Union of Wednesday, October 21. 
 The paper was then two weeks old, having been sent to 
 my correspondents in London and remailed to me from 
 there. But I do not think I have ever received or read 
 a newspaper with greater pleasure. It seemed to me 
 
Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 83 
 
 like a voice from home, a touch of home scenes, and home 
 life amid far and strange surroundings. I read the 
 news, I read the editorials, I read many of the adver- 
 tisements, and I think I even glanced over the society 
 news. It was all so homelike and so natural that it 
 was elating and refreshing. One page was given to 
 the great Fusion meeting held at the Rink the evening 
 before. And on that page I saw not only the speeches, 
 but the rapid, graphic sketch-pictures of the different 
 speakers. It seemed to me almost as though I could 
 hear their eloquent appeals, and the thunder of ap- 
 plause and commendation from that great audience, 
 men and women, of Brooklyn's best citizenship, crowding 
 that great building. Noting how many of the speakers 
 were unknown to me, I realized that it was a long time 
 since I dropped out of the procession, but, at least, I 
 had the satisfaction of feeling that for many years, and 
 as long as my strength lasted, I had done — no matter 
 what — the best I could. 
 
 One of the papers I had read at the Consul's office 
 stated that Jerome encountered a frost at that meeting, 
 and that the audience left him. As I read the full and 
 better account in The Standard Union I knew that that 
 statement was not correct. No speaker who makes a 
 speech after ten o'clock to an audience that for two 
 hours has been at a high tension of excitement can hold 
 the entire audience, and generally the speaker congratu- 
 lates himself if he holds any. 
 
 As I read the story of that meeting there came to 
 my mind the scene on the night when McKinley, coming 
 out of the West, made his first bow to a Brooklyn audi- 
 ence. Commencing his speech in a voice so low as to 
 
84 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 
 
 be hardly audible on the platform, it soon swelled to 
 higher tones, strong and rich in compass, filling the 
 entire building, holding a vast audience in rapt atten- 
 tion, for two full hours, his voice clear and vigorous 
 in every sentence to the end. And then the great meet- 
 ing, when Roosevelt, about to be elected Governor, came 
 to the Rink. And then another meeting, when the nomi- 
 nation for Mayor was tendered to Charles A. Schieren — 
 not by Republicans only, but by the Shepard Democ- 
 racy, as we then called them — ^by the Young Men's 
 Democratic Club and by the German- American Democ- 
 racy. That was Fusion on broad lines, and when these 
 nomination were made and the candidates had accepted, 
 a great movement had been inaugurated and success 
 was practically almost assured; and thence came a vic- 
 tory which not only elected a Mayor and a Supreme 
 Court Judge, but made the State Republican for the 
 first time, I think, in ten years. 
 
 Reading your paper, Mr. Editor, was like having 
 before me the moving picture of everyday life in Brook- 
 lyn. It was so full, so free, so sketchy and so piquant ; 
 and I am very glad to join the procession and to have 
 my reminiscences and ruminations goi out in such a 
 paper to 150,000 Brooklyn readers. 
 
 About all the papers I am able to read here are the 
 English papers. The London papers, of course, are 
 great newspapers ; but I think they lack the vivacious, 
 snappy, newsy " go " of the American papers. But 
 the London evening papers are not at all comparable 
 with the evening papers of Brooklyn and New York. 
 Our evening papers are more and more taking the place 
 of their generally larger and older brethren, the morn- 
 
Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 85 
 
 ing papers. But this is not so in London. There the 
 morning newspaper is the paper, and the evening paper 
 is rather an afterthought, like a cigar after dinner, 
 pleasant, but not essential. And so I say to Brooklyn's 
 leading evening paper, as Daniel Webster said to the 
 young lawyer, " There is plenty of room in the attic ! " 
 "Excelsior!" 
 
 As I complete this letter I have heard of the result 
 of the election. It is a far-reaching victory for Tam- 
 many — ^but where and whom will it reach.? Perhaps 
 we can see, or only dimly guess ; and I am quite willing 
 — and, willing or not, shall have — to wait until the 
 curtain of the future is withdrawn. 
 
 It is very foggy and cloudy here, so much so that I 
 have been unable to see Mont Blanc again. So, being 
 in mist and fog in far-away Geneva, I will attempt no 
 prophecy, except the prophecy of The Standard Union, 
 and that in a single word — " Excelsior " ! 
 
 XIII 
 
 Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 
 
 We went to Lausanne from Paris, making the trip in 
 about eight hours, across France, to Lausanne, a city 
 of about 50,000 inhabitants, situated within the outer 
 lines of the Alps. In the rear of the hotel is a beautiful 
 terrace, adorned by trees and plants and overlooking 
 the beautiful Lake of Geneva, which is seen blue and 
 brilliant at the foot of the hill about a quarter of a 
 mile away, and some hundred feet lower than the ter- 
 race from which we view it; and beyond the lake, sheer 
 
86 Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 
 
 and bare, rise the sharply serrated ridges of the Alps, 
 5000 feet high. 
 
 We are told that on that terrace Gibbon wrote his 
 great history of " The Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire." In one of the sitting-rooms of the hotel is a 
 fine portrait of the great historian, and that, coupled 
 with the name of the hotel (Hotel Gibbon), in my pres- 
 ent mood, I take as proof conclusive that here, where 
 we sip our coffee and smoke our cigar, the great histo- 
 rian unraveled a snarl of the skein of history, and, out 
 of the tangle of successive and apparently disconnected 
 crimes and tragedies, evolved the story of the decay and 
 fall of the great Roman empire. 
 
 We delayed our departure from Paris in order to re- 
 main there over Tuesday, which is one of the days on 
 which the public are admitted to a view of the tomb 
 and last resting place of the First Napoleon. Start- 
 ing from our hotel, we directed our driver to first take 
 us to the Place Vendome, that we might have another 
 view of the great Vendome column, which was erected 
 by the great Napoleon to commemorate his victories over 
 Russia and Austria in the Austerlitz campaign. The 
 column, surmounted by a statue of the great emperor, is 
 142 feet high; its exterior is of metal, in appearance 
 bronze, said to have been obtained by melting down 
 twelve hundred Russian and Austrian cannon captured 
 in that campaign. Its exterior consists of metal plates 
 forming a spiral band reaching from the bottom to the 
 top, on which are represented memorable events in that 
 campaign. The first drive we took in Paris we drove 
 to see that column, and in this, which we expect to be 
 our last ride there, we go to view again the column sur- 
 
Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 87 
 
 mounted by the statue of the emperor and the tomb 
 where his remains are laid. 
 
 I remember, as though it were yesterday, when I first 
 read or knew of Austerhtz. Sitting in an upper cham- 
 ber in the house of a relative, on one of those long after- 
 noons that come to boys in the country, and looking 
 through the reading matter there, I found a copy of 
 Harper's Magazine, containing an account of the bat- 
 tle of Austerlitz, as written by J. S. C. Abbott, who was 
 then writing the life of Napoleon. The pages were 
 illuminated by a picture of the great cavalry charge 
 led by the dashing Murat, which shattered the center 
 of the allied armies and gave Napoleon the victory, 
 which caused Lord Chatham (the elder Pitt) to say: 
 " Roll up the map of Europe ; we shall not need it for 
 twenty years." I have just been rereading " David 
 Harum," who, explaining that he was a growing boy, 
 describes how he devoured and relished ginger bread at 
 the country circus. The appetite with which David de- 
 voured that ginger bread was like, though inferior to, 
 the appetite with which I read, devoured, the story of 
 that battle as told by Abbott's facile pen, illustrated by 
 the intelligent liberality of the Harpers. As David says, 
 I was a growing boy then — it must have been more than 
 fifty years ago, but I remember it as distinctly as if it 
 were yesterday. From that I formed the design to ac- 
 quire and own Abbott's life of Napoleon, and com- 
 menced to " save money " for that purpose. How well 
 I remember that little hoard! A great Mexican silver 
 dollar, with a sunburst on one side of it, was its base, and 
 for a long time its principal part. I believe that after 
 a while, David Harum, having all the ginger bread he 
 
88 Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 
 
 wanted, cared less for ginger bread, but he never quite 
 forgot the appetite with which he devoured two great 
 cakes of ginger bread in a country circus ; later I had 
 all the books I wished to read, but first and foremost, 
 for a long time, I sought the story of Napoleon, and I 
 do not think I have since read anything with the zest 
 and interest with which I devoured the story of Auster- 
 litz in that old, but then new, magazine, which I had 
 pulled out from under a great heap of books, maga- 
 zines, and rubbish that lay in a little closet opening out 
 of the room in which I was sitting. 
 
 And when in a httle district school, at the top of Ver- 
 mont hill, where I used to stand up In the class and 
 read from the Fourth Reader, we had these lines : 
 
 " His falchion flashed along the Nile, 
 His hosts he led o'er Alpine snows, 
 O'er Moscow's towers, that blazed the while. 
 His eagle flag unrolled — and froze." 
 
 I thought that that was very grand poetry In those 
 days ; perhaps I have changed my mind a little as to that 
 poetry and the character and life work of the great 
 emperor ; but if those short lines are not Mlltonic, they 
 are at least clear and forcible, and I know of no four 
 lines that contain a more graphic statement of the mar- 
 velous vicissitudes in the life of the great Corslcan. 
 Haunted by thoughts and memories such as these, I 
 looked up at that great column, and at the strong, well- 
 poised figure at the top ; and from there we drove down 
 the Boulevard, past the Tullerles, where Napoleon, while 
 Emperor, lived with Josephine, and, after his divorce, 
 with the Austrian princess, Marie-Louise. From there 
 we soon came to the Champs Elysees, and both on our 
 
Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 89 
 
 left and on our right we saw a triumphal arch, both 
 initiated or constructed by Napoleon. The lesser arch, 
 the one on our left, is not unlike, in general appearance, 
 the triumphal arch in the plaza of our Prospect Park. 
 Like the Park arch, it is surmounted by horses and 
 chariots of victory, and it stands just at the entrance 
 of the gardens of the Tuileries. The other arch is at 
 the other end of the Champs Ely sees and just outside 
 of the Boulogne wood. That is the largest triumphal 
 arch in existence ; it is visible from almost every part 
 of the environs of Paris, and within it are inscribed the 
 names of battles and victories of the great emperor: 
 Marengo, Austerlitz, Wagram, and Rivoli, and names 
 like these break through the gloom of the interior arch- 
 way. On its front and rear are groups of figures, gi- 
 gantic in size, representing different events in the wars 
 of the emperor. 
 
 As we go up the great avenue connecting these two 
 arches we see far ahead, and across the Seine, a great, 
 gilded dome, rising conspicuously over all surrounding 
 objects, and toward that we take our way, and soon find 
 ourselves in front of a high building, which we approach 
 over a gravel walk. Entering, we see a man on our 
 right, presumably an invalid soldier, whose blue coat is 
 adorned with bronze eagles and medals, who quietly 
 motions us to proceed. Proceeding silently and slowly, 
 looking almost unconsciously for some great monument 
 which we imagine would indicate the last resting place 
 of the emperor, we see in front of us only a stone railing 
 two or three feet in height ; seeing another attendant in 
 similar uniform adorned with medals and eagles, in dumb 
 pantomime we ask whether or not we should pass around 
 
90 Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 
 
 this stone railing. He motions gently to us, a motion 
 which leads us to go up to the railing, and there, look- 
 ing down over it, we see, as it were, a great inverted 
 dome, or bowl of gigantic size, directly under the great 
 gilded dome which we had seen from the other side of the 
 Seine, and in that great inverted dome, or bowl, we see 
 a piece of highly polished and beautifully wrought dark 
 brown granite, and immediately we recognize that we are 
 looking on the granite sarcophagus which contains the 
 mortal remains of the great emperor. 
 
 The man who waited on the cigar stand of our hotel 
 spoke good English, and, besides that, had been in 
 America. I found it very pleasant to talk with him. 
 He told me that when plans were invited for the tomb of 
 Napoleon three hundred were submitted, and two hun- 
 dred and ninety-nine of them proposed something con- 
 structed or built upward like a shaft or monument, and 
 that a single one of them proposed this great opening 
 and substructure, under that great gilded dome, and 
 that the committee unanimously chose the one proposing 
 this opening and substructure, and the result is a tomb 
 and resting place unique, original, unlike all others, as 
 is the history and career of the great Napoleon. Na- 
 poleon died at St. Helena in 1821. In 1840, when a 
 Bourbon king was ruler of France (Louis Philippe, I 
 think), his remains were brought from St. Helena and 
 deposited in that tomb under that great golden dome. 
 As I recollect, I have read somewhere, but I am not able 
 to verify the statement, because I cannot find the books 
 here, except in French, that when the barge laden with 
 the remains of Napoleon was coming up the Seine, and 
 was expected soon to land, this Bourbon king, with his 
 
Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 91 
 
 princes, sons, and brothers, bedecked and decorated as 
 such puppets usually are, were in waiting, in the room 
 where that tomb was constructed, when suddenly the 
 great doors were thrown open and an old soldier, en- 
 tering and saluting, said : " Sire, the Emperor," and 
 immediately the plumes and hats were removed from the 
 heads of that princely throng, and they stood uncovered 
 while the great Napoleon finished his last triumphal 
 march, as he was borne past them to his stately tomb 
 under that great gilded dome. 
 
 The building where is this tomb is one of a large 
 number of buildings surrounding a large open court, 
 constructed and intended as a hospital or home for old 
 or invalid soldiers, and appropriately called Hotel des 
 Invalides. In it is a museum containing weapons of 
 warfare new and old, from the short sword and the 
 shield of the Roman legionaries to the rifled cannon and 
 breech-loading rifles of the present day, and so the 
 great emperor takes his last sleep surrounded by all the 
 paraphernalia and implements of war, and doubtless, so 
 long as any of them survive, surrounded by the soldiers 
 who fought at the Pyramids of Egypt, or in sight of the 
 spires and pinnacles of Moscow, or in some of the two 
 hundred battles, fierce and bloody, that lay between. 
 
 Having looked down into that tomb under that great 
 gilded dome, we took carriage to return to our hotel. 
 Crossing the Seine, we soon came to the great avenue 
 which connects the two great triumphaj arches, but the 
 Germans had been there, and, as they thought, had 
 squared the account of Jena and Marengo. From there 
 we passed by the Tuileries, but they had been burned 
 by the Commune, and but partially rebuilt, and they 
 
92 Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 
 
 are entirely unoccupied, except for one of the minor 
 public offices. The destruction of so much of the Tuil- 
 eries lays open a great interior court, where the emperor 
 walked with Josephine and Marie-Louise, and where his 
 son, styled King of Rome, had his playground. That 
 interior is now a flower garden, open to the public and 
 largely frequented, as is said, by children and nurses. 
 Even that great Vendome column was thrown down by 
 the Commune, and it now stands as restored by the 
 Republic. 
 
 France seems prosperous and happy under the Re- 
 public, and it does not seem to me probable, or possible, 
 that another Napoleon will come to the throne of France. 
 The son of the great emperor languished at the Austrian 
 court and died of consumption early in life. We had 
 seen the effigy of the son of the third Napoleon in the 
 royal chapel at Windsor. The Napoleonic line, so far 
 as the probable claimants to the throne, seems to be 
 extinct. It seems to me that those who believe there is 
 a Providence that rules in the affairs of men (and I am 
 one who so believe), may well believe that Providence 
 has interposed to overthrow the emperors, and to prevent 
 other emperors coming to the throne of France. I have 
 written how the story of Napoleon captivated my youth- 
 ful fancy, but sitting on the other side of life, perhaps 
 in the Indian summer of my days, I look at the history 
 of Napoleon quite differently. I have written of my 
 visit to the country of the " Lady of the Lake," and to 
 the grave of Scott at beautiful Dryburgh Abbey ; and 
 to me now more beautiful and admirable seems the life- 
 work and memory of Sir Walter Scott than the career 
 and achievements, splendid and dazzling though they 
 were, of the great Napoleon ; and to me sweeter and 
 
French Peasants on Market Days 93 
 
 dearer memories will always cluster around that simple 
 grave beneath the roof of the old Abbey, almost hidden 
 by twining ivies and ancient trees, than around the 
 grand resting place provided by a nation under the 
 gilded dome of the Hotel des Invalides. 
 
 XIV 
 
 French Peasants on Market Days 
 
 Nice, France, Dec. 1, 190 — . 
 We left Geneva three weeks ago yesterday, and after 
 journeying more or less for three days found ourselves 
 at Nice, one of the best-known and most attractive cities 
 in the far-famed Riviera. 
 
 Our journey commenced at 10 a. m., and with a few 
 puffs of the engine we were out of the depot and had 
 rounded a curve that carried us out of Geneva, and out 
 of view of the beautiful lake, and out of all the scenery 
 within the view and horizon of glorious Mont Blanc. 
 As we left the city we found ourselves swiftly coursing 
 down the Rhone. Passing the point where the Arve, 
 swollen by glaciers, discharges its icy waters into the 
 Rhone, we noted how the blue of the Rhone and the 
 gray of the Arve flowed side by side for many miles, as 
 though separated by some impalpable barrier. Soon 
 the train stopped at the point where the railroad enters 
 France, and it was necessary to have our baggage 
 passed by the customs officials. This caused a little de- 
 lay, but no inconvenience, and very soon there was a 
 chalk mark on each of our bags and trunks which indi- 
 cated that they had the right of entry into the bright, 
 sunny, and inviting land of the great French Republic. 
 
 After about five hours of railway travel we found 
 
94 French Peasants on Market Days 
 
 ourselves in Lyons, a city of over 400,000 population, 
 situated in the central portion of France. Having se- 
 cured accommodation at a hotel — quite imposing, and 
 very excellent except that the cooking was abominable 
 — we strolled out on to the adjacent street, and soon 
 found ourselves passing a great public square, in the 
 center of which was a large equestrian bronze statue 
 of Louis XIV., whom the French call " The Great Mon- 
 arch." At Versailles we had seen evidence of his 
 egotism, pride, vainglory, and prodigal profligacy, and 
 I wondered if even into that ear of bronze no raven 
 croaked of the expiation that was to be demanded in the 
 blood of the French Revolution. Looking out from the 
 window of the very comfortable and commodious room in 
 which we were lodged, right in front of us was the 
 Rhone, the river which had been our companion all the 
 way from Geneva, but there, instead of running wildly 
 and rapidly, it seemed to move smoothly and slowly ; and 
 along its banks were piers and abutments of stone to 
 which were moored light pleasure boats, and long and 
 heavy freight carriers, and then we learned that a canal 
 had been cut from the Seine to the Saone, which joins 
 the Rhone in Lyons. This gives continuous water trans- 
 portation from the mouth of the Seine at Havre, on the 
 English Channel, and from Paris and hundreds of in- 
 terior towns and cities, to Lyons, and so to Marseilles. 
 Between us and the river was quite a large piece of 
 open ground, and this space of ground, as we saw it at 
 night, was entirely unoccupied; but as we looked out 
 on it in the morning it was filled with people, men and 
 women, young and old, with booths and wagons piled 
 high, loaded with fruits and vegetables, meats, and every- 
 
French Peasants on Market Days 95 
 
 thing eatable. It was a most busy scene; everyone 
 seemed to be full of light and joyous activity. 
 
 Women were talking and gesticulating rapidly and 
 prettily, as French women do ; boys and girls were run- 
 ning up and down with joyous shout and halloa, ap- 
 parently helping, or trying to help, their parents. And 
 a little to one side we saw a congregation of carts, 
 wagons, horses, cows, and oxen, all harnessed. There 
 was a great patient cow, as large and stout as an ox, 
 from whose large and distended udder had probably 
 been drawn the milk that had made a breakfast that 
 morning for some of those boys and girls, and on this 
 cow was a harness precisely like the heavy harnesses we 
 see on draught horses in America, except that it had no 
 bridle. This cow had obviously come from some farm, 
 drawing a load of fruit and vegetables, on top of which 
 was perched an entire family, laughing and joyously 
 chattering as they came to this great gathering. And 
 what was this aggregation that so usurped and filled 
 this place? From its looks it might be the citizens of 
 France under another Paul Kruger, trekking from their 
 homes to some unknown land ; or was it not like the en- 
 campment of Israelites under Moses, when trekking 
 across the Red Sea and camping for forty years in the 
 wilderness, before coming in sight of the Promised 
 Land ? All these questions might have come to me, but 
 they did not ; for it was Wednesday, and I knew what 
 that meant. 
 
 It was market day, and these people had come there 
 during the night from fields and farms all around, 
 bringing with them, fresh from their fields, the fruits 
 and vegetables of that sunny land. There were oranges, 
 
96 French Peasants on Market Days 
 
 pears, and apples, plucked but the day before from the 
 trees, with the leaves hanging on the branches, still fresh 
 and un wilted ; eggs fresh laid, and milk, fresh and rich 
 in cream ; grapes and plums and lustrous roses, that but 
 the day before hung on southern slopes, tanned and 
 purpling as kissed by the rays of the southern sun. And 
 through this motley and cheerful aggregation were 
 going dames of the city purchasing their supplies for 
 half a week (for market days in France are twice a 
 week — ^Wednesdays and Saturdays), and following be- 
 hind them, boys balancing on their heads baskets filled to 
 overflowing with these ripe and luscious spoils of the 
 husbandman; and others going, half curiously, as we 
 had gone at Lausanne, because we wished to secure some 
 fresh grapes, pears, or plums, or some roses just plucked 
 from their bush. Nothing is sent home by these market 
 people; everyone who purchases at these markets pays 
 cash, and takes it away himself, and so, in a few hours, 
 it had all ended and the cows and oxen and horses were 
 harnessed again to the wagons and carts, the women 
 and children climbed in, and, with their little silver and 
 gold pieces clinking in their pockets, started away for 
 the little home on some remote hillside, perhaps to glean 
 and gather again for the next market day. 
 
 These market days are one of the established institu- 
 tions in France and Switzerland, and where there is no 
 open, convenient space, certain streets, known and 
 understood by vendors and buyers, are surrendered 
 to this good-natured, rapid, and useful traffic. Hardly 
 could there be devised a better plan for bringing to- 
 gether the producer and consumer — giving to the farmer 
 a ready cash market and to the dwellers in the city 
 
From Geneva to the Riviera 97 
 
 fruits and vegetables, fresh and rich and luscious with 
 the glow and warmth of the sun of the day before. 
 
 XV 
 
 From Geneva to the Riviera 
 
 Nice, Dec. 17. 
 On our journey to Lyons, to our right were steep, pre- 
 cipitous hills which looked like the outlying ridges of 
 the Jura range, which lies along the northern shore of 
 Lake Geneva. We were on the south side of these hills, 
 and, consequently, had in view the slopes fronting on 
 the south ; and nearly all the way, on these steep south- 
 ern slopes, were the well-tended and luxuriant vineyards, 
 built in terraces, bearing the large white grapes, some- 
 times almost purpling in the sun ; and these carefully 
 tended vineyards hung all along these slopes, sometimes 
 in little clearings breaking into the forest line, and ex- 
 tending almost to the top of the ridge. And ever and 
 anon these hills would send one of their rocky spurs 
 down to the river's brink, and then our train would shoot 
 through the ridge or spur by one of the tunnels, which 
 are quite frequent, and appear to be easily made in this 
 rather soft limestone rock which appears almost every- 
 where in the Alpine districts. 
 
 At our left ran the Rhone, not a very large river, but 
 broken and rippled by its swift descent from these 
 mountainous regions. We followed the Rhone, I should 
 think, about four hours. It seemed to me to be a river 
 in many ways resembling the Merrimac — perhaps not 
 quite so large, but certainly with a more rapid descent 
 than has the Merrimac after it escapes from the fast- 
 nesses of the White Mountains. But the Merrimac is 
 
98 From Geneva to the Riviera 
 
 in Yankeeland, and the Rhone is in France. The Merri- 
 mac at Manchester, Lowell, and Lawrence is harnessed 
 so as to yield to man every pound of the impact of its 
 falling waters, and is forced to turn great wheels, which 
 drive millions of shuttles and spindles, which weave and 
 make the cotton fabrics for a nation. Certainly, it 
 would be difficult to find a river apparently better 
 adapted to furnish water power than the Rhone, but I 
 did not see, during all our journey, any indication that 
 its enormous power is at all utilized, except for what 
 appear to be small mills, for grinding the corn and 
 wheat of the various localities. 
 
 As we see the Arve bringing its swollen floods from 
 the great altitude of the Mont Blanc tableland, and the 
 city of Geneva burning roots, small twigs, and branches 
 of trees, complaining that coal is $15 a ton, we wonder 
 that no one has thought to harness the Arve, so that 
 from its icy flow shall come light and heat for fair, 
 beautiful, and historic Geneva. 
 
 And, looking from our window, beyond there appeared 
 the same ridge that had seemed to tower on our right 
 all the way from Geneva; but instead of being covered 
 with vines and forests of evergreen and fruitful trees, 
 it was covered thick with buildings, large and small, 
 towering one above the other as they climbed toward the 
 summit ; and on the top, the highest point in the city 
 (as seems to be usual in French cities), was the great 
 cathedral, and as the sun went down, and the shadows 
 of the evening quickly fell, all that hillside broke out 
 in a glare of electric light, very picturesque and beau- 
 tiful, as we saw it across the river, and reflected in its 
 shining waters. 
 
From Geneva to the Riviera 99 
 
 We spent the first afternoon and the following day in 
 Lyons, driving round the city and through its park, in a 
 cold, disagreeable rain. The next evening, at about 
 seven o'clock, we again took train for Marseilles. This 
 was a through train from Paris — what is called a " train 
 de luxe " — and was furnished and run more like our best 
 American trains than any other trains I had seen on 
 the Continent. On the train was a dining car, in which 
 was served a good dinner, which is a luxury but little 
 known in Continental traveling. Our train stopped at 
 about eleven o'clock, and we were told that we had 
 reached Marseilles, and, leaving our train, we passed 
 from the depot into a terminus hotel. These terminus 
 hotels — generally built and maintained by the railway 
 companies — are peculiar to Europe, and, I think, on the 
 whole, they furnish attractions and conveniences which 
 we do not have in America. We walked directly from 
 the depot into the hotel, and when we resumed our 
 journey, passing out of the hall by a side door, we were 
 in the depot and convenient to our train. 
 
 In the morning, passing along the hall of the hotel, 
 I saw a man of swarthy complexion, in a peculiar cos- 
 tume, part of which was a bright red cap or " fez," 
 which easily identified him as a Mohammedan, or at least 
 as an East Indian. On the depot platform we saw some 
 tall, fine-looking men in zouave uniform. The interpre- 
 ter told us that they were zouaves who had just come 
 back from the French colonies at Morocco and Algiers, 
 and he added that these zouaves are drawn from Brit- 
 tany and Normandy, in the northern part of France, 
 and are regarded as the flower of the French army. All 
 these things told us that we were on the border line of 
 
100 From Geneva to the Riviera 
 
 European civilization. From Marseilles there is a line 
 of steamboats which, traversing the Mediterreanean, 
 pass through the Suez Canal, and on down through the 
 Red Sea and Indian Ocean, taking passengers to Ceylon, 
 from thence the transfer is easy to India and all the 
 adjacent islands of the fabled and wondrous East. 
 There are also regular lines of steamers to the French 
 possessions in Algiers, to Corsica, to Sardinia, to Egypt, 
 to Constantinople, and to Syria ; and Marseilles, we find, 
 is the great southern and Mediterranean seaport of 
 France. As we crossed the Channel some months earher 
 we learned that on the Channel boat were many passen- 
 gers for Constantinople and India, via Marseilles, and 
 that that line is the favored route from London to the 
 great English Indian Empire. 
 
 Again taking train at about nine o'clock in the morn- 
 ing, we were taken northerly from Marseilles, but soon 
 turned to the east and were brought along the shore of 
 the Mediterranean to Nice, in about four hours. Most 
 of this journey was with the Mediterranean clearly in 
 view on our right, and on our left steep hills or moun- 
 tains often coming down to the sea and traversed by 
 the railroad through deep cuts or tunnels. At two 
 o'clock we were at Nice, the largest city on what is 
 known as the Riviera. 
 
 There seem to be two sections or parts to what is 
 known as the Riviera: Nice is in the westerly section, 
 which is best known, and may fairly be called " The 
 Riviera." This westerly section extends from the 
 vicinity of Toulon to Genoa, little over two hundred 
 miles. Looking at the map, it will be seen that this por- 
 tion of the coast is on what is called the Gulf of Lyons, 
 
From Geneva to the Riviera 101 
 
 fronting generally to the southwest and shielded from 
 westerly winds and westerly ocean currents by Spain 
 and the heights of the Pyrenees, and on the east shut 
 in by Italy and the wooded Apennines. 
 
 The Mediterranean, covering an area as great as all 
 the States of the Union east of the Mississippi, is al- 
 most tideless, its rise and fall on account of tides being 
 less than one foot. This great bay opens toward the 
 great, rainless, hot Sahara region, and, protected by 
 the sheltering arms of Spain and Italy on either side, 
 and generally un vexed by winds, its waters are quite 
 warm, even in winter, and break in gentle waves along 
 the pebbly shore as though lulling to rest and inviting 
 to indolence. Bathing houses are along the shore, and 
 bathing here, in December, is almost as much a matter 
 of course as it is at Coney Island in July and August. 
 Back a few miles from the coast, through all these two 
 hundred miles, are ranges of limestone mountains, which, 
 they tell us, are the Maritime Alps, and so, with the 
 warm water of the placid Mediterranean on the south 
 and these rocky ridges along the north, and other moun- 
 tains on either side to intercept and break the winds and 
 take and draw from the clouds their moisture and their 
 rains, the Riviera has a climate, which, warm and at- 
 tractive even in winter, reveals itself to us in the glow 
 and warmth of bright, rich, and generous sunshine, 
 where, discarding overcoats, we lounge and walk as 
 though winter, with its frosts and ice, were for memory 
 only. 
 
 Now, in December, we still see in the parks and gar- 
 dens orange trees bending beneath their burden of yel- 
 low fruit, half hidden among long, green taper leaves, 
 
102 From Geneva to the Riviera 
 
 still bright and clear, untouched by frost — roses rich 
 and fragrant as though laughing in the caresses of a 
 July sun — and on all sides, in gardens, yards, and 
 parks, and often along the sidewalks, next to the car- 
 riage line, palms ten or twenty feet in height and from 
 one to two feet in diameter, each with its verdant crown 
 of lustrous green leaves, ten or fifteen feet in length, 
 in shape like ostrich plumes, seeming, as they wave and 
 toss, to rejoice and be exceeding glad, as they breathe 
 the soft air, rich with the sparkle and warmth of the 
 December sun. i^ 
 
 Our guide book, which seems full and accurate, in- 
 structs us as to the climate and the vegetable growth of 
 this fair southern slope, as follows : 
 
 The main winter temperature (November, December, and Janu- 
 ary) of Hyeres, considered the coolest of the winter stations, is 
 50.3 degrees Fahrenheit, and of San Remo, considered the mildest, 
 51 degrees Fahrenheit. The coldest months are December and 
 January. With February the temperature commences to rise 
 progressively. Throughout the entire region bright and dusty 
 weather is the rule, cloudy and wet weather the exception. In 
 December wild flowers are rare till after Christmas, when the 
 long-bracted orchid, the purple anemone, and the violet, make 
 their appearance. These by the end of January have become 
 abundant, and are quickly followed in February by crocuses, 
 primroses, and pretty blue hepaticas. Meanwhile, the star-anem- 
 ones are springing up in the olive woods, with periwinkles and 
 rich, red anemones. In March the hillsides are fragrant with 
 thyme, lavender, and the Mediterranean heath, to which April 
 adds cistuses, helianthemums, convolvuli, serapiases, and gladioli. 
 The date-palm flourishes in the open air. Capital walking sticks 
 are made of the midrib of the leaf. Among the trees which 
 fructify freely are the orange, lemon, and citron trees, the pepper 
 tree, the camphor tree, the locust tree, the tree vronica, the mag- 
 nolia, and different species of the eucalyptus or gum tree, and of 
 the true acacia. In marshy places the common bamboo attains 
 a great height; while the aloe and the opuntium, or prickly-pear, 
 clothe the rocky banks with verdure. 
 
From Geneva to the Riviera 103 
 
 Perhaps someone will say: Why do you go to Nice? 
 Are there no Rivieras, no land of orange and palm, no 
 savannahs fanned by southern breezes or lapped by 
 gentle waves in America ? Indeed there are ; and better 
 than vineclad hills or southern seas is the dear land 
 and scenes which have been home and comfort to me for 
 fifty years. More beautiful than the orange or the palm 
 is the sturdy maple, with its wilderness of leaves flutter- 
 ing in purple and in gold when smitten and chilled by 
 the frosty breath of our autumnal days ; and better than 
 the soft lapping of southern waves Is the crash and roar 
 of Atlantic billows when lashed and driven by the stress 
 of November gales. But neither Mrs. Johnson nor I 
 have ever been to Europe before this journey, and we 
 would not end our journey without seeing the Coliseum, 
 the Pantheon, and St. Peter's; and Nice is on the direct 
 road to Rome, and a convenient place in which to halt 
 until the spring, which is reputed to be a better season 
 than the winter to visit Rome; and so I suppose early 
 in March we shall take boat from here to Genoa and go 
 from there to Florence and to Rome, and then to Naples 
 and Pompeii, to look in wonder, and, perhaps, dread, at 
 the great volcano which, I believe, is active this year; 
 and then take boat from Naples, and, sailing past Spain 
 and Algiers, past the Rock of Gibraltar (once known 
 as the Pillar of Hercules), break out, as Columbus did, 
 Into the great, broad Atlantic; and touching, perhaps, 
 at the Azores, reach New York, Brooklyn, and — ^home, 
 as I hope. In April. How does the future and the un- 
 known still lure us on and on ; but I am sure there Is and 
 can be no joy of travel like that of returning home; for 
 when abroad we " drag at each remove a lengthening 
 chain." 
 
104 Cheerfulness of the French People 
 
 XVI 
 
 Cheerfulness of the French PEOPiiE 
 
 Florence, Feb. 29, 190 — . 
 We left Nice on the 13th, proceeding to Genoa, and 
 thence to Milan, and to Venice, and arrived here a week 
 ago. We expect to sail for home from Naples in April, 
 and as we shall not retrace our steps, I feel that I would 
 not leave the sunny lands in which we have lingered for 
 the last six months without a final word of retrospect, 
 and, as it were, summing up of the impressions of travel. 
 From various reasons, but I think mostly from the 
 record of what seemed to me the disgraceful prosecu- 
 tion of Dreyfus, I had entered France with a very poor 
 impression of the French people. I am happy, and feel 
 obligated, to say that that impression is entirely re- 
 moved, and I left France with a great admiration for 
 the French people as I saw them in my travels. The 
 good-nature of the French is simply invincible. Nor is 
 this good-nature any surface show, but it seems a 
 spontaneous bubbling forth from a great well-spring 
 of kindness and good-nature beneath. It is often quite 
 vexatious to be unable to speak the language of those 
 we are in contact with, and I confess that in the first 
 surprise of attempting to communicate in English in 
 a French country, I would often find myself quite irri- 
 tated, and, I fear, sometimes, in thought at least, not 
 quite polite or altogether courteous : but the abun- 
 dant good-nature of the French never seemed to fail 
 or tire in such situations ; and I often found myself 
 wondering whether, if conditions were reversed and I 
 
Cheerfulness of the French People 105 
 
 were at home listening to a Frenchman attempting to 
 make his way through our country, without understand- 
 ing a word of English, wondering whether or not I 
 would be I as patient and conciHatory to the French 
 stranger in my own country as I found these French 
 people were to me. 
 
 I would give an instance of these good-natured acts, 
 and so state one, which, though not much in itself, seems 
 to me so typical of the prevailing sentiment of the 
 French people that I have thought of it very often. 
 
 When in Paris we engaged a carriage for a ride in 
 the Bois de Boulogne. The carriage was one of these 
 low, open carriages about like our victorias, except the 
 wheels were low and the body swung near the ground ; 
 the driver was on a seat just in front of us. He was 
 a great hulk of a man, fat, brawny, and good-natured, 
 with a face that seemed always dimpling with a half- 
 suppressed smile. We told him to drive in the farther 
 and less frequented parts of the wood; and, going 
 through the old city gate, we soon found ourselves far 
 from the whirl and rush which, on that afternoon, was 
 thronging the road leading to the race course; and in 
 a stillness, almost as though we were in the pathways 
 of a forest primeval, we moved slowly along the shaded 
 road. 
 
 Suddenly our driver rose from his seat and began to 
 gesticulate wildly, talking in words we could not at all 
 understand. His gestures and motions caused us to 
 look into the near-by wood, where we saw a Httle herd 
 of deer feeding on the rich grass that was spread like 
 a carpet through and among the frequent small, but 
 high, trees along the roadside. When he saw that we 
 
106 Cheerfulness of the French People 
 
 had seen the deer he seemed satisfied, and, resuming his 
 seat, he started his horse at a slow trot. Proceeding a 
 short distance we found our driver suddenly again stand- 
 ing and gesticulating and talking more wildly than 
 before, and, looking where he pointed, we saw another 
 and larger herd of deer grazing quietly in the near-by 
 wood. This was a Httle too much for us, and so, 
 motioning him to remain, we stepped from the carriage 
 and started to walk through the woods to secure a nearer 
 view of this second and larger herd. As we were ap- 
 proaching them they seemed disturbed, as it appeared, 
 by something on the side farthest from us — and, looking 
 through the thick clumps of trees, we saw our friend, the 
 driver, hulking along about as nimbly as a rhinoceros, 
 his face one great expansive smile, for he was driving 
 the deer toward us that we might the better see them. 
 There was not much in this, I know, but the exuberant 
 good-nature, the obvious spontaneity of the whole pro- 
 ceeding, made us think of him as a great-heart, whom 
 it was a pleasure to meet in the dusty round of otherwise 
 commonplace travel. 
 
 In the barber shop that I patronized while in Nice 
 there was a boy of about 10 or 12 years old, apparently 
 the son of the proprietor. I would not enter the shop 
 before the boy was by, with some httle thoughtful at- 
 tention, taking hat or cane, and a pleasant " Bon jour " 
 (good-morning) — always a pleasant welcome and inci- 
 dent of my entering. When I was there last, as I left, 
 the boy and the father equally had a kind " Bon voy- 
 age " (good journey) for me, and the father told me 
 the boy was going to New York, where I have no doubt 
 he will soon appear, and with his quiet, thoughtful in- 
 
Cheerfulness of the French People 107 
 
 diistry, will soon be making his way along the line of 
 effort he may select. 
 
 There was a little girl who used to come to take and 
 return the wash for the washerwoman: and this little 
 girl was so thoughtful, so assiduous, so punctual, and, 
 withal, so helpful to her mother, the washerwoman, that 
 she seemed a very rainbow of comfort, solace, and sup- 
 port to her old mother in the humble path along which 
 they walk. 
 
 In France the people all work, and the children help 
 the parents and grow up in their work. Their industry, 
 economy, and carefulness in all they undertake to do 
 is remarkable and very pleasing. For in that industry 
 and economy is the secret of their immense success in 
 unloosing the hold, and ending the occupation of the 
 German armies, by paying the immense debt which was 
 contracted as the price for securing such release. 
 
 France is the only country I have ever been in where 
 a severe and merciless conscription is enforced. 
 
 In England the men for the army and navy are sup- 
 plied (as in America) by voluntary enlistment. 
 
 In Switzerland the men at certain ages are called out 
 for what they call " the maneuvers." The men go into 
 camp, and march and countermarch to secure positions 
 for their sham or mimic battles. We saw many of the 
 regiments coming and going from these maneuvers 
 and the services required seemed to me less like that de- 
 manded of our regular soldiery than like the encamp- 
 ment and drills of our national guard; besides, Switzer- 
 land being interior, having no coast line, has no navy 
 whatever, -and the traditional and settled policy of the 
 republic renders it highly improbable that Switzerland 
 
108 Soldiers in the French Academy 
 
 will ever be drawn into any of the fierce and desperate 
 wars which so often have desolated the fields and ex- 
 acted a sacrifice of the best and bravest of the young 
 men of the nations engaged in the war. 
 
 But in France the case is quite different. France has 
 long frontier lines entirely undefended by any river or 
 natural obstacles, and just beyond those frontier lines 
 on every side are great conscript armies, having in 
 their ranks a ^million or more of highly trained soldiers. 
 To defend herself against these surrounding armies 
 France relies entirely on her conscription. Under this 
 conscription every able-bodied young man, when he 
 reaches the age of twenty-one, is compelled to enter the 
 army for a term of three years, and during that period 
 of time he goes into camp, and is as much a part of the 
 active army of France as are the soldiers of our regular 
 army stationed at Fort Hamilton, or fighting on the 
 Indian frontier. 
 
 XVII 
 
 How S01.DIE11S ARE Made in the French Army 
 
 Nice, March 6, 190—. 
 From the military service in France no exemption what- 
 ever is allowed, either on account of profession, business, 
 or money payment. If any young man would claim ex- 
 emption on account of physical inability, he must notify 
 the proper officers and have that debility ascertained 
 and duly certified before he is summoned to the ranks. 
 This conscription keeps under arms about 500,000 
 men; the privates receive only about five centimes a 
 day, which is only equal to one cent of our money, while 
 
Soldiers in the French Army 109 
 
 the pay of the oflScers is very nominal ; and officers, while 
 in this active army, are not allowed to marry except 
 they marry a lady having a dowry of. 10,000 francs, or 
 $2000. 
 
 During the three years of service the young con- 
 script is in the active army, and in what may be termed 
 the first line; and if France should be drawn into the 
 war, it is from these young conscripts, drawing but a 
 penny a day, that the armies at the front must be 
 drawn. Nor is the service of the young Frenchman com- 
 plete at the end of his three years. For during the first 
 three years after his discharge he is liable to twenty- 
 eight days' additional service, and, also to twenty-eight 
 days in the next three years, and to a short prescribed 
 term of service each year for six years more; and dur- 
 ing all that time, and, indeed, until he is 45 years of 
 age, he is deemed to be in the reserve army and hable 
 to be summoned to the front in case of war. So that it 
 is the assured lot of the young Frenchman that during 
 three years of his active life he must be in the front 
 ranks of the armies of the Republic, and that practically 
 during all his years of best maturity he will be in the 
 active or reserve army. It is estimated that adding 
 the men in the reserve army — the men who have already 
 given three years to active service — to the men in the 
 active army and doing their first three years of service, 
 the French republic has at her disposal 1,800,000 men. 
 I may add that this burden is borne by Frenchmen alone, 
 and that a person subject to a foreign country, residing 
 in France, is exempt from this conscription. And yet 
 it seems to me the French carry the burden of this im- 
 mense military service willingly and cheerfully, and I 
 
110 Soldiers in the French Academy 
 
 think the fact of such miHtary service is a great con- 
 servative force in France to-day. It was Rufus Choate, 
 I think, who spoke of " the bulletins in which her First 
 Consul told to France her dream of glory." But to-day 
 the case is quite different. If any Frenchman hungers 
 to-day for war or conquest, he knows that the soldiers 
 for the war must be taken from his own kindred, from 
 the very flower and life-blood of young France, and 
 from the men who are on the first line of battle in their 
 first three years of conscript service. And I think this 
 conscription will prevent France from being hastily 
 drawn into the Asiatic or any other war, so that the 
 Republic, with all its military burden, is to-day a con- 
 servative force and a force for peace in the politics and 
 international affairs of the world. And so I say: 
 " Bravo for France ! Plucky and patient RepubHc ! " 
 the only great nation that I know of which, being 
 purely and entirely a republic, bears patiently the 
 burdens of a severe conscription and keeps the very 
 flower of her manhood always on the front line, to re- 
 sist or repel attack or invasion. 
 
 At Nice the Maritime Alps seem pushed back a little 
 from the shore, and on a little plain thus left between 
 the sea and the mountains Is that city of above 100,000 
 people, more than half of whom are probably transients, 
 like ourselves, there only temporarily, to enjoy the 
 beautiful sunshine and the many attractions of the place. 
 As we proceed toward the mountains from the sea the 
 first rise brings us to a little plateau, where there Is the 
 ruin of an old Roman structure built In stone, which is 
 called an amphitheater. Near it is a new, large, and 
 
Soldiers in the French Army 111 
 
 palatial hotel, where Queen Victoria was accustomed to 
 come in winter, occupying when there one entire wing 
 of the hotel. The hotel itself is called the Regina, and 
 running back from it is a road leading up the mountains 
 to the height of 4000 or 5000 feet — a superb road from 
 which is had a grand view of the city of Nice, locked 
 in between the circling sea and these outlying Alpine 
 ridges. 
 
 As we pass to the west of Nice the mountains come 
 down to the shore in sharp and serried ridges. About 
 twenty miles to the west is a place called Mentone, which 
 we visited one day, driving over and along these lime- 
 stone ridges on a wide, broad military road, called the 
 Cornice Road, said to have been constructed by the first 
 Napoleon. At Mentone we were shown a modest wooden 
 house in which we were told is the residence of Paul 
 Kruger, ex-President of the Boer Republic, an old man 
 of eighty, whose life has run through strange and 
 somber histories. 
 
 Just beyond Mentone is a great fissure in the moun- 
 tains which extends down to the sea, and is the boundary 
 line between Italy and France. On the bridge which 
 crosses it is set up a large flat stone, on one side of 
 which , is chiseled " France," and on the other side 
 " Italy," and on the two sides of this great cleft in the 
 hills we saw the customs officers in the uniforms of the 
 two countries, bright and conspicuous in red and blue — 
 the diverse colors of the two nations. 
 
 But our way, then, was not to the west, but back to 
 Nice. And driving back along the shore, about midway 
 to Nice, we came to Monte Carlo. Just before we 
 reached Monte Carlo we saw to our left a rocky cape 
 
112 Monte Carlo 
 
 or promontory projecting into the sea. On this rocky 
 promontory there was pointed out a house, said to be 
 the winter residence of Sir Thomas Lipton, known in 
 America for his plucky and persevering efforts to take 
 home a cup which seems to be nailed fast to the do- 
 main of the American eagle, and to be destined to re- 
 main the trophy of the eagle, and under the protection 
 of the starry flag. 
 
 A little farther out on the promontory is another and 
 larger house, which is the winter residence of Eugenie, 
 the widow of Napoleon III., and the mother of the 
 prince whose marble effigy, cut in polished marble, we 
 had seen in the chapel at Windsor Castle. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 Monte Carlo, the Cancer Spot of Europe 
 
 Monte Carlo, March 10. 
 Near and just beyond Monte Carlo a great rock 
 makes out of the sea, rising perpendicularly nearly 200 
 feet in height, on top of which is the palace of the 
 Prince of Monaco. And there is a little area, probably 
 not more than a mile square, which is called Monaco, 
 and it is said to be entirely independent — to be a little 
 sovereignty all by itself. The Prince of Monaco is said 
 to own all the land there and to be the king or emperor, 
 at any rate, governor or over-lord, of this little tract of 
 land, in which is the notorious gambling palace of Monte 
 Carlo. The Prince leases the palace and adjusts the 
 laws so as to favor and protect the gambling which is 
 there carried on. 
 
 We took the trolley up the steep hill to the palace, 
 
Monte Carlo 113 
 
 and there saw a detachment of his army, a soldier 
 marching up and down before the door. Going inside, 
 we found the palace was built around a great open court, 
 and looking down over from the perpendicular height 
 to the sea, we thought it very much such a place as 
 Byron describes in his " Corsair," and we wondered 
 whether in old days this rocky pinnacle had not been 
 the fortress and refuge of some pirate gang who there 
 found safe retreat from their excursions of rapine and 
 murder. 
 
 This little dukedom or principality is in some respects 
 the cancer spot of Europe. Not only is gambling there 
 allowed, but it flourishes under the seeming patronage 
 of the sovereign power of the principality. Monaco, 
 geographically, is part of France, and it seems as 
 absurd to consider that little square mile as an inde- 
 pendent country as it would be to imagine Coney Island 
 separated from the United States, with a separate flag 
 and the right to maintain an army and navy of its own, 
 and using all its power and patronage of government 
 to sustain great gambling establishments. 
 
 I do not think there is a place in Europe naturally 
 more attractive than Monaco. It is in the Riviera, 
 where it is understood the air is the softest and the 
 skies the brightest of any part of Europe. In front is 
 the Mediterranean, with a deep harbor protected by the 
 great fortress rock, on which is built the palace of the 
 Prince. Back of it the Maritime Alps rise sharp and 
 steep to the height of 3000 and 5000 feet, shield- 
 ing and protecting from the frosts and cold winds 
 of northern Europe; and these mountains, being of 
 limestone, are easily aff^ected by the rains and snows, 
 
114 Monte Carlo 
 
 and have been worn and furrowed by frost and rain 
 until their pinnacles stand up rugged and furrowed, cut 
 often into fantastic and curious shapes, seeming, as we 
 look up to them in the glint and glow of the setting sun, 
 Hke the towers and battlements of some ethereal city, 
 and we almost wonder that from their tops we see no 
 flaunting flags, no pomp or sound of aerial hosts. 
 
 From this little principality to the top of this moun- 
 tain range, to the far, high pinnacles glinting and 
 gleaming against the sky, there is a railroad operated 
 by cable, which will swiftly and speedily carry us from 
 this eyrie by the sea to the highest point of those far-off 
 peaks. About half way to the top the traveler on such 
 a journey would pass a round tower, without door or 
 window — I should think about twenty feet across and 
 fifty feet in height. And, if he is curious to learn, he 
 will be informed that it is an old Roman fortification, 
 built in the time of Augustus — perhaps indicating the 
 point where some Roman garrison made a last and 
 desperate stand against the Goths or Vandals, who 
 poured over these rocky walls, making for the rich val- 
 leys and rich and splendid cities that lay below. 
 
 As I have said, this little principality naturally be- 
 longs to France, and would doubtless be absorbed and 
 taken by France were it not for the gambling cancer 
 that has fastened there. For France, I suppose, does 
 not care to incur the obloquy of sustaining or per- 
 mitting gambling so notorious ; nor does she care to 
 assume by force the ofl5ce and responsibility of surgeon 
 to remove the cancer. 
 
 Near the Casino where gambling is carried on are 
 hotels and restaurants, I suppose as well served and as 
 
Monte Carlo 115 
 
 luxurious in appointment as anything in Europe or 
 America. A little way farther back is a bank, a post 
 office, drug stores, etc. Crossing the ravine we come to 
 the palace and settlement of Monaco — it is a little 
 principality devoted to pleasure, and to pleasure only ; 
 and yet I have never seen faces so haggard, careworn, or 
 burdened with unrest than I have seen in and around 
 those gay and splendid palaces. No one can, nor would, 
 I think, care to live there, if he were not a patron of, 
 employed in, or in some way subservient to, the gam- 
 bling; and in the country round about it is reported 
 that, in the early morning round of the policeman many 
 of these men with haggard and drawn faces are found 
 lying dead under those great fir trees, and that nothing 
 is said about it, and no report is allowed to go therefrom 
 to any newspaper. At the lowest point of this princi- 
 pality, in the dry bottom of a ravine, is a little church, 
 where, it is whispered, the would-be suicides go when, 
 broken at the gambling table, they seek oblivion and 
 repose in the short, sharp shock of self-destruction. 
 
 But the policy of the place is to keep all those things 
 quiet, and the motto is, " On with the dance " — even 
 though it is the dance of death. 
 
 We have much in our own fair land that we would 
 wish were different ; but, at least, we may be thankful 
 that nowhere within it is there a place where the hateful 
 vice of gambling is the only occupation or business; 
 and no place where this most deadly of contagions 
 flaunts its power and its ill-gotten wealth so brazenly 
 as it does at Monte Carlo. 
 
116 Venice and Other Historic Cities 
 
 XIX 
 
 Venice and Other Historic Cities of Northern 
 Italy 
 
 Rome, March 31, 190 — . 
 Leaving Nice, travehng eastwardly by rail, our first 
 stop was at Genoa. Genoa is the chief commercial city 
 of Italy, and has been a city of large commercial im- 
 portance for more than a thousand years. It has 
 owned navies, carried on wars, and disputed, during the 
 Middle Ages, for supremacy on these inland seas. A 
 spur of the Maritime Alps, here, breaking out into the 
 sea, and making an effective barrier not only against 
 waves, but against winds, is the basis of its harbor. 
 This rocky spur has been supplemented by great moles 
 or dykes, which make the harbor thoroughly protected 
 against all incoming seas. The city's antiquity gives 
 it a very peculiar appearance. The streets are narrow, 
 crooked, and irregular, and the whole town seems to rise 
 terrace above terrace on the rocky ridges of these Mari- 
 time Alps. But to Americans Genoa has peculiar in- 
 terest, because it was here, in this great commercial port, 
 that four hundred years ago lived a Genoese navigator 
 who, looking out on the sea from these rocky headlands, 
 saw as in a vision a strange, new, -and hitherto unknown 
 world, and after years of toil was able to make the voy- 
 age which revealed to Europe a strange, new world, and 
 made the name of Columbus immortal. 
 
 As we emerged from the railroad station, just to the 
 north, we saw a monument of Columbus, on the sides of 
 which had been chiseled, in marble, in relief, different 
 
Venice and Other Historic Cities 117 
 
 scenes in the hfe of the great Genoese navigator. On 
 one of these steep and narrow streets is a small house 
 in which Columbus is said to have lived. The guide 
 books say it is open two days in the week. I made no 
 attempt to visit it, but Mrs. Johnson, more energetic 
 than myself, with some lady friends, made a pilgrimage 
 up the steep and narrow street, only to find the house 
 closed, and to be informed that the caretaker, or janitor, 
 was sick, and that no admission to the house could be 
 had on that day. Our hotel was " Smith's Hotel." We 
 selected it partly because we guessed that a hotel in an 
 Italian city named good plain " Smith " would be a 
 place where English and good straight North American 
 would be understood and spoken. Reaching the hotel 
 we found it was a place where our good old mother 
 tongue prevailed, and we thought the Smith family 
 older, better, and nobler than the younger mushroom 
 nobility of the present day. The hotel was an old 
 monastery, built of stone, with walls two or three feet 
 thick. The billiard- and smoking-room was one of 
 its largest rooms, and we were told it was the old 
 chapel — ^the place where the pious monks from day to 
 day assembled to pray. Perhaps if any of them should 
 look in there when the place was brilliantly lighted, and 
 listen to the click of billiard balls and glasses and 
 notice the smoke from fragrant cigars, the place would 
 not seem quite familiar: but that, however, is a matter 
 for the monks to adjust with the Smith family. 
 
 Leaving Genoa by rail, our route carried us up by 
 the southerly slopes of the Maritime Alps, until near 
 their summit, when the train suddenly entered a tun- 
 nel in which it continued about five minutes ; and 
 
118 Venice and Other Historic Cities 
 
 when we came out from the tunnel we found Genoa, 
 the Mediterranean, and all the bright and beautiful 
 Riviera were hidden from our view, separated from us 
 by a great rocky barrier, and as we looked ahead we saw 
 far down, a beautiful plain extending north and west 
 as far as the eye could reach. A little later, peering 
 still to the north, the direction in which our train was 
 traveling, high up, through or among the clouds, we saw 
 what we supposed to be the Alps, capped with snow, 
 bright and dazzling white, and seeming, through the 
 curtain of the clouds, almost as though we had caught 
 a glimpse of hills and mountains ethereal, floating in 
 those great white cloud-banks. Soon our swift-moving 
 train carried us ofl* the ridges of those Maritime Alps 
 and down to the great plain, across which we had been 
 gazing as we came down the mountain. We then found 
 ourselves on a broad plain, as level, it seemed to me, 
 as Long Island, cut by frequent deep and swift-flowing 
 streams, fed and replenished, I suppose, from the great 
 snow-clad mountain we had seen to the north. It was 
 a country apparently very highly cultivated, with fre- 
 quent houses, near which were barns and sheds, horses, 
 cattle, and sheep, and all the aggregation ordinarily 
 seen in the farm life of America. Clusters of trees, ap- 
 parently orchards, were quite frequent, and the farms 
 were enclosed by good, substantial fences, and as I 
 looked out I could hardly believe that this was Italy, 
 for it seemed to me rather as though it were a section 
 of the farm lands of the Connecticut or Mohawk valleys. 
 About five hours of travel through a country level but 
 never monotonous brought us to Milan, a city of about 
 400,000 inhabitants, situate near the center of this 
 
Venice and Other Historic Cities 119 
 
 great Lombard plain. There we saw the great ca- 
 thedral, popularly known by the name of the city 
 where it is situated — the " Milan Cathedral." This 
 magnificent Gothic cathedral in size is second only to 
 St. Peter's here in Rome and to the Cathedral of Seville, 
 in Spain. Despairing of giving any adequate descrip- 
 tion of this beautiful cathedral, I enclose a picture of it, 
 which I hope you will print in connection with this letter. 
 This great cathedral is nearly 500 feet long, SOO feet 
 wide, and is 155 feet high. Within it are 6000 statues, 
 besides great granite monoliths, while in the wilderness 
 of pinnacles and turrets that rise from its great marble 
 exterior are over 2000 life-size marble statues of the 
 greatest beauty, some by Canova. This cathedral is 
 one of the best examples of Gothic architecture. Look- 
 ing up, in its great exterior, we see everywhere, above 
 the pointed arches, and on the sides, the high, jointed 
 windows, fitly supplemented by the points, spires, and 
 pinnacles, rising from its great exterior. Looking at 
 this great temple, I could but think how well Gothic 
 architecture expresses the thoughts and the aspira- 
 tions of Christian religion, and the whole edifice seemed 
 to me to symbolize a prayer or exhalation of praise 
 to the unseen and infinite God. A little outside 
 the city we saw a triumphal arch, like the great 
 triumphal arches we see in Rome, like those built by 
 the first Napoleon in the city of Paris, and not unlike 
 the arch in the plaza of our Prospect Park. This arch 
 is so placed that, looking from the city through the arch, 
 the gaze is directed toward the great Simplon pass, 
 down which came the armies of Napoleon to the conquest 
 of Italy. This arch was begun by Napoleon and em- 
 
120 Venice and Other Historic Cities 
 
 bellished by reliefs to record his victories over Austria. 
 After Napoleon had been defeated and banished to St. 
 Helena the Austrians took up his unfinished work and 
 completed the arch, adding decorations of their own to 
 show the victories of Austria over France. 
 
 From Milan we traveled still by rail along those 
 beautiful, fertile Lombard plains until one afternoon, 
 just before dusk, the train stopped in a great enclosure, 
 in which we saw printed the words " Venezia," and which 
 we understood was the terminus of our railroad journey 
 to Venice. Passing out of the train we put ourselves 
 under the care of a hotel porter or shouter, who spoke 
 English, and conducted us down to the water's brink, 
 and instructed us to step into the boat which lay at the 
 shore. Stepping on the boat we soon placed ourselves 
 inside the little enclosure, or cabin, appearing on the 
 deck of the gondolas. 
 
 Soon our trunks were brought and placed in front of 
 us on the gondola. The gondolier, who takes his posi- 
 tion at the stem of the boat, swung his oar, and our 
 voyage in a Venetian gondola on the Grand Canal of 
 Venice began. This great canal I should think was 
 about as wide as the Boulevard leading from Prospect 
 Park to the ocean, including all the roads, grassplots, 
 and courtyards on either side. But soon our fickle 
 craft turned from the Grand Canal, and we began to 
 thread narrow, tortuous, and crooked ways, crossed 
 by frequent low bridges, where the houses seemed to 
 almost overhang. We have since learned that the 
 Grand Canal being shaped like the letter S, our gon- 
 dolier had taken a route through these narrow ways in 
 order to shorten the j oumey by avoiding the curves and 
 
Venice and Other Historic Cities 121 
 
 windings of the great S. These narrow waterways are 
 called rios. Emerging from one of them, making a 
 quick turn to the left, we found our little shallop was 
 again in the Grand Canal, and soon our gondola was 
 safely moored, and we found it was lying up against 
 some stone steps, over which extended a broad and com- 
 modious piazza. Moving gingerly and carefully out of 
 the little cabin, we stepped ashore, and going up those 
 steps, we found we were at once inside our hotel. We 
 had not up to that time seen much of the poetry or 
 song of Venice, but that evening, sitting in the great 
 public room which fronts on the Canal, we heard beau- 
 tiful, rich music coming from the front of the hotel, and 
 looking out on the Canal, which was then dark, except 
 for the lights from the hotel, it seemed cold and chilly 
 — it was then an evening in February — ^but in the half- 
 gloom, by the lights from the hotel we saw a gondola 
 filled with young people, men or boys and maidens, sing- 
 ing with ay force, a j oy , a verve, an enthusiasm of song 
 and melody that told us we were in Italy, the land of 
 music and of song. Stepping out on the little piazza, 
 we found there was not one of those singers so enwrapt 
 in song, or lost in breathing melodies, as to fail to ex- 
 tend the ready hat or hand for a contribution. Further 
 exploration of this strange and curious city was reserved 
 until the next morning, when, securing a guide, we 
 passed out through a side door to a curious little street 
 running near the rear of the hotel. This street, like 
 many others, was very narrow — I should think not more 
 than three or four feet wide. But why should it be 
 wider.? There are no horses or carriages in Venice, and 
 the entire street is properly used by pedestrians. 
 
122 Venice and Other Historic Cities 
 
 Soon we came to one of the little rios, crossed by a 
 low stone bridge. Crossing this bridge, we found we 
 were in the great square of San Marco. The guide 
 book told us that in this square was a vast isolated 
 Gothic Campanile (bell-tower or structure for support- 
 ing great bells) built in 911, and that inside it was an 
 inclined plane leading to its top, 322 feet high; and 
 that up this inclined plane the first Napoleon rode on 
 his war-horse when he passed through Venice as he made 
 his conquering march from the Alps. As we entered the 
 great square we saw that it was entirely open — fiat and 
 level, paved with great flat stones, and in it was no 
 indication of the great Campanile that made so large 
 a picture in the guide books and views of Venice. Ask- 
 ing for the Campanile, our guide informed us that about 
 two years ago the great Campanile suddenly fell, col- 
 lapsed into a great mass of dust and crushed and broken 
 brick and mortar, and a little later he showed us a great 
 bell, which he told us was the only one of all those in 
 the great Campanile that escaped destruction in the 
 fall. 
 
 Just before the great Campanile fell it spread apart, 
 as though wearily yielding to the weight of its thousand 
 years. While it was in that condition — as it were in 
 the pangs of dissolution — someone was fortunate 
 enough to secure a photograph of it; and we find on 
 sale copies of that photograph, which was taken on 
 the 14th of July, 1902, at 9.52 a. m., and less than 
 fifteen minutes before the great, venerable, and historic 
 pile crumbled to dust and ashes. 
 
 We were four days in Venice. On one of our jour- 
 neys up the Grand Canal a gondolier pointed out to us a 
 
Venice and Other Historic Cities 123 
 
 house fronting on the canal, where Browning hved and 
 died, and on the other side a house in which Lord Byron 
 is said to have written his " Don Juan." 
 
 Leaving Venice, a journey of five hours by rail 
 brought us to Florence, a city of 180,000 population, 
 situated on the Arno, on a high tableland between 
 ridges of the Apennines. Many Americans will remem- 
 ber Florence as the place from which James, G. Blaine 
 wrote his famous and wonderful " Florentine " letter, 
 which set the music of the campaign, and did much 
 to direct the policy and history of the Great Republic 
 for a decade after. 
 
 Florence is a perfect treasure-house of art, and in 
 its galleries are found the master-pieces, both in marble 
 and on canvas, of the great masters of Italy. Spending 
 two happy and busy weeks in Florence, we reluctantly 
 resumed our journey southward, and crossing one of 
 the great spurs of the Apennines, we soon found our- 
 selves on the more level country below. Soon, along 
 the left of our train, we saw the outlines of a quiet, 
 peaceful lake, said to be about thirty by eight miles in 
 area, which is Lake Thrasymene, which gives its name 
 to one of the great battles of history and probably to 
 the greatest defeat which ever came to the Roman arms, 
 for it was by that quiet lake that Hannibal annihilated 
 the Roman army 200 years before Christ. Proceeding 
 still southward, we soon found we were following a river, 
 which being brown, turbid, and rapid, we surmised must 
 be the historic Tiber. Our surmise was correct, for 
 following the valley of this river, after about five hours 
 of rapid railway travel, a little before 6 o'clock p. m., 
 we saw on our right the great dome of St. Peter's, and 
 
124 The Homes of the Cassars 
 
 in twenty minutes more we were in the Eternal City, 
 enjoying the hospitahty of a hotel, which opened its 
 great sheltering arms to receive us. We have been here 
 now four weeks and expect to remain about ten days 
 longer. Of course we have seen St. Peter's, St. Paul's 
 without the walls, St. John Lateran and the Coliseum, 
 and as we look upon these mighty monuments how true 
 and appropriate seem the words of our own Emerson: 
 
 " For out of thought's interior sphere 
 Those wonders rose to upper air; 
 And Nature gladly gave them place, 
 Adopted them into her race, 
 And granted them an equal date 
 With Andes and with Ararat ! " 
 
 XX 
 
 The Homes of the C^sars 
 
 I KNOW not how I can better put your readers in touch 
 with Rome, or in touch with those who traverse its 
 ancient and historic streets, than by describing an after- 
 noon on the Palatine Hill. Contrary to our usual cus- 
 tom we had secured a guide for that afternoon — an 
 English lady — very intelligent, energetic, and con- 
 scientious in her efforts to impart the information she 
 had acquired from many years' residence in Rome. 
 
 Leaving our hotel at three o'clock a short drive car- 
 ried us down a narrow street which brought us to the 
 old Roman Forum. In the days of Roman pros- 
 perity this was the place of assemblage of the people. 
 In it was the old Senate House, a temple to Saturn, 
 said to have been founded by Romulus, and near it 
 
The Homes of the Caesars 125 
 
 the home of Juhus Caesar, the place where he left 
 Calpurnia, his wife, when, refusing to heed her warn- 
 ings and prophecies of evil, he went, as we now know, to 
 his death by assassination. Passing around the end of 
 the Forum to a point near where are two high ruined 
 columns, we found ourselves outside a gate where stood 
 a number of soldiers in the uniform of the Italian army. 
 Paying an admission fee of one lire (20 cents) each, 
 we passed up a road constructed in the side of the 
 hill, behind those high columns. On our left was the 
 Forum, and on our right a rough, irregular bank ris- 
 ing about twenty or thirty feet higher than the road 
 along which we were walking; and in this bank we could 
 see where excavators were busy digging out of the bank 
 and out of what seemed to be the solid hill, the lower 
 stories of the palace of Caligula. Turning from the 
 road we passed leisurely through what has now been 
 revealed of that old palace. There we saw enormous 
 brick walls, arched overhead, and I should think with 
 about two tiers of arches, one above another, beneath 
 the superincumbent earth. I suppose what we there saw 
 were the lower stories, . basement or perhaps cellar, 
 of the palace of the Roman Emperor who there lived 
 and reigned in splendor two thousand years ago. 
 The guide book tells us that this Palatine Hill was 
 owned by the Farnese family, and on it they had 
 vineyards or gardens through the Middle Ages, which 
 means, I suppose, for the last thousand years. And 
 down under these arches, from time to time, their 
 gardeners shoveled or tumbled the refuse from the 
 broken palace above, or the soil and earth from the 
 verdant gardens. Passing a little farther, we saw heavy 
 
126 The Homes of the Caesars 
 
 brick stairways, apparently constructed to convey to 
 the stories above. Soon on our right, situated so as to 
 give a view across the western part of the city, the broad 
 Campagna and out over the Appian Way and the Alban 
 Hills, we saw an old wooden building, apparently once 
 the summer house of the Farnese, built just outside their 
 gardens and vineyards, and though perhaps its owners 
 did not know it, just above the ruins of a palace of the 
 Csesars. In front of the house a beautiful fountain 
 plays, as though glad with the joy of eternal youth; 
 but the house itself, doubtless more than a thousand 
 years younger than the great vaulted ruins that lie be- 
 neath it, seems old, tarnished, and shrunken, as though 
 ready to yield to the weight of years and crumble into 
 ruin above the mightier ruins that lie beneath. Pro- 
 ceeding again onward, beyond the gardens and vine- 
 yards, we were very soon on the highest portions of the 
 Palatine Hill, and found its surface generally level, 
 partly covered with grass, around and through which 
 run hnes of bare brown earth, trodden by many feet 
 into hard, smooth, and level paths. 
 
 Soon we came to some excavations, I should think 
 about fifteen feet deep, bounded, crossed, and intersected 
 by heavy brick walls ; and looking down we saw those 
 spaces, large and small, all connected by doorways and 
 passages, and all encased in brick, and there, freed by 
 the shovel of the excavator from the mold of twenty 
 centuries, unroofed and open were revealed to us the 
 saloons, dining hall, parlors, and bedrooms of the 
 haughty Livia and the home surroundings of Augustus 
 Caesar. 
 
 A little to the left of this old excavated palace of 
 
The Homes of the Caesars 127 
 
 Livia appeared a number of ruins above ground and 
 which did not seem to have been revealed by the labor 
 of the excavator. At one place among these ruins ap- 
 pearing above ground we were shown old broken walls 
 which we were told were the ruins of the judgment hall 
 of the Caesars, and the tradition is that there is the spot 
 where Paul was judged and acquitted by Nero. Next to 
 that judgment hall is another large ruin. In its center 
 is a square plot of unpaved ground which we were told 
 was once a flower garden, and around this square plot 
 were formerly fluted marble columns, some of which and 
 remnants of others still remain ; these columns formerly 
 supported the roof of a piazza which surrounded the 
 flower space in the center. We were shown little rem- 
 nants of the poHshed marble floor and of the wall or 
 ceiling back of those fluted columns and underneath the 
 piazza roof. That,, we understood, was the ruin of 
 a sort of lounging- or reception-room adjacent to the 
 dining hall. 
 
 Next to that were other ruins, which we were told 
 were the ruins of the old dining hall, at one end of which 
 the wall bulged outwards so as to make a great convex 
 in which were the seat and table of the Emperor. Just 
 beyond, and back of the convex where sat the Emperor, 
 was a small obscure room which, we were told, was the 
 Vomitarium, an annex which the Romans seem to have 
 found necessary in order to protract their gluttonous 
 repasts 
 
 A little way from these ruins there is the Stadium of 
 Domitian, where were held foot races, contests in throw- 
 ing the discus, boxing, and other similar games. On the 
 side of, and overlooking the Stadium, were the ruins of 
 
128 The Homes of the Caesars 
 
 a great stone tower or cupola, from which the Emperor, 
 as from the front of his palace, could view the games 
 below. 
 
 Turning from the palace of Domitian, we took a road 
 which led us round the other side of the Palatine, and 
 looking down into the valley we saw great gas-holders 
 and all the paraphernalia of the gas works of a great 
 city. That, we were told, was the site of the old Circus 
 Maximus, where were held the great chariot races in 
 which the Roman nobles and princes drove their war 
 chariots in fierce and dangerous competition in the sight 
 of the Emperor, who, from another great stone cupola 
 built on that side of the hill, could watch the races and 
 know the winner from seeing the colors of the foremost 
 charioteer. 
 
 Just beyond the gas works a low green mound swelled 
 up from the httle valley, and on it we could see the fre- 
 quent gavestones, half hidden by the thick, overhanging 
 trees. Beyond the cemetery was another hill called the 
 Aventine, on which, we were told, was the home and 
 fortress of the Sabines, and that on that little cemetery 
 mound between the Aventine and the Palatine was where 
 the Sabine women came to feast with the Romans, and 
 that there was the scene of the rape of the Sabine women 
 and where those fierce Romans took captive their fair 
 guests and carried them shrieking to their homes on 
 the Palatine ; and doubtless, too, I suppose, there was the 
 place where the Sabines and Romans met in bloody en- 
 counter when the fathers and brothers and Sabine lovers 
 of those fair captured women came to reclaim them by 
 the fierce energy of battle. And we could imagine 
 the Sabine women as they came down from the Palatine 
 
The Homes of the Cgesars 129 
 
 and flung themselves in terror between their husbands 
 and their fathers and so brought peace and reconcilia- 
 tion between the Romans and the Sabines — ^between 
 Aventine and Palatine, two of the largest of the seven 
 hills of Rome. Passing still on down a good, broad road 
 or path built along the side of the hill, we saw a wall 
 built of large square blocks of stone, erect, plumb, and 
 square and unbroken. This, we were told, was the wall 
 of Romulus, built when he founded Rome, more than 
 seven hundred years before Christ. Near the wall is a 
 little opening under the rocky structure of the Palatine. 
 This we were told is the cave that tradition assigns as 
 the lair of the she-wolf who nursed the Roman twins 
 when they were washed in there by the swollen and over- 
 flowing Tiber, which here makes a sharp bend in toward 
 the Palatine. 
 
 As we came slowly down that road along the side of 
 the Palatine, our gaze turned almost unconsciously 
 across the Tiber, by whose turbid waters tradition as- 
 serts the Roman twins were brought to the Palatine Hill, 
 and there, on the very crest of Janiculum Hill, which 
 rises west of and beyond the Tiber, breaking and stand- 
 ing out clear and distinct on the horizon, there appeared 
 the great monument to Garibaldi — in form the general 
 seated on his war horse, in bronze^ — raised aloft on a 
 great granite base and visible and conspicuous from 
 almost every part of Rome. 
 
 Before we came to the foot of the Palatine the sun 
 had gone down behind Janiculum, but its rays, coming 
 full and almost horizontal across the monument, seemed 
 to enwrap and enfold the fiery general in a radiant 
 glow. The Italians venerate Garibaldi as their Wash- 
 
130 The Homes of the Csesars 
 
 ington, and in every Italian city we have been in we 
 have seen one, and often more than one, monument to 
 the great liberator; but nowhere have we seen a monu- 
 ment more fortunately placed than this one — on the 
 western horizon line of a great city, where ever will 
 linger the last radiance and glory of the setting sun. 
 
 But soon, too soon it seemed, we had come to the 
 enclosure of the hill, and at the expense of a lire (only 
 20 cents) had secured a carriage that took us back 
 again past the Forum, and soon we were at home again 
 in our hotel, feeling that we had had an afternoon rich 
 in pleasure and in profit, which will remain one of the 
 pleasantest pages of the albums of our memory. 
 
 And here, in the heart of old Rome, I must bring 
 these letters to an end, for I have booked a passage at 
 an early day from Naples back to New York, and I hope 
 very soon to tread the streets of a city greater and more 
 powerful than was Rome in the days of her prime. 
 
 I had no thought of writing any letters for publica- 
 tion during my trip abroad until a few hours before I 
 sailed last July, and as each of the first four or five 
 letters was written, it seemed to me that each would be 
 the last. And yet I would not take leave of this labor 
 which has so long been with me without saying a word 
 in relation to it. I have come to find it a pleasure to 
 write letters which would be spread before so many thou- 
 sands of the men and women of the city where I live. I 
 have found Europe interesting and instructive in every 
 part of my journey, but sometimes, and perhaps not 
 infrequently, a feeling almost of homesickness would 
 come over me, and at such times it was a pleasure to 
 feel that through these letters I was a little in touch 
 
The Homes of the Csesars 131 
 
 with friends in Brooklyn, with men I have known, some 
 of whom perhaps might love me, and some, who do not 
 love, might remember. In one of Kipling's recent poems 
 he makes the English exile say: 
 
 " How stands the old Lord Warden ? 
 Are Dover's cliffs still white?" 
 
 And so I wonder how will look the Iron Pier, Observa- 
 tory and the great wheel as we approach Coney Island, 
 and how will look the Goddess of Liberty and the hills 
 on the either side, as we sail up the great waterway to 
 anchorage at a New York dock, where we can buy a 
 paper printed in the English language and hear the 
 clang announcing the extras, as it comes in good 
 straight English from boys who know no other lan- 
 guage. 
 
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