Twenty Years in Europe

On December 16, we had left New York on the “Elysia” and had tempests all the way across the ocean. On Christmas night, a hurricane set in, such as is not seen outside of the Indian seas. Everything on the outside of the ship was torn to pieces-not a life boat, nor bridge, nor boom pole, nor sail left. Everything gone. We were blown back thirty miles towards New York. The sea was churned into mountains of milk, and the thunder and lightning at midnight was something perfectly terrific. The ship’s hatches were all battened down with tarpaulins, and we were fastened in below. Spite of the precautions, water rushed down the ship’s stairways by hogsheads full. Two or three passengers lost their minds. Many said farewell to each other, including the ship’s officers, and we all thought ourselves lost.

On New Year’s Day we reached England, just ahead of another storm such as Britain had not seen in a hundred years. Hundreds and hundreds of coast vessels went to the bottom, carrying unnumbered British sailors and passengers with them.

As we passed the great pier of Dover, we saw how the mighty rocks composing it had been hurled in vast piles by the storm, as if they were boxes made of straw. The work of the engineers had been as nothing.

Man marks the earth with ruin; his control

Stops with the shore.

*****

While I had been in Washington, the contest was going on over the election of Governor Hayes and Samuel Tilden to the Presidency.

In official circles at Washington, the fear of disorder, rebellion, revolution, was extremely grave. Troops were being silently, secretly slipped to Washington. Many looked for an immediate storm. General Sherman told me privately he was preparing for it the best he could. “If a civil war breaks out,” said he, “it will be a thousand times worse than the other war. It will be the fighting of neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend.” He grew almost pessimistic in his views for the future of our country. “It is only a question of time,” said he, “till the politicians will ruin all of us. Partisanship is a curse. These men are not howling for their country’s good, but their own political advantage, and the people are too big fools to see it. We are liable to smash into a thousand pieces every time we have an election.” He was greatly moved, and almost wept at the thought of what would happen, were the violence then threatened really to break out.

January 4, 1877.-Again in Zurich. When we reached our home, we found the servants had returned, the house was warmed for us, and everything was in place as if we had not been gone a day; yet we had traveled 13,000 miles. Above the hall door, in evergreen and holly, were the words-“Welcome Home!”

How many of our American servants think of such a pretty, feeling act as that, for their employers!

*****

Some of our first Winter evenings here we spent in playing whist at the Dennison home. They are worth mentioning, for the people who played with us, and the story of some of them. Mr. Dennison had once been manager of the Waltham Watch Works, and it was he who invented watch making by machinery. He is called the “father of American watch making.” He is a tall, fine looking gentleman of seventy, with kind eyes, pleasant speech, modest manners, and universal genius. He seemed to know everything that concerns the working of a machine.

Our best whist-player at the table was Mr. Sadler, a kind old English gentleman who brought Christmas cake to my wife, regularly as the holiday came. He kept the story of his life secret. He was a mystery, and no one dared to pry into his past. We knew him to be rich, though he lived like a poor man in an obscure pension.

One day, just as I was in Liverpool on my way home from New York, he was murdered in a quiet park; no soul suspects by whom. Then we found out that he had been a member of the English Parliament, who for some mysterious misdemeanor, in association with his brother, also in Parliament, had to fly England. He got away by feigning sickness and death, having himself carried out of the hospital in a coffin. His wife, of whom we had never heard before, appeared suddenly at his death, like a specter. She claimed his money, which can not be found, though I personally knew he had thousands, and as suddenly and specter-like departed. It is all mystery, even to-day. His banker, shortly after the murder, received a mysterious and unsigned telegram from New York City, saying: “Give yourself no trouble as to who killed Sadler. He will not be found.” The murderer had not had time to reach New York. Who sent the telegram?

Another of that card quartette was the lovely Miss Dimmick, of Boston, a medical student at the University here. She was the first young lady graduate at Zurich, and she finished with great honors. Then she went home on a visit. On her return, we arranged to meet her in Paris, but one morning came the shocking news that she and five hundred others had drowned at the wreck of the “Schiller.”

Early one morning, in a terrible fog, the steamer Schiller struck a rock off the Scilly isles. Almost everybody was lost. The last seen of Miss Dimmick she was on the deck, kneeling in her night robe, her hands clasped, her face turned to heaven in prayer. When the peasants of the island found her body, there was a beauty and a peace in her countenance that touched them, and moved them to treat her tenderly. They placed her by herself, and when the officers came later to take some of the bodies away, they prayed permission to bear her coffin on their shoulders to the ship.

Boston City Hospital voted some money and named one of the free ward beds in honor of Miss Dimmick.

Now I recall those little card evenings at the Dennison’s with strange feelings.

CHAPTER XIV

1877

GENERAL GRANT VISITS LAKE LUZERN-CONVERSATIONS WITH HIM-HOW I BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS OF SHERMAN’S SUCCESSES IN THE CAROLINAS TO GENERAL GRANT AT RICHMOND-GRANT’S SIMPLICITY IN HIS TRAVELS-A STRANGE EXPERIENCE ON THE RIGI-LONDON PAPERS AMAZED AT THE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES-FIRST TELEPHONE.

July 1, 1877.-Last week there was some talk among the prominent people here, including the few Americans, of having a public reception for General Grant. Knowing that he was stopping at Luzern, I went to see him for the committee. In a little lake-excursion near to the Rigi, it happened that I was on the same boat with him. The seats on the deck of the steamer were filled with tourists, gazing in wonder at the inspiring scenery we were passing in the bay of Uri. The water is two thousand feet deep, the lake a wonderful blue, and the dark, majestic mountains near by, a contrast to the slopes of snow and the ice fields a little further off.

It was summer, but the day was dark and cool. “Where is the General?” I said to General Badeau, who was traveling with him.

“Do you see that man sitting down there at the right, alone, with his coat collar turned up?” I went nearer, and recognized the familiar features. But to me, he looked none at all like the General Grant of war times, the one I had seen on critical battlefields. He wore a black cylinder hat, his overcoat collar, turned up, hid half his face, he sat earnest and speechless with arms folded, apparently barely glancing at the mighty scenes the vessel was hurrying past-scenes that were exciting exclamations of wonder from half the people on the deck.

General Badeau pronounced my name, but General Grant did not, at first, remember me. When I recalled the time I brought the dispatches from Sherman to City Point, and the long talk we had together in the little back room of his cabin, about Sherman’s army, he brightened up, interested himself, and seemed glad to talk of old war days.

I think not one reference was made to the scenery we were passing. I must think, too, he was getting tired of all the attentions heaped upon him by European cities, for he preferred, when I spoke of it, that the Zurich people should do nothing in the way of receiving him.

“Look at that great, foolish lot of people hurrying to be first at the gangway,” he remarked to me, as the steamer turned landwards at Luzern. “They might as well sit still; nine times out of ten, hurry helps nobody-the boat stays at the landing, everybody will get off, and to-morrow it will be all the same who is off first.”

I have often thought of that remark. His taking time for things may have been one of the keys to his success.

We were the very last to go ashore. That evening at the Schweizerhof, I had some pleasant conversation with him again.

He regretted that he was not at the White House, just a few hours, to put the deserved quietus on the strikers in Pennsylvania who were shamelessly destroying other people’s property. One hundred and twenty-five locomotives and ten million dollars worth of railroad stock were destroyed at Pittsburg in one night. “That is what an army will be wanted for yet, in our country,” he added, “an army to make ourselves behave.”

He spoke of silver and free coinage. I admitted my ignorance of the whole subject. “I don’t understand subjects on which the experts themselves differ,” I said. “It is simple enough,” he replied. “I can explain some things that will make it clear to you;” and he asked me to come and be seated on a garden bench, on the terrace overlooking that wonderful lake.

It was 9 o’clock at night. Behind us, in zigzag lines, were the picturesque city walls and towers, built in the Middle Ages. The lights from the quays and bridges reflected themselves on the lake; not far away stood the eternal mountains. The scene, the time, seemed all out of keeping with talks on politics. But General Grant lighted a cigar and gave me more clear-headed notions about what makes money than I had learned from listening to, or reading, the buncombe of half the politicians in the country. It was because he was simple, and honest, and sincere, and because he knew what he was talking about. I had, in some way, long before concluded that Grant was only a military man. That night’s conversation led me to think him also a statesman. Any way, he was sincere.

After smoking quite a little time in silence, he said, abruptly: “I was just thinking of the letters you brought me that time from Sherman. How did you get to me at City Point? Sherman must have been entirely cut off from the North.” I told him, in a few words, how I had long been a prisoner of war, how I had escaped my captors at Macon, and my experiences in the Rebel Army at the battle of Atlanta; my recapture, my escape again at Columbia, South Carolina, and my being appointed to a place on General Sherman’s staff at the time; how one morning General Sherman ordered me to get ready to run down the Cape Fear River in the night, to carry dispatches to General Grant and the President; how half a dozen of us got aboard a tug, covered its lights and its engine with cotton bales, and passed down the river in the darkness, without a shot being fired at us; how I reached City Point in a quick ocean steamer, and his reception of me in the little back room; the excitement of General Ord at the news I brought. It was the first news that the North had of Sherman, after he entered the swamps of the Carolinas.

All at once, the whole incident came back to General Grant’s mind, for there in his cabin that time, many years before, he had questioned me about the details of my final escape from prison, and my means of reaching him in the North.[4 - Details of this incident are related in Mr. Byers’ “Last Man of the Regiment.”]

“Yes,” he said, “I remember it all now. You had a letter, too, from Sherman to Mr. Lincoln, who came down from Washington that very night. We were all tremendously moved and gratified by the news you brought of Sherman’s constant successes.

“Many of my generals feared always that Lee might slip away from me, and jump on to Sherman down about Raleigh. I had, myself, more fears of that, than I had about my ability to take Richmond, if Lee would only stay there and fight me.”

Pretty soon, a steamer landed with a lot of passengers, and I walked with the General back into the hotel. We found General Badeau deep in newspapers, and Jesse, the General’s son, playing billiards and smoking.

The next morning, after an early breakfast, I visited Mrs. Grant and the General in their rooms. Mrs. Grant was as kindly mannered as the General himself. One would not have thought them fresh from the attentions of princes and potentates. They told me in an enjoyable way, much about their travels. The General dropped some remarks, too, showing me that the grand scenery he had passed the day before had been noticed very closely by him, silent though he had been.

The contrast between these simple, great people, upstairs in the hotel, and some of the great people downstairs, was very impressive to me. There was not one particle of stiffness or formality in General and Mrs. Grant’s reception of me. It was as if his rank were no greater in the world than my own; simply as if he and his wife had met an unpretentious man to whom they liked to talk, and who would go away feeling that they were friends.

All over Europe, I understand, General Grant and his wife have impressed people in the same way. In every sense, they were preserving their unostentatious, homely American ways.

“Certain comforts and things, I want in traveling, just as at home,” said the General. “I want my little sitting room. I want my ham and eggs for breakfast-and nothing is so hard to get cooked right in Europe, as just these ham and eggs.”

*****

I had a strange trip down the Rigi last Monday morning. I had been staying at the Staffel over Sunday. At ten of Monday, I was to be in Luzern, as an official, to help marry a couple, one of whom was an American. Long before daylight, I was starting down the steep path. It was starlight overhead, and a warm summer morning. Down below, however, the whole valley and all the lakes and hills seemed hidden by a mantle of fog. Every few moments we heard a clap of thunder away down there, or saw a flash of lightning dart along the gray surface. My wife urged me not to descend into clouds that looked so dangerous; but my presence in Luzern was a necessity, and I went ahead. For half an hour my path down the mountain side was dry and beautiful. It was just breaking dawn, when suddenly, and within a few feet distance, I stepped down into a cloud full of water. Instantly I was in a perfect Noah’s flood, and yet I knew a hundred feet above me the stars were shining. The peals of thunder soon seemed to shake the mountains, and the lightning became terrific. A few moments’ walk had brought me out of a dry atmosphere and a quiet morning, into this storm of the Alps. I tried to get back and up the mountain, but I was fairly washed from my feet and the path. In five minutes I was completely lost, and, fearing to tumble off some precipice, I stood stock still. I had reached what seemed a level plateau of tall grass. There I stood till daylight came, and the storm went partly by, when, to my horror, I saw that had I walked another dozen steps I would have gone over a cliff and fallen a thousand feet.

I caught a steamer, however, and reached the city, where the groom divided some of his drier garments with me, and the wedding went merrily on.

*****

Some of the London newspapers are in great wonder over the United States census. A country only a hundred years old, and yet mustering thirty-eight and a half millions of people!! Few European states so large, and none of them so rich and great.

*****

Our friend, Mr. Witt, had a telephone put up in his house yesterday. It is probably the first one in the country. Great curiosity and interest is manifested here in this invention of a talking apparatus, by which the human voice may be carried a hundred miles.

CHAPTER XV

1877