“You have been giving our country some information on the emigration question,” he said to me, as he hung his overcoat up in the hall.
This was followed by an ominous silence, and we all walked into the drawing-room, and were presented to Mrs. Blaine, who was just leaving. The Secretary walked to the open fire-place, turned his back to it, and, addressing me, said: “Mr. Byers, I want you to understand that I consider that in this pauper emigration matter you have done a good thing-and I am going to support you in it.”
“You can give me the information I want,” he continued, later in the conversation, and invited me to come and see him on the following Monday.
I think the conversation helped Mr. Blaine to make up his mind to send a certain strong letter abroad.
*****
May, 1881.-When at Washington, I was invited to prepare the Decoration Day poem. I wrote “The Nation’s Dead.” The President and many distinguished people were present at its recital.
As I could not be present to read my poem personally, some one suggested that the distinguished Robert Ingersoll should be invited to read it. General Sherman, in a letter to me, objected in strong language. Ingersoll was a friend of his, but he regarded it manifestly improper for an infidel to be delivering poems over the graves of American soldiers.
*****
Before sailing, I visited at the Allen home and school, West Newton. James T. Allen had been one of my best friends in Europe. The school was somewhat on the plan of the celebrated Beust school at Zurich; that is, fewer textbooks and better teachers.
I had a letter to the poet Longfellow, and Mr. Allen suggested that we go over to Cambridge on Sunday afternoon. My letter was from Mr. Longfellow’s nephew.
The poet came into the little drawing-room with a full blown red rose in his buttonhole. He took me by the hand and welcomed me very kindly. I commenced to apologize for coming on Sunday. “Tut-tut,” said he, “no apology; I hope we are not so puritanical as not to want to see our friends on a Sunday.” And then we sat down and talked about his nephew who had been in Switzerland. His language was vivacious, his eye clear, his cheeks rosy, his hair perfectly white. I was surprised to see how small was his figure, for I had always thought of Longfellow as a tall man with a great Leonine head; his pictures make him so.
I could not wholly help a glance around the famous room. I am sure he saw it, for he offered to show me some of the things that he knew I had read about. They were not bought bric-a-brac, but souvenirs, or else things his poetry and life had immortalized. Somehow he seemed to me a man to love-simple, pure and beautiful as his verses.
I also had letters to Mr. Bronson Alcott, the transcendentalist philosopher. He received me one morning in a very cordial manner. It was in his library. We talked of books and something of his life. I had just been out to the battlefield of Lexington, looked at the bronze monument of the “Minute Man” there, and was so struck with the verse on it as to commit it to memory. “And Mr. Emerson wrote it,” I said, somewhat uncertain as to my memory. “Certainly, certainly,” said Mr. Alcott. “Of course, that is Mr. Emerson’s. We Americans don’t half know what a poet we have in Mr. Emerson.” He went to the book shelves and brought a volume of Emerson’s poems, presented to him, with this particular poem marked in it, and showed it with evident pride.
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
Shortly, he proposed to take a walk. He would show me the town, the old elms, the old, old graveyard and the famous Lecture Hall, “and then,” said he, “we will swing around and call on Mr. Emerson.”
He showed me all about, talking, as only Mr. Alcott could talk. When we reached the unpretentious frame building called the Lecture Hall, in the edge of the bushes, I reflected what great things had been said there, what ideas given wing, and now I felt sure I was about to be overwhelmed with deep philosophy. Nothing of the kind. He spent a full half hour telling me about the cost of the wooden structure and its course of building, from the underpinning to the top of the chimney. I was anxious to move on and be sure to have our call on Mr. Emerson. We really started once, but immediately Mr. Alcott recalled something about the wonderful “Hall” he had not shown me, and we went back.
At last we started in earnest, and reached the white frame house that neighbors and friends of Mr. Emerson had built in place of the one destroyed by fire.
“Mr. Emerson is at home, I suppose,” said Mr. Alcott to the girl who answered the door bell. “Yes,” said she, “that is, he has just this moment left for Boston.” I was a bit disappointed, and I think Mr. Alcott was, but he made up for it in fine and kindly talk, and we went back to the library. There was an invitation to stay to lunch, but the hour for my train back to Newton interfered. He gave me a fine photograph of himself. Mr. Alcott was a great and powerful looking man. He had an immense head and face, shaggy eyebrows, and clear deep eyes. He was tall and large in body. His voice was gentle and his manners were delightful and simple.
“Now, is there nothing I can do for you?” he said, as I was about to take my leave. “Thank you, Mr. Alcott,” I answered, “and yet it would be a pleasure if I could have the honor of meeting your daughter.”
“Bless me,” he cried, jumping up; “don’t you know Louise? Louise!” he called out at the top of his voice, “Louise, come in here.” There was no answer. “Come on,” he said; “we’ll hunt her up,” and away we started through the rooms of the house on a chase for the famous woman.
We found her in morning gown, with carpet sweeper in hand, dusting one of the chambers. She was as kindly and simple as her father. She could not hear well, but she was very vivacious and full of fun. She asked me to go with her all about the house, looking at this souvenir and that, as if she herself were not at that moment the greatest sight of all. She dwelt especially on some pictures on the wall that a sister had painted in Paris. My stay abroad must have fitted me to know about paintings, she insisted. These were indeed interesting and good.
As we were talking, two young fellows ran over the stile and out into the street. Mr. Alcott gleefully nudged me on the arm, and said, “Look, the ‘little men.’” We all looked. Miss Alcott smiled and said, “Yes, they are the boys.”
The train was just starting as I reached it at the station, and there I had a glimpse of a tall, intellectual-looking man crossing the platform, apparently looking for some other train. He carried a little hand bag. I heard a passenger next me say, “There is Mr. Emerson.”
*****
Mr. Allen took me to Newton Center, to see the famous Dr. Smith, author of the song “America.” It was dark when we called. His daughter went to fetch matches, and was no little surprised on coming back to find the gas burning brightly. Mr. A. had lighted a match on his shoe and found the gas lamp. Shortly, Dr. Smith came in. Though old and partially deaf, his face was kind and his eyes bright. He liked to talk with us about his past, and told us much concerning the origin of his famous song. I thought his home old and dingy for so famous a man. The people of America could well afford to give him a palace. His song has done more to preserve the American Union than any army ever did. He was interested about music in Switzerland, and asked me to tell him what effect the mountains have on the Swiss character. I told him to judge by their songs. No country in the world has so many music festivals, so many singing clubs. “And the songs they sing?” inquired the doctor. “They are mostly about their country, their mountains, their lakes, their rivers,” I answered. At a great musical contest last year, attended by ten thousand people, forty-six songs were sung in chorus. Nineteen of these were about the Alps, or hymns to nature. Seven were about Switzerland, two or three about the Rhine, and ten were love songs.
It was a Sunday evening and we feared to prolong our visit.
*****
After I had reached my post at Zurich, a New Yorker wrote me to send him a book printed in the Swiss language. I had seen but few. There is a Swiss language, all the uneducated speak it; so do many of the cultivated, when among themselves, but not among strangers. It is also spoken much in the family circle. It has many dialects, and some of them are older than the German language itself. An occasional newspaper is printed in these dialects, but books rarely.
CHAPTER XXIII
1881
ELM AND ALL ITS PEOPLE DESTROYED BY AN AVALANCHE-A FOOT TRIP IN IRELAND-FENIANS-REDCOATS-POVERTY-THE QUEEN HOOTED-OUT OF JAIL AND A HERO-MUCKROSS ABBEY BY MOONLIGHT-AN IRISH FUNERAL-A DUPLICATE BLARNEY STONE-LETTERS FROM GENERAL SHERMAN-THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON-THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD.
September, 1881.-It is a year now since pretty Elm and all its people were buried in an avalanche.
Only a few days before, we had climbed over one of the obscure bridle paths from the Rhine valley to Elm. The path led over a glacier and was 9,000 feet high. All that summer night in Elm we heard the avalanches fall in the neighborhood, for we were in the higher Alps; lofty and awful pyramids of eternal rock and snow were all about us.
Right behind the little inn, where we staid that night, frowned a threatening, almost perpendicular mountain, 12,000 feet high. What if that dark pile should tumble over on the village, we thought, as we looked out into the moonlight. How little we dreamed what was about to happen. We were hardly back in our home in Zurich, when a telegram announced that the mountain had fallen, that Elm and all the people had been destroyed.
Shortly, Consul Mason, of Basel, and myself hurried by rail to Schwanden, and in a little wagonette went up the comparatively easy valley road to what was once Elm. The sight was terrific. A part of the mountain overhanging the village slipped off on Sunday, just as the people had returned from afternoon church services. The mighty debris of rock and earth overwhelmed and buried the pretty village. It filled the valley for half a mile. Mason and I climbed over granite boulders and broken rocks as big as a house. Nothing of the town was to be seen, the houses had been torn to pieces and buried fifty feet below. Nearly everybody had been killed. There were no funerals, for till this day the peasants of Elm sleep under the mountain that overwhelmed them. The few who had escaped, by being on hillsides or out looking at their herds on the higher fields, wandered about as if dazed. They shed no tears. To them, the end of the world had come. Some of them told me, without a tremor in their voices, how they stood on some high place and saw their wives, their fathers or their children first thrown into the air by the awful concussion and then buried with their houses. The keeper of the little inn where we stopped that night had been spared, and told us how he saw the big iron bridge across the river Sernf tossed a hundred feet into the air, twisted like a straw, and thrown against a hillside.
The river bed had been dammed up by the falling rock, and the waters now wandered aimlessly over the ocean of debris above the people’s homes. It is all silent now, up there in the Alps where Elm stood, silent save where the winds from the mountain peaks on moonlight nights moan a requiem to the sleeping dead.
September 20.-President Garfield died yesterday at 5 A. M. (Swiss time), and all the world went into mourning. I draped the flag here, and put it out at the consulate. Many people called to express their sorrow. A more unprovoked murder of a ruler never occurred. The President’s agony since July 2d has been terrible, and his courage to bear it has been tremendous.
Early this month, I made a little foot tour in Ireland. Everybody said, “Don’t go!” Even in Dublin, a friend warned me, saying: “It is a terrible time in Ireland. Landlords are being murdered and farmers locked up in prison. You are a stranger here. The English soldiers, on the watch everywhere, will take you for an American Fenian. The Irish will take you for an English spy.”
It was all a mistake, as to myself at least. I went everywhere unmolested. True, the tourists were frightened out of the country. British redcoats were being sent up and down the island looking for “boycotters” and assassins. The people everywhere were sullen, and ominous silence reigned in many places. The country seemed to be sitting on a volcano. I often walked miles on country roads without meeting a soul, and nobody at all dared to be abroad at night. At little country inns where I stopped, people did not talk about the situation. I suppose they dared not.
By accident I picked up a newspaper one day and read a warning signed by New York Fenians against any one’s traveling to Europe on an English steamer. “They would blow them all up.” To my horror another item told how an “infernal machine” was believed to have been put on board the “Adriatic,” that had sailed on the 8th. This might go off in mid-ocean and destroy the ship. My wife and two children were on board that vessel, and the ship had sailed. There was nothing to do but wait, and fear. Besides, it did not seem possible to me that the friends of Ireland could resort to such crimes. In Ireland itself, however, there was little respect for law, and for England none at all.
Once I was on a railroad train near Mallow. I was in the third class, because there I could see the common people. A Fenian, out of jail that very morning, sat next to me. He would not talk about the government, but constantly asked me to “look out at the green fields”-they were so beautiful to him after months of imprisonment.
Many redcoat soldiers, in charge of prisoners wearing handcuffs, were on the train. The prisoners yelled: “Down with England! Hurrah for free Ireland!” and sang the “Wearing of the Green.” The soldiers could not help themselves and simply laughed.
The train stopped at a little country village and I saw a great mass of people running towards us. The soldiers said they were coming to stone the train. I wished now that I had listened to the “warnings.” Instead of stoning us, however, the mob rushed into the car where I was, seized the man by my side and bore him out on their shoulders. The men hugged him, the women kissed him, and everybody cried for “free Ireland.” It was his welcome home from prison. The redcoats said nothing and did nothing. As the train moved on, I could see the mob still carrying the man up the street, while the village band marched at their head.
I wanted to go to Limerick for the races next day, but I saw a train with three hundred armed and uniformed policemen going to the same place, so I stayed away, and took to the quiet and safer country roads.
I passed lovely scenes in the neighborhood of Killarney. The lakes equal the Swiss lakes in beauty; there are bright waterfalls there, groves, grand estates, ruined castles, and wretched poverty.
Saw Muckross Abbey by moonlight-nothing more romantic conceivable. The grand old trees, the broken arches, the ivy-covered walls, the graveyard with its bones of long-dead Irish kings, all silent and lone under the soft light of a summer moon, impressed me.
A young Irishman and his newly wedded wife, stopping at the inn, had joined me in the wish to see Muckross by moonlight. We walked down the road to the entrance of the ground. The care taker at the gate was upstairs in the lodge in bed. When we called to him to unlock the gate, he poked his head out of a window and ordered us away instantly. We offered him good pay to come down and let us into the grounds. “Not for a dozen pounds would I come down there,” he yelled back at us. “How do I know what you are or who you be, tramping around the roads this time of night. You might be going to blow the top of the head off of me. I tell you go along wid you.” We went along further down the road, climbed over into the enclosure, and without blowing off tops of heads of anybody, had a good time. We knew the man would not venture from his lodge. His fear showed the kind of times Ireland was living in.
The next day I saw an Irish funeral at Muckross Abbey. The coffin was borne on men’s shoulders, at first. When they passed out of Killarney village, they put it on top of an immense hearse, the shape of an omnibus, and behind it capered along a company of old women and girls, groaning, bawling and shrieking by turns. Occasionally, on seeing a friend at the roadside, these hired mourners rested themselves a moment and greeted the friend with a grin. It seemed a hideous performance. The grave was not dug when the procession reached the abbey, and there was nothing to do but wait till some one came with shovel and spade. In the meantime I slipped away.
I had many long walks through the country as I footed it off towards Cork. Most of the peasants seemed sticking close to their wretched little hovels, called houses. Excepting an occasional magnificent estate that I saw walled in at the country roadside, all seemed wretchedness. In a hundred miles I did not see a farmhouse that an American would regard as anything more than a barn or pig sty. These huts are of stone, one or one and a half stories high, covered with straw, and no floor but the ground.
Wherever I talked, pitiable tales were told of bad living, high rents, extortionate landlords. In the midst of all the wretchedness and the present danger (and danger there is, for arrests and murders and crimes are going on all the time), the peasants seem rather jovial and cheery, though not contented. It is amazing where they get the money to pay the landlords. One man told me he paid thirty dollars a year for a dirty little hut without a foot of ground or garden. It was all the house would sell for. “Yes,” said the man, “and I would be tumbled into the road in six minutes if my rent were not paid; that’s what all them constables are hanging around for.” I went into many of the little dark farmhouses. All I saw was wretchedness-a pig or two, a few chickens-maybe a cow staked outside-some dirty children-a woman, cheery in spite of it all.
At one little hut a peasant woman asked me to stay and see what her dinner was. Shortly she gave a call and the “brats” came running in. She took a pot from the fire and gave to each a few potatoes, some salt and a piece of bread, nothing more. The boys took their dinners in their caps.
I was affected to tears, when the good woman put some potatoes on a plate and offered to divide with me, as I stood looking on in the doorway. “Oh, sir,” she said, and even cheerfully, “there are many worse off than we. We cannot complain.” The husband was off at the coast at work. On Sundays, he brought home a part of his wages to pay the rent and part of the wages he spent for drink. He brought a little coarse fish with him, too.
In some houses no meals were had. The potato pot hung by the fire, and each helped himself out of it, whenever he felt hungry.
And that was peasant life in Ireland.
Potatoes and bread, with a bit of meat or fish on Sundays, seem to be the regular rations of the family. What would have happened had Sir Walter Raleigh never introduced the potato there? And what did the people live on before they had potatoes?
The Irish are full of hope, and all the people look to the new “Land Bill” to save them. But it won’t do it!
One day I overtook two Americans who, like myself, were wandering about Ireland on foot. We went together to Blarney Castle. We did not see the herd of white cows that rise up out of Blarney Lake at night, but we climbed to the top of the castle tower (120 feet), where the youngest of the party caught hold of an iron bar at a window and let himself down outside the tower until he could reach the Blarney stone. Few ever venture so foolhardy a feat, or have the muscle to hang on by one hand at so perilous a height. The rest of us thought him a dead man. No wonder the ancient Irish firmly believed that if one could kiss this stone it would give him eloquence, because they knew it could not be kissed, not by one mortal in a million.
The old poet was safe in saying:
“There is a stone there
That whoever kisses,
Oh, he never misses
To grow eloquent.”
There is a kind of duplicate “Blarney stone” placed at a convenient and easy spot on the castle for kissing, and the old woman in charge smiles as she pockets the tourist’s shilling, turns the key in the door and says to herself: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
At Queenstown I met my wife and two little ones returning from America, the little girl suffering with a pain that shortly took her sweet life away from us.
*****
At the request of the Harper’s Magazine editor for something of the kind, I have written an article called “My Farm in Switzerland.” My wife has illustrated it, as well as the one on “The Swiss Rhine.”
The farmers here seem to be doing as well on ten acres as our people do on quarter sections. There is the same complaint about mortgages and all that, of course; but with it all, at the end of the year, the Swiss peasant, like the American farmer, has made a living.
The investigation necessary for this paper showed me two things. First, the Swiss are better farmers than the Americans. Second, they are ten times as economical, else they would starve to death. Economy is a fine art here. There is no other way to explain how it is a Swiss lives, even poorly, on ten acres, while the Yankee requires one hundred and sixty. Grass land here costs $200 an acre, grape land $1,000. Big farms are impossible at such prices.
Suppose the Swiss has five acres of grape and garden land and ten of pasture and meadow. His investment is $7,000. He lives from it with less hard work than the American has, who owns one hundred and sixty acres, worth $60 an acre or $9,600. The American’s investment is much more than that of the Swiss, his labor must be double, his income the same-a living. What is the matter? It is this. The one saves; the other wastes. Expensive farm machinery does not lie around the fields rusting to pieces in Switzerland. Horses and cattle are not thinned down and killed off by exposure to bad weather. Care for what you have earned, is the Swiss peasant’s motto. Waste everything you get, is the practice of the American. After a while, careful foreigners will own all the farms in America, and the American farmer will be loafing around village stores, starving. Swiss economy applied to American land culture, would enrich every farmer in America. Economy is the thing that keeps the Swiss farmer from the poor-house.
*****
I give two letters from General Sherman; the first, with something about the Duke of Wellington, and the science of war; the second, about President Garfield’s assassination. The little girl, referred to in the first letter, was our little Helen, now drifting away from us, although we did not think it.
“Washington, D. C., October 4, 1881.
“Dear Byers: – I have your good letter of September 21, with the slip from the London Times, which I have read with profit. The English cannot discuss any proposition without bringing in the Duke of Wellington. No man, if living, would be quicker to avail himself of improved transportation and communication than the Duke, but it would astonish the old gentleman to wake up and read in the Times of all events in America and Asia the same day of their occurrence.
“The science of war, like that of natural philosophy, chemistry, must recognize new truths and new inventions as they arise, and that is all there is of change in the science of war since 1815. Man remains pretty much the same, and will dodge all the risks of war and danger if by electricity and nitroglycerine he can blow up his enemy ten miles off. Nevertheless, manhood and courage will in future wars be of as much use as in the past, and those who comprehend the object and come to close quarters will win now as before.
“I am very sorry to hear that your little girl is in such precarious health, and hope with you that the complete change in surroundings may bring her back to her wonted health. All my flock is about as well as usual, but now scattered. I expect Rachel home from Europe by the Celtic, which leaves Queenstown October 21. My aide McCook lost his wife at Salt Lake City and Bacon lost both his children, boys, this summer.
“We all feel the effect of Garfield’s death yet, but next week the called session of the Senate will meet, and then the political pot will begin to boil and bubble. The telegraph keeps you so well advised that it seems useless to attempt anything by letter.
“Give my best love to your wife and family and believe me as always,
“Your friend,W. T. Sherman.”
*****
“Washington, D. C., Dec. 14, 1881.
“Dear Byers: – I have owed you a letter for a long while, and though we have had enough in all conscience here to furnish fit topics for letters, I have known that the telegraph would be a long way ahead. In Europe you know as much of the tragedy of Garfield’s shooting and death as our own people in the interior, and many returned travelers describe the intense interest of all classes in Garfield’s fate, as long as he clung to life. The patient submission of our people, and their continued endurance of the brutal Guiteau till he shall have had a fair trial, is most honorable to us as a law-abiding people, but even I am sometimes impatient at the law’s dallying, as this trial draws its slow length along. I think the court means to make the trial so full, and so perfect, that all the world will be convinced of the justice of the sentence of death. So intense is public feeling that if the fellow was turned loose, he would be stoned to death by the boys.
“The transition of power from Garfield to Arthur has been so regular, so unattended by shock, that it proves the stability of the Government. I have never known a time when there was so little political excitement, or when the machinery of government worked more smoothly than now. There is the same outward pressure for place, but President Arthur fends it off with the skill of an old experienced hand. So I infer there will be as few changes as possible. Blaine goes out to-day and Frelinghuysen in, but it makes no more noise than a change of bank presidents. In the army the same general composure prevails, and we believe Congress will give us our 30,000 men, which will increase the strength of companies and thereby increase the efficiency of the establishment.
“All my family continues statu quo, reasonably well, in our house on Fifteenth Street. Our season also seems mild for December, for this far we have had no signs of winter.
“With my best love to all your folks, I am as ever,
“Your friend,W. T. Sherman.”
On Sunday, as often happens after church here, the people were at the polls, voting as to the adoption or rejection of a batch of laws that had been adopted by the parliament. This is the “Referendum” in action. Absolute order and decency prevailed, and there were no intriguing ward politicians hanging around the polls, to buttonhole voters. Voting is a responsible, dignified act with the Swiss. A majority of the people seem to think the “Referendum” operates well enough with a people so intelligent and patriotic as themselves, and in so small a country. Yet, thousands here ridicule the idea of submitting great questions of state to be voted on by the intelligent and ignorant alike. In great cities, the world over, the ignorant and vicious are in the majority, and the laws would all be bad if such citizens had the decision of them. My own observation is that even the Swiss misuse this Referendum and adopt just as many bad laws as they do good ones.