CHAPTER XIII
WRITING HIS WAY AROUND THE WORLD
Days of Poverty in Boston. Sent to Southern Battlefields. Around the
World for New York and Boston Papers. In a Gambling Den In Hong Kong,
China. Cholera and Shipwreck.
Abject poverty awaited him on his return to Boston. The fire in St. Paul had left them but little property, while their enforced hurried departure compelled that little to be sold at a loss. This money was now entirely gone, and once more he faced the world in absolute poverty. He rented a single room in the East district of Boston and furnished it with the barest necessities. Colonel Conwell secured a position on "The Evening Traveller" at five dollars a week, and Mrs. Conwell cheerily took in sewing. Thus they made their first brave stand against the gaunt wolf at the door. Here their first child was born, a daughter, Nima, now Mrs. E.G. Tuttle, of Philadelphia. These were dark days for the little household. Night after night the father came home to see the one he loved best in all the world, suffering for the barest necessities of life, yet cheerful, buoyant, never complaining. So sensitive to the sufferings of others that he must do all in his power to relieve even his comrades in the war when, injured or ill, what mental anguish must he have endured when his dearly loved wife was in want and he so powerless to relieve it. She read his heart with the sure sympathy of love, knew his bitter anguish of spirit, and suffered the more because he suffered. But bravely she cheered him, encouraged him, and spent all her own spare minutes doing what she could to add to the family income.
Thus they pluckily-worked, never repining nor complaining at fate, though knowing in its bitterest sense what it is to be desperately poor, to suffer for adequate food and clothing. Colonel Conwell learned in that hard experience what it is to want for a crust of bread. No man can come to Dr. Conwell to this day with a tale of poverty, suffering, sickness, but what the minister's eyes turn backward to that one little room with its pitiful makeshifts of furniture, its brave, pale wife, the wee girl baby; and his hand goes out to help with an earnest and heartfelt sympathy surprising to the recipient.
But the tide turned ere long. Colonel Conwell's work on the paper soon began to tell. His salary was raised and raised, until comfort once more with smiling face took up her abode with them. They moved into a pretty home in Somerville. Colonel Conwell resumed his law practice and began, as in the West, to deal in real estate. He also continued his lecturing.
Busy days these were, but his life had already taught him much of the art of filling each minute to an exact nicety in order to get the most out of it. His paper sent him as a special correspondent to write up the battlefields of the South, and his letters were so graphic and entertaining as to become a widely known and much discussed feature of the paper. Soldiers everywhere read them with eager delight and through them revisited the scenes of the terrible conflict in which each had played some part. While on this assignment, he invaded a gambling den in New Orleans, and interfering to save a colored man from the drunken frenzy of a bully, came near being killed himself. Coming to the aid of a porter on a Mississippi steamboat, he again narrowly escaped being shot, striking a revolver from the hand of a ruffian just as his finger dropped on the trigger. He mixed with all classes and conditions of men and saw life in its roughest, most primal aspect But all these experiences helped him to that appreciation of human nature that has been of such, value and help to him since.
These letters aroused such widespread and favorable comment that the "New York Tribune" and "Boston Traveller" arranged to send him on a tour of the world. When the offer came to him, his mind leaped the years to that poorly furnished room in the little farmhouse, where he had leaned on his mother's knee and listened with rapt attention while she read him the letters of foreign correspondents in that very "New York Tribune." The letter he wrote his mother telling her of the appointment was full of loving gratitude for the careful way she had trained his tastes in those days when he was too young and inexperienced to choose for himself.
It was a wrench for the young wife to let him go so far away, but she bravely, cheerfully made the sacrifice. She was proud of his work and his ability, and she loved him too truly to stand in the way of his progress.
This journey took him to Scotland, England, Sweden, Denmark, France,
Italy, Germany, Russia, Palestine, Arabia, Egypt and Northern Africa.
He interviewed Emperor William I, Bismarck, Victor Emanuel, the then
Prince of Wales, now Edward VII of England. He frequently met Henry
M. Stanley, then correspondent for the London papers, who wrote from
Paris of Colonel Conwell, "Send that double-sighted Yankee and he will
see at a glance all there is and all there ever was."
He also made the acquaintance of Garibaldi, whom he visited in his island home and with whom he kept up a correspondence after he returned. Garibaldi it was who called Colonel Conwell's attention to the heroic deeds of that admirer of America, the great and patriotic Venetian, Daniel Manin. In the busy years that followed on this trip Colonel Conwell spent a long time gathering materials for a biography of Daniel Manin, and just before it was ready for the press the manuscript was destroyed by fire in the destruction of his home at Newton Centre, Massachusetts, in 1880. One of his most popular lectures, "The Heroism of a Private Life," took its inception from the life of this Venetian statesman.
He also gave a series of lectures at Cambridge, England, on Italian history that attracted much favorable comment.
Mr. Samuel T. Harris, of New York, correspondent of the "New York Times" in 1870, in a private letter, says, "Conwell is the funniest chap I ever fell in with. He sees a thousand things I never thought of looking after. When his letters come back in print I find lots in them that seems new to me, although I saw it all at the time. But you don't see the fun in his letters to the papers. The way he adapts himself to all circumstances comes from long travel; but it is droll. He makes a salaam to the defunct kings, a neat bow to the Sudras, and a friendly wink at the Howadji, in a way that puts him cheek-by-jowl with them in a jiffy. He beats me all out in his positive sympathy with these miserable heathen. He has read so much that he knows about everything. The way the officials, English, too, treat him would make you think he was the son of a lord. He has a dignified condescension in his manner that I can't imitate."
Part of the time Bayard Taylor was his traveling companion, and there grew up between these two kindred spirits an intimate friendship that lasted until Taylor's death.
All through the trip he carried books with him, and every minute not occupied in gathering material for his letters was passed in reading the history of the scenes and the people he was among, in mastering their language. Such close application added an interesting background of historical information to his letters, a breadth and culture, that made them decidedly more valuable and entertaining than if confined strictly to what he saw and heard. It was on this journey that he heard the legend from which grew his famous lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," which has been given already three thousand four hundred and twenty times. It gave him an almost inexhaustible fund of material on which he has drawn for his lectures and books since.
During his absence his second child, a son, Leon, was born. He returned home for the briefest time, and then completed the tour by way of the West and the Pacific. He lectured through the Western States and Territories, for already his fame as a lecturer was spreading. He visited the Sandwich Islands, Japan, China, Sumatra, Siam, Burmah, the Himalaya Mountains, India, returning home by way of Europe. His Hong Kong letter to "The Tribune," exposing the iniquities of the labor-contract system in Chinese emigration, created quite a stir in political and diplomatic circles. It was while on this trip he gathered the material for his first book, "Why and How the Chinese Emigrate." It was reviewed as the best book in the market of its kind. The "New York Herald" in writing of it said: "There has been little given to the public which throws more timely and intelligent light upon the question of coolie emigration than the book written by Col. Russell H. Conwell, of Boston."
These travels were replete with thrilling adventures and strange coincidents. When he left Somerville after his brief visit, for his trip through the Western States, China and Japan, a broken-hearted mother in Charlestown, Mass., asked him to find her wandering boy, whom she believed to be "somewhere in China." A big request, but Colonel Conwell, busy as he was, did not forget it. Searching for him in such places as he believed the boy would most likely frequent, Colonel Conwell accidentally entered, one night in Hong Kong, a den of gamblers. Writing of the event, he says:
"At one table sat an American, about twenty-five years old, playing with an old man. They had been betting and drinking. While the gray-haired man was shuffling the cards for a 'new deal' the young man, in a swaggering, careless way, sang, to a very pathetic tune, a verse of Phoebe Carey's beautiful hymn,
'One sweetly solemn thought
Comes to me o'er and o'er:
I'm nearer home to-day
Than e'er I've been before.'
Hearing the singing several gamblers looked up in surprise. The old man who was dealing the cards grew melancholy, stopped for a moment, gazed steadfastly at his partner in the game, and dashed the pack upon the floor under the table. Then said he, 'Where did you learn that tune?' The young man pretended that he did not know he had been singing. 'Well, no matter,' said the old man, I've played my last game, and that's the end of it. The cards may lie there till doomsday, and I will never pick them up,' The old man having won money from the other—about one hundred dollars—took it out of his pocket, and handing it to him said: 'Here, Harry, is your money; take it and do good with it; I shall with mine.' As the traveler followed them downstairs, he saw them conversing by the doorway, and overheard enough to know that the older man was saying something about the song which the young man had sung. It had, perhaps, been learned at a mother's knee, or in a Sunday-school, and may have been (indeed it was), the means of saving these gamblers, and of aiding others through their influence toward that nobler life which alone is worth the living."
The old man had come from Westfield, Mass. He died in 1888, at Salem,
Oregon, having spent the last seven years of his life as a Christian
Missionary among the sailors of the Pacific coast. He passed away
rejoicing in the faith that took him
"Nearer the Father's House,
Where many mansions be,
Nearer the great white throne,
Nearer the jasper sea."
The boy, Harry, utterly renounced gambling and kindred vices.
While coming from Bombay to Aden, cholera broke out on the ship and it was strictly quarantined. It was a ship of grief and terror. Passengers daily lost loved ones. New victims were stricken every hour. The slow days dragged away with death unceasingly busy among them. Burials were constant, and no man knew who would be the next victim. But Colonel Conwell escaped contagion.
On the trip home, across the Atlantic, the steamer in a fearful gale was so dismantled as to be helpless. The fires of the engine were out, and the boat for twenty-six days drifted at the mercy of the waves. No one, not even the Captain, thought they could escape destruction. Water-logged and unmanageable, during a second storm it was thought to be actually sinking. The Captain himself gave up hope, the women grew hysterical. But in the midst of it all, Colonel Conwell walked the deck, and to calm the passengers sang "Nearer my God to Thee," with such feeling, such calm assurance in a higher power, that the passengers and Captain once again took courage. But strangest of all, on this voyage, while sick, he was cared for by the very colored porter whose life he had saved on the Mississippi steamboat.