“I was led out by Secretary Evarts. I don’t think he would have selected me if he could have been allowed his choice. You have to go in the order of the Cabinet. Three hours so close to the great New York criminal lawyer! I thought I should faint! I cast my eyes down the table at my husband; he was below me on the other side of the table and he looked ‘blue.’ I was just thinking what he could find to say to the strange women on each side of him, for he never talks to me, when I would be interrupted by one of Evarts’ questions that would make me feel that I was on the witness stand. I can talk fast sometimes, but I felt if I spoke except to answer him it would be sure to be wrong, and I would disgrace the Cabinet. I managed to get through some way and afterwards found out that I was liable to be taken into state dinners by Secretary Evarts as long as we were in the Cabinet. I tried to prevail on my husband to resign, to which he agreed as soon as some other good place could be found for him.”
The Cabinet dinners are modeled on the same plan as the state dinners, and the misery endured is in proportion to its size and duration. The torture consequent upon the formal dinners made a hero and a place in history for dear old Sam Ward. Of course, his dinners were as much above those of the White House as Sam exceeded the steward in brilliancy of conception of dainty cuisine. Sam’s culinary reputation rests on a ham boiled with three red clover heads, and when put into the oven to “brown” it was treated to a baptism of champagne. The three heads of red clover have been proved to be a fraud. Nothing was ever served on Sam’s table that was half as delicious as himself. He is familiar with nine different languages, three of which he spoke with all the fluency of his mother tongue. He has been seen to put his arm around a foreign minister with all the grace and affection with which a lover embraces his sweetheart. Is it strange that this man became an idol to the public men whose constitutions were impaired by the dyspeptic dinners of “high society?” Extremes meet, and overfeeding is far more disastrous in its remote results than a mild course of starvation. Sam Ward managed that his guests should never be satiated. The oyster patties, like a little woman, would be so perfect, though small, that the next course would be anxiously awaited. “Two dessert spoonfuls of soup with a thimbleful of choicest sherry, that is my foundation for a dinner,” says the immortal Sam. Only people of ability were permitted to gather around his board, and it was the brilliant conversation more than the viands that made it appear “a feast fit for the gods.” If a dinner was to be given to the Spanish minister the proper number of agreeable people who speak Spanish could always be found for a small party. Could anything be more grateful to a stranger in a strange land than to hear his home language spoken by his host with the ease and fluency of a native; to have the conversation adroitly turned to the subjects which lie nearest to the Spanish heart; to drink the blood of the grape brought all the way from Castile or Arragon? Is it a wonder with Sam’s arm around his diplomatic waist that he would feel as did Mungo Park in Africa when he heard the negro woman singing at the foot of the tree that sheltered him:
“No wife to catch him fish and grind him corn”?
When one of the foreigners died it is said that he left Sam Ward a fortune. If his cuisine was not always perfect the host himself made up the imperfection. He had the power to throw his guests out of their shells and by this means adding any amount of heat to the social atmosphere. The last time Sam Ward was seen he was marching across the Capitol Rotunda, his short, full arm around another man’s waist, looking as much like a fat Philadelphia capon as Charlie O’Neill. His round, chubby, boyish face and duck legs bore not the slightest resemblance to the lobby. He is the brother of Julia Ward Howe, the author of the battle hymn of the Republic. The same kind of spiritual essence that enters this poem made the dinners famous, but let no man attempt the same high art. The solitary vase has been broken, but the odor is left and clings to it still.
Olivia.
[BEN HILL AND ROSCOE CONKLING.]
Mannerisms of These Famous Senators and a Number of Their Colleagues.
Washington, May 14, 1881.