November 11th, 1893. To the funeral of Francis Parkman, to which I went as a matter of historical interest. It took place at King’s Chapel, without pomp, ceremony or trappings of woe. The music was pure classic, but passionless, the voice of the clergyman grave, reverent, without emotion. It seemed as if all elder Boston had come to the obsequies of one of the last great New Englanders. The service was impressive from its very impassiveness. No rending either of hearts or garments, no shrouding of pale faces with crape,—all stern, granite, real. Barrett Wendell had been that morning to the funeral of his choreman at the Catholic cathedral. He compared the gorgeous ceremony for this humble servant with the incense, the vestments, the velvet pall, the emotional music, to the grave function at King’s Chapel. He spoke of the ringing Latin words of the mass, in sæcula sæculorum. “In the matter of funerals,” he said, “Thomas certainly had the best of it.”
CHAPTER XVI
London in the Nineties
“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!”
The absurd words, the maddening air, greeted us when we marched on London, four strong, in that dazzling season of 1892. My husband, my mother, my niece, Alice Richards, and myself made up the swaggering contingent,—“four precious souls and all agog to dash through thick and thin.”
The Columbian epoch glitters resplendently when I look back along the line of years that stretch behind me, a motley company dressed in cloth-of-gold, sackcloth, and brown holland. Something of the glow of new life that came to the world four hundred years earlier was reflected in the time.
Fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus crossed the ocean blue!
The old intoxication seized upon my mother and me the moment we stepped out of Saint Pancras Station and into the moldy-smelling four-wheeler. Alice, fresh from boarding school, was not less deeply stirred perhaps, but showed it less, according to the manner of her generation. A fellow traveler on the train had said to us:
“I call this the American season! You Americans are furnishing more of the year’s sensations than ever.”
At Earl’s Court our old acquaintance, Buffalo Bill, with his bronco busters and cowboys was making a great hit. A friend offered me a seat in the weather-beaten Deadwood Coach during the pursuit by Arapahoe Indians.