Why did Christ curse the fig-tree? It was not in the least to blame; and it seems most unreasonable to have expected it to bear figs out of season. Instead of withering it away, it would have been as great a miracle, and far more beautiful, and, one would think, of more beneficent influence, to have made it suddenly rich with ripe fruit. Then, to be sure, it might have died joyfully, having answered so good a purpose. I have been reminded of this miracle by the story of a man in Heywood, a town in Lancashire, who used such horribly profane language that a plane-tree in front of his cottage is said to have withered away from that hour. I can draw no moral from the incident of the fig-tree, unless it be that all things perish from the instant when they cease to answer some divine purpose.
March 6th.—Yesterday I lunched on board Captain Russell's ship, the Princeton. These daily lunches on shipboard might answer very well the purposes of a dinner; being, in fact, noontide dinners, with soup, roast mutton, mutton-chops, and a macaroni pudding,—brandy, port and sherry wines. There were three elderly Englishmen at table, with white heads, which, I think, is oftener the predicament of elderly heads here than in America. One of these was a retired Custom-House officer, and the other two were connected with shipping in some way. There is a satisfaction in seeing Englishmen eat and drink, they do it so heartily, and, on the whole, so wisely,—trusting so entirely that there is no harm in good beef and mutton, and a reasonable quantity of good liquor; and these three hale old men, who had acted on this wholesome faith for so long, were proofs that it is well on earth to live like earthly creatures. In America, what squeamishness, what delicacy, what stomachic apprehension, would there not be among three stomachs of sixty or seventy years' experience! I think this failure of American stomachs is partly owing to our ill usage of our digestive powers, and partly to our want of faith in them.
After lunch, we all got into an omnibus, and went to the Mersey Iron Foundry, to see the biggest piece of ordnance in the world, which is almost finished. The overseer of the works received us, and escorted us courteously throughout the establishment; which is very extensive, giving employment to a thousand men, what with night-work and day-work. The big gun is still on the axle, or turning-machine, by means of which it has been bored. It is made entirely of wrought and welded iron, fifty tons of which were originally used; and the gun, in its present state, bored out and smoothed away, weighs nearly twenty-three tons. It has, as yet, no trunnions, and does not look much like a cannon, but only a huge iron cylinder, immensely solid, and with a bore so large that a young man of nineteen shoved himself into it, the whole length, with a light, in order to see whether it is duly smooth and regular. I suppose it will have a better effect, as to the impression of size, when it is finished, polished, mounted, aid fully equipped, after the fashion of ordinary cannon. It is to throw a ball of three hundred pounds' weight five miles, and woe be to whatever ship or battlement shall bear the brunt!
After inspecting the gun we went through other portions of the establishment, and saw iron in various stages of manufacture. I am not usually interested in manufacturing processes, being quite unable to understand them, at least in cotton-machinery and the like; but here there were such exhibitions of mighty strength, both of men and machines, that I had a satisfaction in looking on. We saw lumps of iron, intensely white-hot, and in all but a melting state, passed through rollers of various size and pressure, and speedily converted into long bars, which came curling and waving out of the rollers like great red ribbons, or like fiery serpents wriggling out of Tophet; and finally, being straightened out, they were laid to cool in heaps. Trip-hammers are very pleasant things to look at, working so massively as they do, and yet so accurately; chewing up the hot iron, as it were, and fashioning it into shape, with a sort of mighty and gigantic gentleness in their mode of action. What great things man has contrived, and is continually performing! What a noble brute he is!
Also, I found much delight in looking at the molten iron, boiling and bubbling in the furnace, and sometimes slopping over, when stirred by the attendant. There were numberless fires on all sides, blinding us with their intense glow; and continually the pounding strokes of huge hammers, some wielded by machinery and others by human arms. I had a respect for these stalwart workmen, who seemed to be near kindred of the machines amid which they wrought,—mighty men, smiting stoutly, and looking into the fierce eyes of the furnace fearlessly, and handling the iron at a temperature which would have taken the skin off from ordinary fingers. They looked strong, indeed, but pale; for the hot atmosphere in which they live cannot but be deleterious, and I suppose their very strength wears them quickly out. But I would rather live ten years as an iron-smith than fifty as a tailor.
So much heat can be concentrated into a mass of iron, that a lump a foot square heats all the atmosphere about it, and burns the face at a considerable distance. As the trip-hammer strikes the lump, it seems still more to intensify the heat by squeezing it together, and the fluid iron oozes out like sap or juice.
"He was ready for the newest fashions!"—this expression was used by Mrs. Blodgett in reference to Mr. ——— on his first arrival in England, and it is a very tender way of signifying that a person is rather poorly off as to apparel.
March 15th.—Mr. ———, our new ambassador, arrived on Thursday afternoon by the Atlantic, and I called at the Adelphi Hotel, after dinner, to pay him my respects. I found him and his family at supper. . . . They seem to be plain, affable people. . . . The ambassador is a venerable old gentleman, with a full head of perfectly white hair, looking not unlike an old-fashioned wig; and this, together with his collarless white neckcloth and his brown coat, gave him precisely such an aspect as one would expect in a respectable person of pre-revolutionary days. There was a formal simplicity, too, in his manners, that might have belonged to the same era. He must have been a very handsome man in his youthful days, and is now comely, very erect, moderately tall, not overburdened with flesh; of benign and agreeable address, with a pleasant smile; but his eyes, which are not very large, impressed me as sharp and cold. He did not at all stamp himself upon me as a man of much intellectual or characteristic vigor. I found no such matter in his conversation, nor did I feel it in the indefinable way by which strength always makes itself acknowledged. B———, though, somehow, plain and uncouth, yet vindicates himself as a large man of the world, able, experienced, fit to handle difficult circumstances of life; dignified, too, and able to hold his own in any society. Mr. ——— has a kind of venerable dignity; but yet, if a person could so little respect himself as to insult him, I should say that there was no innate force in Mr. ——— to prevent it. It is very strange that he should have made so considerable a figure in public life, filling offices that the strongest men would have thought worthy of their highest ambition. There must be something shrewd and sly under his apparent simplicity; narrow, cold, selfish, perhaps. I fancied these things in his eyes. He has risen in life by the lack of too powerful qualities, and by a certain tact, which enables him to take advantage of circumstances and opportunities, and avail himself of his unobjectionableness, just at the proper time. I suppose he must be pronounced a humbug, yet almost or quite an innocent one. Yet he is a queer representative to be sent from brawling and boisterous America at such a critical period. It will be funny if England sends him back again, on hearing the news of ———'s dismissal. Mr. ——— gives me the impression of being a very amiable man in his own family. He has brought his son with him, as Secretary of Legation,—a small young man, with a little mustache. It will be a feeble embassy.
I called again the next morning, and introduced Mrs. ———, who, I believe, accompanied the ladies about town. This simplicity in Mr. ———'s manner puzzles and teases me; for, in spite of it, there was a sort of self-consciousness, as if he were being looked at,—as if he were having his portrait taken.