[CHAPTER XXX]
1891

GO TO SWITZERLAND AS CONSUL GENERAL​--​AN OCEAN VOYAGE THEN AND NOW​--​A GLIMPSE OF BURNS’ HOME​--​THE HIGHEST CITY IN EUROPE​--​A NOVEL REPUBLIC​--​LIFE IN THE HIGHER ALPS​--​HEADQUARTERS FOR EMBROIDERY​--​PRINCESS SALM SALM​--​AN OPEN AIR PARLIAMENT​--​THE UPPER RHINE​--​AT HAMBURG​--​A SUMMER ON THE BALTIC​--​INTERVIEW WITH PRINCE BISMARCK.

In a few weeks I was again in Switzerland; this time away up among the Alps, for St. Gall is the highest city of any importance in the world.

The sea voyage had been uneventful. The only lion among the passengers on the “City of New York” was Henry M. Stanley. His wife, a distinguished looking English lady, was with him.

April 10, 1891.​--​This is my fourteenth sea voyage on the Atlantic. What changes in ships since 1869! First-class steamers of that time are now all off on second-class lines to South America; or else they are at the bottom of the sea. Three that I crossed on have since gone down​--​“City of London,” “Anglia,” “Deutschland.”

Yet aside from the added speed, the changes in ocean ships are not so favorable as we try to think them. True, the vessels are more palatial, but one can be just as seasick on a floating palace as on board a schooner. Besides, speed and a palace are poor recompense for the crowds that pack a modern ocean greyhound. Twenty years ago everybody knew everybody on shipboard, and many of the ship acquaintances became friends for life. Then, too, few of one’s fellow passengers had ever been to Europe. There was all the joy of expectation that made the little crowd happy. Those who fly often across the Atlantic have small pleasure compared with the delight of those who long ago saw land for the first time after a long voyage.

The crowds, the blasé character of half the passengers, have robbed a sea voyage of most of its delights.

April 20.​--​We came straight from Liverpool to Scotland, and staid a week in Ayrshire at the old home of my wife’s father. “Clerkland,” their old farm place, is there as good as it was centuries since, when presented by Mary Queen of Scots to Mary Livingstone, one of her maids of honor. It seems strange to read in the town register the name of every owner of the Gilmour home for three or four hundred years down to the present time. We do things differently in America, where we hardly know where our own fathers were born.

The old-fashioned graveyard back of the kirk at Stewarton, with its big brown granite slabs, confirms the town register. They are all there, save an occasional one who wandered beyond the sea and died among strangers. A pretty memorial window in the same kirk tells of John Gilmour, my wife’s uncle, a young poet, called the Kirk White of Ayrshire, who took all the Glasgow University prizes, won fame, and died at nineteen.

We went to every spot near Ayr, made illustrious by the name of Burns​--​Bonny Doon, Kilmarnock, Ellisland, everywhere, and held in our hands the very Bible the poet gave to Highland Mary as they bade farewell forever, standing with hands clasped across a little brook.