One little incident of the visit was amusing. In one of the rooms, by way of a surprise to the Duke, and to give a local colour to the place in his eyes, there was in waiting, amidst a group of lady pupils and students of the sculpture models, a full-dressed Highlander. He was all alive, too, and made his bow very nicely, but he was exceedingly disconcerted when the Duke exclaimed, "He has got on his plaid over the wrong shoulder." The Highlander, amid the laughter which followed the remark, merely said in good American, "I'm not a Scotchman nor a Highlander at all." I believe there are many in the kilted regiments at home who might make a similar confession. He had been evidently dressed after a photograph, and the plaid reversed.
In development of public spirit and wealth, in the beautiful park, the public buildings, the scientific and literary societies, and commercial activity, the city possesses an indefeasible title to be considered the real capital of the State of Pennsylvania.
April 30th.—After three separate heads had popped in at my bedroom this morning and popped back again, seeing that it was "tubbing" time, at 8 A.M. I bolted the door and proceeded to finish my business. Desperate attempts to get in—knock! knock! knock! "You can't come in! I'm undressed!" "Only for a minute!" "I tell you I'm undressed." A card was pushed under the door. Presently I go to the spot, and find on the card in pencil, "S. Cameron, Harrisburg, Pa." It was my old friend, the venerable ex-Senator of Pennsylvania, Mr. Lincoln's first War Secretary, Simon Cameron! I hurried down-stairs to the office. Mr. Cameron was not staying in the Hotel. After a time it was ascertained that he was quartered at the Girard House, nearly opposite, but he was not in, and I had to go away without seeing him.
At 10.30 we bade good-bye to Philadelphia and many friends, and departed in a special train for Baltimore (98 miles) by the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railway on our way to Washington. In Mr. Hinckley, the President of the line, who accompanied us and told us he was about to be boa-constrictored by the P. R. R., we found a delightful companion, and a most agreeable guide; a man of wit and travel, full of observation and anecdote; a sportsman, a naturalist, as well as a railway president; conversant with prairie and Indian life, abounding in anecdote concerning beasts, birds, devil-fish, grizzlies, buffaloes, Red men, as well as the newest devices and dodges of civilised life in the dreadful forms of oleomargarine, butterine, glucose, and the like. Just imagine the atrocity of filling bee-hives with glucose, and selling them as charged with bee-made honey! Fancy, again, the ingenuity of providing the industrious little hymenoptera with artificial hives, with cells and all complete, made out of gutta-percha or papier-mâché, or the like, so that the bee is free to expend all his energy in storing up honey at once, and need not bestow a thought upon making wax, or gathering the materials for it!
The line of railway to Baltimore passes through a populous, unattractive country, which seemed exceedingly prosperous. On our way we passed the oldest city in the State, which, though it bears the name of Chester, was founded by the Swedes about the time of our Civil War, shortly before the raising of the standard by Charles I. It is now remarkable for the ship-building yards of a gentleman of Irish origin, named Roach, and the Swedes have all vanished. A little farther on is the Brandywine River, on which, in 1777, was fought the battle which the Americans have somehow persuaded themselves was a victory. The stones set up to mark "Mason and Dixon's Line" are near Newark, close to Maryland, and the special was stopped to enable us to visit them. Mr. Hinckley told us some very interesting facts connected with the original survey, the dispute between Lord Baltimore and the colony of Pennsylvania concerning their boundaries, the verification of the original survey by the Special Commissioners, and knocked several ignorant delusions on the head.
There was but one expression of feeling at our departure—one of regret; into our short stay in Baltimore, which we reached in a couple of hours, there was compressed so much cordiality and hospitable intent that we were beggared even in thanks. There was a drive with Mayor Latrobe through the city and Druid Park, following an excursion down the harbour and Fort M'Henry in a steamer, visits to elevators and wharfs and landing-piers, and lunches without speechmaking, all to be got through ere the special resumed the run to Washington, of which the Capitol loomed in sight just as the last rays of the sun shot up from behind the ridge which I remember white with the tents of the army of the Union. The long drive to Rigg's House—a magnificent creation of the last few years—was a succession of surprises; new streets, splendid mansions, smooth pavements, electric lights, private carriages, an animated crowd of well-dressed, pleasant-looking people in Pennsylvania Avenue, reminiscences of Paris and New Vienna all around us, instead of mud and closed shutters, gloom, and "John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave" sounding out of patriotic cellars, horses tethered to every tree, orderlies galloping, patrols marching, and the noise of never-ending convoys of warlike stores. It was indeed a happy change. Si sic omnia, si sic semper!
CHAPTER IV.
WASHINGTON.
Heroes New and Old—The Soldiers' Home—The White House—President Garfield—His Visitors—The Capitol—Mount Vernon—Mr. Blaine—"On to Richmond!"—Fitzhugh Lee—The Capitol, Return—The Corcoran Gallery—Sight-seeing.
May 1st.—Such a May-day as our poets sang of ere there was a change of style, and of climate too! A local paper remarks that "the remarkable facility with which an Englishman takes to water under certain conditions was exhibited by the word 'bath' appended on the register of the hotel to the name of every gentleman of the party;" but it was not quite so easy to obtain the thing as to write the word. However, everything comes to him who knows how to wait, and we were all provided at last. By some mischance it was ordered that we should have a private room (No. 32), instead of breakfasting in the common room, which was large and airy, and our "aristocratic exclusiveness," which was quite involuntary, was punished by immurement in an inferno which daylight could not reach, and which was perforce illuminated by gas. It was "ad suffocandum," as Dr. Syntax would say, hot and stuffy. There was a great clangour of church bells after breakfast. The air was resonant with invitations, and we had choice of many places and forms of worship. The Church of the Epiphany in our street was near at hand, and those who attended there found a large congregation, an excellent preacher, and a well-ordered service. Mr. Victor Drummond gave the Duke and myself lunch at his lodgings, where we met Lord G. Montagu and Mr. De Bunsen, of the Legation, and as we walked to the house I had ample opportunities, though I still know the names of my friends, of lamenting the effects of the "longa oblivio" of which Juvenal writes, for the changes which have been made in the city have obliterated most of the landmarks, and time has done the rest. I could not identify "Jost's," where I lived for so many weeks between the rout of Bull Run and the winter of McClellan's preparations in 1861, nor quite satisfy myself as to the precise house "in Seventeenth Street, at the corner of I," where so many anxious days and nights were passed during "the Mason and Slidell" pourparlers, and where "the Bold Buccaneers" were wont to meet. There were new squares and streets in the way, and, moreover, there were statues to heroes whose lights were then hidden under a bushel. In addition to the colossal statue of Washington, by Clark Mills, at the crossing of the Pennsylvania and New Hampshire Avenues, there are the equestrian statue (heroic) of General Scott, by H. Brown, at the crossing of Massachusetts and Rhode Island Avenues; Balls' enormous and "characteristic" statue of Lincoln (paid for by negro subscription) in Lincoln Park; an equestrian statue of Nathaniel Greene, the revolutionary general; one of General Rawlins (to me an unknown quantity—ignoramus that I am!). To these (most of them "buccæ bene notæ oppido") must be added a statue of Admiral Farragut, very like, but complicated by a ridiculous telescope; a fine statue on horseback of General Thomas, one of the best of the Federal generals (pace General Grant and General Badeau); another of General McPherson, who fell at Atalanta, and the Naval Monument, near the Capitol, to the sailors who were killed in the Civil War. These were all Federal heroes, and Washington is a Federal capital. I could not but think how near it was, for the time at least, being a Confederate capital after that memorable July day in 1861, when in despair Mr. Lincoln crossed the Potomac to visit the only fortified port which lay between Washington and the victorious but inept Southerners at Manassas, and found the defenders in flagrant disobedience to orders. But that time is as dead and gone as the period of the Wars of the Roses, albeit the evil that men do lives after them, and the Southern fire blazes no longer—it burns all the same.
Later in the day the Attorney-General, Mr. MacVeagh, drove the Duke and myself out to the Soldiers' Home, which gave me another opportunity for meditations, with which I shall not weary my readers. The drive revealed new improvements and grand efforts on the part of "the city of magnificent distances" to come to terms with its outlying boundaries. How pure the air, how bright the sky, how fair the scene! The wide expanse of roofs, the still waves of the ordered house-tops, above which rose the rocky steeples, the colossal mass of the Capitol on the Virginian shore, the rolling wooded heights of Arlington, the Potomac shining like a sinuous belt of burnished gold in the setting sun! It seemed so peaceful and so secure. And yet we are climbing to "the Soldiers' Home," the outcome of one of the most sanguinary wars of modern times, of which in one sense this District of Columbia was the cause and end. It consists of a number of detached buildings of stone or marble, on a high plateau broken into wooded dells and undulating gently towards the south and west, where the ground dips so as to give a fine view of the city some three miles away. The Home stands in a large enclosed park (500 acres), and there is plenty of land beside for the soldiers to cultivate for the benefit of the institution. In these grounds there is a pleasant detached house, which is set apart for the use of the President pro tem., when the heat renders Washington more than usually abominable in summer time, and Mr. MacVeagh said he thought it very possible the President would move out as soon as he could. Mr. Lincoln was very fond of his villeggiatura here. As it was Sunday there was no work going on, and, moreover, it was not easy, we found, for even an Attorney-General of the Republic and a Minister of State to get in through the closed gates, so the Duke got out of the phaeton which Mr. MacVeagh's fast trotters had whirled up the steep at a creditable rate, and sought to repeat the miracle of Samson at Gaza, but we managed to dispense with it. Probably it was because of the day of rest so many old men were crawling about the avenues smoking pipes, and looking very unhappy, I thought. It struck me that there were many small and weak-looking veterans among them—dwindled by the fatigues of war and lapse of years—not such "stalwarts" as I remembered to have seen encamped at Arlington yonder. There were men of all nations amongst them—many Irish and Germans—and foreigners from all the corners of the earth; but Northern American officers say, one and all, that the Americans pur sang bore the brunt of the fighting. Their uniform is neither neat nor becoming; though neither the "Invalos" nor the Chelsea Pensioners have much to boast of in their apparel, they have the advantage of the U.S. veteran. The Duke was received at the central building by the Commandant, to whom he was presented by the Attorney-General, and we were shown over the library, sleeping-wards, dining-rooms, &c., which have a strong family likeness all over the world. A glance at the bookshelves enabled me to come to the gratifying conclusion, and the English litterateur ought to take comfort from the fact, that English literature solaces the leisure of the American veteran very largely. The "genius loci" seems to be a rather deplumed and demoralised-looking eagle, in a cage on the ground outside the central building. I was reminded, as I surveyed his "cadaverous aspect and battered beak," of Audubon's ineffectual protest against the adoption of the bird as the symbol of the Republic. I believe the "aquila chrysaëtos," the Golden Eagle, is not known in America. The eagle which our cousins have taken up with (though it has not two heads, is not black, and does not wear a crown) is but a poor bald-headed falcon, of uncleanly habits and sordid appetites, not very much given to use claws or beak against a vigorous enemy—so, at least, wrote the naturalist—therefore very inappropriate as the type of a brave, generous, and bellicose people. As we turned citywards, the beauty of the landscape was glorified by one of the sunsets which rival the most brilliant phenomena of the kind in India after the monsoons, and Washington, bathed in purple, looked every inch an empire city. The Duke and some others of the party dined with Sir Edward Thornton in the evening, where we spent a very pleasant time, and heard many interesting things about Washington and its society.