“Mamma hopes Belle will always mind her aunt, Miss Oppenheim, her cousins, and Anne.
“Anne loves Belle and is very kind to her and does all for little Belle that she can.
“Now, dear little Belle, good-bye, and do not forget
“Mamma.
“Mother sends Belle her bird in the cage.”
Some of the reminiscences of this journey come back quite distinctly. One of them was the indignation of an Irishman at being asked the name of the river they were passing, which, unluckily for the questioner, happened to be the Boyne. Another was of a service at a kirk in Scotland, during which an old lady said to Mrs. Field, “Remember that you are in the house of God.” Her offence was that she had offered to share her book of psalms with her husband. Indeed it must have seemed impossible for those who did not know to believe that they were husband and wife and that they had been married nine years, for both looked very young at this time.
They travelled rapidly during the following five months. They visited Manchester, York, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin, and London, Paris, Geneva, and from there to Milan over the Simplon, to Leghorn, Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, from Frankfort down the Rhine to Cologne, to Brussels, back to England and Liverpool, and from there by the steamship Europa to Boston, and to their home in New York in September.
They had been interested spectators of the events succeeding the great uprising of the people in France, Germany, and Italy, and of their failure to free themselves and obtain self-government.
Mr. George Bancroft was a fellow-passenger on the voyage home. He had made an engagement to dine in Boston on a certain day, and while at sea was troubled lest he should not arrive in time; but as Mr. and Mrs. Field drove to the train they passed Mr. Bancroft on his way to dinner, and he waved his hand to them. On his return to New York, Mr. Field amused his friends by stating the characteristic fact that the first word he learned of each new language, as he crossed from one country to another, was “faster.”
Mr. and Mrs. Field lived simply. The summer outings were short, sometimes for only a few weeks were they and their children away from the city, but their children look back with pleasure to the drives that they took, during the long summer days, to Hoboken (the Elysian Fields), to Astoria, to Coney Island, all very different places from those of the present time. And the family cow was driven each morning to pasture on land that is now known as Madison Square.