“This plate and A Water Meadow were done on the same day, one at noon, the other very late in the evening. The Test (in Hampshire) is a famous trout stream.” Seymour Haden.
Size of the original dry-point, 6 × 8⅞ inches
Before the evening of his reception at the St. Botolph Club, Seymour Haden procured a list of the principal personages whom he was to meet there. He brought it to me, and said: “Now, what should I know about these people?” I wrote down for him as many notes as I could, and when he met the Bostonians, I was astonished to see how well he had coached himself about them. On his return to New York, he received a great number of letters. He was staying at the old Hotel Brunswick, Fifth Avenue, and every morning I had to go there and tell him “who was who” among the writers of the letters. One day he was called down to the parlor by a message that a lady wished to see him. He went down and when he came back to his room carrying a card in his hand, he said to me, “Well, I certainly am in an extraordinary country. That visitor, whom I never knew, is evidently a lady, and she has invited me to come and spend a week with her husband and herself at Yonkers.” Glancing at the card, I read the name of Mrs. James B. Colgate, and said to Seymour Haden, “I should certainly advise you to accept,” and I went on to say that it was easy enough for a stranger from England to see our public show places, big hotels, etc., but not so easy to get an entrée to the home of a really nice American family. Seymour Haden accepted the invitation and spent a week with Mr. and Mrs. Colgate. In those years, I myself lived in Yonkers, and I called on him at the Colgate house the day after his arrival there. The eminent banker showed us into his library, and leaving us alone he closed the door. The English visitor, first looking around to see that there was no other person present, said to me in a sort of whisper: “I am very comfortable here, with but one serious drawback. I have been in the habit, all my life, of taking wine with my dinner; but last evening, what do you suppose they gave me in the place of wine?—milk!” This was about nine o’clock at night, and when I got home I stated the case to my dear old mother. She laughed a little wickedly, and said, “I think I can help your friend in this case.” We happened to have some very good sherry. The old lady got a large flat bottle, filled it with the wine, corked it and put it into an innocent-looking pasteboard box, telling me to take it to him. Before leaving my home, I wrote a brief note to Seymour Haden saying that the package which I had to deliver to him must be opened only in the privacy of his own chamber. The Colgates were total abstainers of so pronounced a kind that when Mr. Colgate rented any house of his in Yonkers, he made a condition in the lease that no intoxicants of any kind were ever to be received in that house. Further than that, one of his principles was, not only never to drink wine or spirits, but never to touch or carry them. When I got back to Mr. Colgate’s house, it was ten o’clock at night, and all the lights in the big house were extinguished and the doors locked. I rang and rang at the bell, and at last Mr. Colgate himself, wearing trousers and slippers, opened the door. I had to manufacture a small fiction, which recalls Sir Walter Scott’s couplet:
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive.
Mr. Colgate said to me rather fretfully that all the household had retired, and that Mr. Seymour Haden must wait until the morning. I said to him in reply, that he would do me a great favor, if when he was passing his guest’s chamber door, he would knock at it and deliver the package, and this Mr. Colgate consented to do. Some days later a reception was given to Seymour Haden at the Lotos Club, Fifth Avenue, and I accompanied him from Yonkers to New York on that occasion. When Mr. Haden found himself safe in the train, he said to me: “I couldn’t have slept a wink except for that excellent sherry that your mother sent me, but I took deucéd good care to carry away the empty bottle in my bag.” I remember that from the train we saw the gorgeous sight of the sun setting behind the Palisades, and mirrored in the Hudson River, and Mr. Haden said to me, with something like reproach in his voice: “Now, why have I never been told of the beauty of all this?” Later on, he said to me, looking about in the crowded train: “Now, isn’t it melancholy to think that nobody among all these people, except myself (and perhaps you), has the slightest sense of the beauty of this magnificent sunset!” I was tempted to say to him that he had no right to assume such callous insensibility on the part of the Americans, but though I thought it, I did not say it. Seymour Haden’s reception at the Lotos Club was a notable function. I remember that the President, the Hon. Whitelaw Reid, made a very graceful speech in honor of his guest, and I recall vividly the marvelous cleverness of a very young man who had been invited to entertain the company. One of this young man’s monologues represented an intimate talk between three Italian opera singers, the soprano, the tenor, and the basso; the three continually interrupting one another. The speaking of the young man was in “fake” Italian, and the three speaking voices were admirably differentiated. I inquired who this young man was, and was told that he was the son of the famous oratorio singer, Madame Rudersdorf of Boston, that his name was Richard Mansfield, and that he was studying for the stage. I then uttered a prophecy that that young man would be a great actor later on; and so he was.
Haden. A By-road in Tipperary
This magnificent plate was etched in 1860, in the park of Viscount Hawarden. All
things considered, it is the artist’s finest rendering of tree-forms
Size of the original etching, 7½ × 11¼ inches