"Let me go. I'm an American, and haven't even seen your Emperor. Besides, I never shot anything out of a pistol but peas in my life. Oh, don't somebody understand?"
But nobody offered to help me, and as two fat men with red faces came up and prepared to march me off between them, I could only resign myself to my fate, first begging Thad, however, to run back to the hotel as fast as he could, and tell father that I had been arrested.
All this while the crowd had been very merry at my expense, and when the two fat men began to walk off with me, loud laughs and cheers were heard on every side. In this humiliating manner, then I was taken from one end of the building to the other, but to this day I can't remember what was in it, although I am sure there were neither horses nor clowns.
I had felt somewhat easier in my mind since sending after father, and was now expecting to see him rush in, "haggard with anxiety," at any minute, when I was suddenly walked out through a side door, and marched off in a direction directly away from our hotel.
"Hold on there! Where are you taking me?" I cried, struggling to free myself, with the sole result of making my captors grip tighter and laugh louder.
The next instant they turned into a photographer's, and signed to me that I was to have my picture taken.
"Well, it's all over with me now," was my despairing thought, as there came to my mind faint recollections of having somewhere heard that a certain class of prisoners were always photographed before being sent to jail.
While the artist was getting things ready, I had a desperate idea of refusing to sit still, but, as I sadly reflected further that by so doing I would only add to the malice of my enemies, I determined to remain passive, and let them do with me as they would.
But wasn't I just boiling over with wrath inwardly! To think that a free-born American should be seized in this shameful manner, and treated like any common criminal, was outrageous, and in spite of the terror I was in I felt like shaking my fist at the whole party, and letting them know that New York had a Seventh Regiment that could whip their entire army—at least I should think it could from the way I've heard Cousin Walter talk, who's a member of it.
As it was, I could do nothing but sit there like a statue, with my head pinched by the iron frame behind me, and the artist in front of me fussing around his cannon-like arrangement, which, had it gone off and killed me on the spot, I thought would be in no way surprising in this land of surprises.