Part 1

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McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

VOL. I OCTOBER, 1893 No. 5

_Copyright, 1893, by S. S. McClure, Limited. All rights reserved._

Table of Contents

PAGE Thomas B. Reed, of Maine. By Robert P. Porter. 375 "Human Documents." 387 The Joneses' Telephone. By Annie Howells Frechette. 394 The Psychological Laboratory at Harvard. By Herbert Nichols. 399 The Spire of St. Stephen's. By Emma W. Demeritt. 410 Mountaineering Adventure. By Francis Gribble. 417 The Smoke. By George MacDonald. 428 The Earl of Dunraven. By C. Kinloch Cooke. 429 At a Dance. By Augusta de Gruchy. 439 Dulces Amaryllidis Irae. By Augusta de Gruchy. 439 A Splendid Time--Ahead. By Walter Besant. 440 An Old Song. 450 Stranger Than Fiction. By Dr. William Wright. 451

Illustrations

PAGE Thomas B. Reed, Portland Me, 17 July 1893. 375 Mr. Reed's Home in Portland. 377 View From the Roof of Mr. Reed's House. 378 Mr. Reed in His Library. 380 A Corner of the Library. 381 Mr. Reed's Birthplace in Portland. 382 The Members of the Pentagon Club of Bowdoin College. 383 Mr. Reed's Portland Law Office. 386 Thomas B. Reed. 388 Frances E. Willard. 390 Edgar Wilson Nye. 391 George W. Cable. 392 The Joneses' Telephone 394 Studying the Effects of Sound and of Attention on Colors. 400 Studying the Effects of Colors on Judgments of Time. 401 Revolving Chair for Studying Localizations of Sounds. 402 Measuring the Time Required for Various Mental Acts. 404 Wax Specimens in the Museum. 406 Gustave Theodore Fechner. 406 Professor Wilhelm Wundt, of Leipsic (1878). 407 President G. Stanley Hall, Founder of 1st Psychological Lab. 407 Professor William James, Harvard University. 407 Professor Hugo Muensterberg, Harvard University. 408 The Mauvais Pas, Mont Blanc. 418 The Needle of the Giants and Mont Blanc. 419 The Matterhorn. 421 The Dent Blanche. 422 The Rhone Glacier. 424 Passage of a Crevasse, Mont Blanc. 425 Pyramids of the Morteratsch. 426 Passage of a Crevasse, Mont Blanc. 428 Lord Dunraven. 429 Lady Dunraven. 430 Dunraven Castle. 431 Captain William Cranfield of the "Valkyrie." 431 G. T. Watson, Designer of the "Valkyrie." 432 The "Valkyrie." 433 The Kenry Gateway. 434 Adare Manor House. 435 Adare Gallery. 436 Ruins of Desmond Castle. 437

THOMAS B. REED, OF MAINE.

THE MAN AND HIS HOME.

BY ROBERT P. PORTER.

It was at a dinner in Washington that I had the good fortune to find myself seated next to Thomas B. Reed, of Maine. It was a brilliant occasion, for around the table sat well-known statesmen, scientists, jurists, economists, and literary men, besides two or three who had gained eminence in the medical profession. Mr. Reed was at his best, "better than the best champagne." His conversation, sparkling with good-nature, was not only exhilarating to his immediate neighbors, but at times to the entire table. Being among friends, among the sort of men he really liked, he let himself out as it were.

Before the conversation had gone beyond the serious point I remember asking the ex-Speaker how he felt at the time when the entire Democratic press of the country had pounced upon him; when he was being held up as "The Czar"--a man whose iron heels were crushing out American popular government. "Oh," he promptly replied, "you mean what were my feelings while the uproar about the rules of the Fifty-first Congress was going on, and while the question was in doubt? Well, I had no feeling except that of entire serenity, and the reason was simple. I knew just what I was going to do if the House did not sustain me;" and raising his eyes, with a typical twist of his mouth which those who have seen it don't easily forget, he added, "when a man has decided upon a plan of action for either contingency there is no need for him to be disturbed, you know."

"And may I ask what you determined to do if the House decided adversely?"

"I should simply have left the Chair, resigning the Speakership, and left the House, resigning my seat in Congress. There were things that could be done, you know, outside of political life, and for my own part I had made up my mind that if political life consisted in sitting helplessly in the Speaker's chair, and seeing the majority powerless to pass legislation, I had had enough of it, and was ready to step down and out."

After a moment's pause he turned, and, looking me full in the face with a half smile, continued: "Did it ever occur to you that it is a very soothing thing to know exactly what you are going to do, if things do not go your way? You have then made yourself equal to the worst, and have only to wait and find out what was ordained before the foundation of the world."

"You never had a doubt in your own mind that the position taken was in perfect accordance with justice and common sense?" I ventured.

"Never for a moment. Men, you see, being creatures of use and wont, are naturally bound up in old traditions. While every court which had ever considered the question had decided one way, we had been used to the other. Fortunately for the country, there was no wavering in our ranks."

"But how did you feel," said I, "when the uproar was at its worst, when the members of the minority were raging on the floor together?"

"Just as you would feel," was the reply, "if a big creature were jumping at you, and you knew the exact length and strength of his chain, and were quite sure of the weapon you had in your hands."

This conversation gives a clear insight into the character of Thomas B. Reed. It shows his chief characteristics: manly aggressiveness, an iron will--qualities which friend and foe alike have recognized in him--with a certain serenity of temper, a broadness, a bigness of horizon which only the men who have been brought into personal contact with him fully appreciate.

Standing, as he does, in the foremost rank of public men, one of the leaders of his party, the public has certainly a right to know something of the man. First of all, one thing about him has to be emphasized; he lacks one of the traits that popular leaders too often possess. He cannot be all things to all men. He is bound to be true to his personal convictions, and he is not the man to vote for a measure he detests, because his constituents clamor for it. Every one knows how public men have at times voted against their earnest convictions, and then gone into the cloak room and apologized for it; but it would be difficult to imagine a man of Mr. Reed's composition in this role.

To judge a man well, to know his best side, it is necessary to see him at home, and I cull from notes made several weeks ago, during a visit to Mr. Reed in Portland.

I found Mr. Reed in a three-story corner brick house, on one of the most sightly spots in town. Over the western walls of that modern, substantial New England home there clambers a mass of Japanese ivy, which, relieving the straightness of the architectural lines, gives a pleasing something, an artistic touch, to the _ensemble_. Its owner having shown his pride in that beautiful ivy, straightway took me to the roof of the house, to admire the superb view of Casco Bay and the picturesque expanse of country around Portland.

The stamp of the man's character is plain everywhere in that house. The rooms are large, airy, and unpretentiously furnished, yet with solidity and that certain winning grace of domestic appointments in old New England. Much of Mr. Reed's work is done at his desk in a wee bit of a room on the second floor, where crowded book-shelves reach to the ceiling. His library long ago overflowed the confines of his den, and books are scattered through the rooms on every floor; books, bought not for binding nor editions, but for the contents, ranging from miscellaneous novels to the dryest historical treatises, from poetry to philosophy.

The library,[1] on the ground floor, where callers are usually received, has among the inevitable book-shelves a few photographs of masterpieces. Over the mantelpiece a painting of Weeks's shows that the sympathies of the owner extend beyond that sphere to which the great public is inclined to confine him.

[1] The picture which forms the frontispiece of the Magazine represents him in this room, at his favorite seat by the window.

Of the favorite haunts of Mr. Reed, the place of all to study his social side is at his club, The Cumberland.

"You see," said Mr. Reed, "a club of this kind is only possible in a conservative town like Portland, a staid, old place which grows slowly, at the rate of about five or six hundred a year, where the one hundred club members, while belonging to opposite political parties, unite to a man in celebrating the victory of any of their fellow-members. Most of them, friends from boyhood, have gone to school together, and are known to one another but by their Christian names." There the ex-Czar is always called "Tom," or "Thomas, old boy," and there reigns supreme a fine spirit of equality, or unpretentious "give and take" sort of intercourse, which is really the ideal object of a club.

"Indeed, there is no place like it," said Reed. "It is the most home-like club one can imagine; too small to have coteries, and with lots of bright, sensible boys, quick at repartee. People talk of my wit, but, I tell you, it's hard work to hold my own there; and then no one can try to pose among us, or attempt to make a fool of himself, but he is properly sat upon. Intercourse with your fellow-men in such a _milieu_ is the best discipline I know of for a man--except that of political life," he added, with his droll smile.

Of course Mr. Reed is interested in the welfare of Portland, and he cherishes the idea that some day the city of his birth will become one of the great cities of the continent. "Portland harbor is one of the finest on the Atlantic coast. It is at least two days nearer Europe than New York, and one day nearer Europe than Boston. The annexation of Canada to the United States, or the union of the two countries, one of which is bound to come in the course of time, will surely bring to Portland the great prosperity that should be hers by reason of her admirable harbor and her geographical position. And," he added, "while I like the life in Washington, especially when the session is active and there is plenty of work to do, it has never yet been the case that I have left Portland without regret, or gone back to it without pleasure."

The frame house in which he was born still stands, shaded by two elms of obvious age. Henry W. Longfellow was born just around the corner from it, in a dwelling that marks the spot where, in 1632, one George Cleeve built the first white man's habitation ever erected in the territory now included in Portland's boundaries. The settlement was called, in tender remembrance of an English field, "Stogumnor," and its founder's life was one of almost ceaseless conflict, now with the redskins and now with the white neighbors of other settlements, so that Cleeve left behind him the impress of a bold, vigorous fellow. His daughter married Michael Mitten, whose two daughters in turn married two brothers named Brackett. One of the Brackett daughters married a fisherman named Reed, whose descendant, Thomas Brackett Reed, has exhibited, in a different way and under vastly different circumstances, much of the nerve and daring that animated his stern old fighting settler-ancestor, George Cleeve.

At nine Mr. Reed entered the grammar school, at eleven the high school. He was sixteen years old when he completed his course in the latter. His boyhood friends say he was fond of fun, though the amount of knowledge he absorbed would indicate that he was also fond of books; yet Mr. Reed himself confesses that literature in general, and old romances in particular, attracted him more than text-books. He still remembers his first schoolmaster, a spare young man, "the best disciplinarian I ever knew," who had the art of holding a turbulent school by finding out what was the particular spring he could touch to control every one of his lawless boys.

"He had the pull on me," says Mr. Reed, "by simply holding over me in critical moments the penalty of dismissal. You know, I had a sort of inborn idea that the school was a great thing for me, and I knew that my parents were too poor to afford to send me anywhere else, so I kept straight along, doing my duty. It was the master's custom to allow each boy who had no demerits to ring his bell before leaving the class, and once for three days in succession I did not ring that bell. I can see now the master coming to me, and saying: 'Tom, is it an inadvertence?' 'No, sir.' 'Did you break the rules?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Why?' 'Because they were too hard.' 'Well, boy, you know what you can do if the rules are too hard; you can leave school.' I hung my head, and he went away, after a few moments of, to me, terrible silence, saying: 'Never let me hear of this again, Tom.' And I replied: 'No, sir.' And meant it."

On entering Bowdoin College in 1856, young Reed had a half-formed desire of becoming a minister, which he relinquished, however, long before his graduation. His life struggle began in earnest with that first year at college, for he had to earn enough to pay his way as he went along. His attendance at class recitations during the first term of his freshman year was regular, but he found it necessary to drop out the next two terms and earn some money by teaching. He kept up his studies, however, without an instructor. All through the first part of his college course young Reed devoted a great deal of time to literature, to the neglect of his studies. While in the high school, a garret in the house of one of his mother's relations had become his Mecca. It was packed full of books, especially novels, and there he was wont to journey twice a week, loading himself with volumes, over which he spent his days and the best part of his nights. Mr. Reed says that it was mostly trashy, imaginative stuff, but that it also was full of delight, and in some ways full of information for him. To that omnivorous reading he attributes in large part his knowledge of words, and it was also, no doubt, an apprenticeship from which he naturally stepped into higher literature.

Graduation was but little more than a year off, when, the contents of the garret being exhausted, the young man realized to his consternation that his class standing was very low. His place at the end of the college course depended on his average class standing all through. He had received none of the sixteen junior parts which were given out during the junior year, and to his dismay the English orations, corresponding to the junior parts at the end of the course, were reduced to twelve. There was but one course open to the ambitious, spirited boy--to offset the low average of his earlier terms by an exceptionally high average during his last. Romances and poems were laid aside, and from that time forward until Commencement he was up at five in the morning, and by nine o'clock every night he was in bed, and tired enough to drop asleep at once. Mr. Reed says very frankly that he did not relish this regimen, for by nature he is indolent. Apropos of this, it was a common saying among his comrades that Reed would be somebody some day, if he were not so lazy.

The consequences of his three years of novel-reading were such a serious matter to him that he was afraid to go and hear the result of the final examinations but remained in his room until a friend came to tell him that he was one of the first five in his class in his average for the entire course. This is the other side of Reed, "the lazy."

Besides this success, his oration on "The Fear of Death" won the first prize for English composition. It was in delivering it that Mr. Reed felt the first emotions of the orator, when every eye in the audience was riveted upon him, and when the profound silence that prevailed told the deep interest which his words aroused. Of the year's work which won for him the privilege of delivering it on that Commencement Day, thirty-three years ago, Mr. Reed says that it was the hardest of his life, and the only time he has forced himself up to his full limit for so long a period.

Graduation from college was not by any means the end of the struggle for the young man. Money was still lacking, and to get it he engaged in school-teaching, an occupation which he had already followed during two terms, and in vacation times. He taught at first for twenty dollars a month, "boarding round," and the highest pay he ever received as a teacher was forty-five dollars a month. His old comrades delight in telling an incident of his school-teaching days. He once found it necessary to chastise a boy who was about his own age, although he had been cautioned against whipping, by the members of the committee of the district, unless he first referred the case to them. But Reed was Reed even in those days. The committee having failed to sustain him in the past, in this instance he decided that some one must be master at school, and that he would be that some one. Accordingly, the refractory young man was thrashed, after an exciting quarter of an hour--a close victory, which one pound more avoirdupois might have decided against the teacher.

Mr. Reed soon gave up school-teaching, and, thinking that a young man would have a better chance out West, he went to California. Judge Wallace, afterwards Chief Justice of California, examined Reed for admission to the bar. It was in '63, during the civil war, when the Legal Tender Act was much discussed in California, where a gold basis was still maintained, that Wallace, whose office adjoined the one where Reed was studying, happened in one day and said, "Mr. Reed, I understand you want to be admitted to the bar. Have you studied law?" "Yes, sir, I studied law in Maine while teaching." "Well," said Wallace, "I have one question to ask. Is the Legal Tender Act constitutional?" "Yes," said Reed. "You shall be admitted to the bar," said Wallace. "Tom Bodley [a deputy sheriff, who had legal aspirations] was asked the same question, and he said 'no.' We will admit you both, for anybody who can answer off-hand a question like that ought to practise law in this country."

Reed's sojourn on the Pacific coast was short. In '64 he was made Assistant Paymaster in the United States Navy, and served in that capacity until his honorable discharge a year or so after. His admission to practise before the Supreme Court of the State of Maine followed on his return to the East. Cases came to the young lawyer slowly. The first ones were in the minor municipal courts. Gradually he secured a certain run of commercial and admiralty cases which began to yield something tangible in the shape of fees. Yet the goal of success seemed a long way off, when it happened that in one of those minor cases he cross-examined a refractory witness in such a manner as to completely overturn the testimony given, and thereby won the case for his client. The unexpected result was that the witness who had been upset by the young lawyer's skill conceived a great admiration for him, and became influential in sending him many cases.

That he made his mark in his modest position is shown by the fact that after two years, in 1867, Mr. Reed was nominated for the State Legislature. Judge Nathan Webb, then County Attorney, who had known Reed simply as his opponent in a number of cases, had proposed his name, and, after six ballots, had succeeded in nominating him. The first thing Reed knew about it was when reading the papers the next morning, and his first impulse was to decline. When Webb came in he urged him to accept, saying that a winter's legislative experience would broaden and be in every respect valuable to him. Mr. Reed accepted, and after serving two terms in the House he was elected to the State Senate. Then he was made Attorney-General and afterwards City Solicitor of Portland, and in 1876 he was for the first time nominated to represent his district in the House of Representatives in Washington.

At the very moment when Reed, escorted by one of his colleagues, took a seat at the first convenient desk, on the day when he began his life as a congressman, Mr. Reed's massive figure, suggestive of physical strength; the easy and yet not offensive assurance with which he took his seat and glanced with quizzical eye about the chamber; the unaffected way with which he accepted congratulations from the New England members who knew him, and the reputation he had already won as a master of wit and the possessor of a tongue which could be eloquent with sarcasm, all of these things so impressed Mr. S. S. Cox that he turned to Mr. William T. Frye, then a member for Maine, and said: "Well, Frye, I see your State has sent another intellectual and physical giant who is a youngster here." "Whom do you mean?" asked Frye. "This man Reed, who must be even now cracking a joke, for I see they are all laughing about him."