Memoirs

After a few days Goshorn and I prepared to go up Elk River, to renew the leases of oil and coal lands. Now I must premise that at all times the man who was engaged in "ile" bore...

My father's resources became about this time limited, and I, in fact, realised that he had taxed himself more than I had supposed to maintain me abroad. His Congress Hall proper...

Through General Whipple's kind aid the brothers Colton were at once brought up from the front. With them and Captain Paxton we went to Murfreesboro, and at once called on the ge...

For here was oil, oil, oil everywhere, in fountains flowing at the rate of a dollar a second (it brought 70 cents a gallon), derricks or scaffoldings at every turn over wells, m...

They were handed over to me, and I saw the bridge and gave the two francs, and all was well. But it gave me no renown in Venice, for the Consul and all my friends regarded it as...

My parents were from Massachusetts, and every summer they returned to pass several months in or near Boston, generally with their relatives in Worcester county, in Dedham, in th...

We came to Naples, and went to a hotel, and visited everything. In those days the beggars and pimps and pickpockets were beyond all modern conception. The picturesqueness of the...

As we were obliged to attend divine service strictly on Sunday, I was allowed to go to the Episcopal church in the village, which agreed very well with my parents' views. I quit...

For I may here note--and it was a very natural thing--that just as Gypsy musicians always select in the audience some one who seems to be most appreciative, at whom they play (t...

So we started and after a few hours' travel, stopped at Altona. There I was very much amused by an old darkey at the railway-station hotel, who had, as he declared, "specially t...

To become intimate, as I did in time, during years in Brighton, off and on, with all the gypsies who roamed the south of England, to be beloved of the old fortune-tellers and th...

I had just published my translation of Heine's _Reisebilder_, and Bayard Taylor had a copy of it. He went in company with Thackeray to New York, and told me subsequently that th...

"I went downstairs too far by mistake into the cellar. There I found a man sawing wood. I went up again. [Pray observe that a year _after_, when I went West, this very incident...

In 1847 even a very respectable hotel in Holland was in any city quite like one of two centuries before. You entered a long antiquely-brown room, traversed full length by a tabl...

I can only remember that for the first twenty or thirty minutes Mr. Carlyle talked such a lot of skimble-skamble stuff and rubbish, which sounded like the very _debris_ and lees...

It happened once in Boston, in the year 1861 or 1862, that I was at a dinner of the Atlantic Club, such as was held every Saturday, when the question was raised as to whether an...

How happy I was again to see my mother and father and Henry! And then came other joys. My father had taken a very nice house in Walnut Street, in the best quarter of the city, b...

And now terrible times came on, followed, for me, by a sad event. The rebels, led by General Lee, had penetrated into Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia was threatened. This period...

Then we talked of the old manor-houses in the neighbourhood, and of the famous Mortstone, a supposed Saxon rude monolith near by. I thought it prehistoric, because I had dug out...

In Florence we went directly to the Hotel d'Europe in the Via Tuornabuoni, where my Indian blanket vanished even while entering the hotel, and surrounded only by the servants to...

Hans Breitmann became a type. I never heard of but one German who ever reviled the book, and that was a Democratic editor in Philadelphia. But the Germans themselves recognised...

Then we all had reed-bird suppers or lunches, eked out perhaps with terrapins and soft-shell crabs, gumbo, "snapper," or pepper-pot soup, peaches, venison, bear-meat, _salon la...

In fact, I think it may be truly said that, as regarded deducing man and all things from a _prima materia_ or protoplasm by means of natural selection and vast study of differen...

I must have been about seven years old when my parents took a house in Arch Street, above Ninth Street, Philadelphia. Here my life begins to be more marked and distinct. I was a...

It was a droll fact that I had, the year before, at Heidelberg, drawn a picture of myself as an insurgent at a barricade, and written under it, "The Boy of the Barricades." I ha...

One day Mr. Laing organised an excursion with a special train to Arundel Castle. By myself at other times I found my way to Lewes and other places rich in legendary lore. Of thi...

I never could learn to play cards. Destiny forbade it, and always stepped in promptly to stop all such proceedings. One night Sandford and friends sat down to teach me poker, wh...

There was another change to a Mrs. Eaton's boarding-house in Fifth Street, opposite to the side of the Franklin Library. I can remember that there was a very good marine picture...

One more reminiscence. Our lieutenant, Perkins, was a pious man, and on Sunday mornings held religious service, which we were obliged to attend. One day, when we had by good for...

Even before I had gone to Princeton I had read and learned a great deal relative to Justinus Kerner, the great German supernaturalist, mystic, and poet, firstly from a series of...

"Her talk reflected a thousand vanished and present things; but there were those of her friends for whom its value was, almost before any other, documentary. The generations mov...

Whoever shall write a history of Philadelphia from the Thirties to the end of the Fifties will record a popular period of turbulence and outrages so extensive as to now appear a...

I had worked only a week or two when a rather queer, tall, roughish Yankee was brought into the office. He worked for a while, and in a day or two took possession of my desk and...

We arrived in Brest, and Mrs. Leland, who had never before been in Europe, was much pleased at her first sight, early in the morning, of a French city; the nuns, soldiers, peasa...

Everything was very English and old-fashioned about the place. The house was said in 1835 to be a hundred and fifty years old, having been one of the aristocratic Colonial manor...

The old _Knickerbocker Magazine_ had been for a long time running down to absolutely nothing. A Mr. Gilmore purchased it, and endeavoured to galvanise it into life. Its sober gr...

I think it was at Duluth that one morning there was brought in an old silver cross which had just been found in an Indian grave on the margin of the lake, not very far away. I w...

The ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and _odium theologicum_ which prevailed in America until 1840 was worse than that in Europe under the Church in the Middle Ages, for even in th...

{242} Abraham Lincoln once remarked of the people who wanted emancipation, but who did not like to be called Abolitionists, that they reminded him of the Irishman who had signed...