My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth Year

The next change in my life, and the real beginning of my career as a business man, was soon to come. I had got as much out of the grocery store as it could give me, and was year...

At Hongkong I went to our correspondents, Williams, Anthon & Co., and took passage in Endicott's little steamer, the Spark, for Macao, the Portuguese port of China. Before leavi...

From Saratoga, I went down the Hudson to New York, and thence to Boston, where I arrived in time to take the Parliament, Captain Brown, on the 25th of July. I had lived fast in...

I went around the world in eighty days in the year '70, two years before Jules Verne wrote his famous romance, Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingts Jours, which was founded upon my...

After the first short stay in Saratoga during my vacation trip in America, I had started for a journey West; and was soon to meet with an experience that turned the current of m...

Once I tried to be President of the United States. Before that I had been offered the presidency of the Australian Republic. It is true that there was no Australian Republic at...

My wife and I in returning to Boston came on a visit that we expected to be brief. I confidently supposed I should go back to Liverpool and continue the business of the branch h...

During my stay in Melbourne the gold-fever was at its height. I was particularly interested in the mines, and went to Ballarat to see how the British managed these things. It wa...

My grandfather was the Reverend George Pickering, of Baltimore--a slave-owner. Having fallen in with the early Methodists, long before Garrison, Phillips, and Beecher had taken...

The old house where I spent these years of my childhood and boyhood is now more than two hundred years old. It was the home of the old Methodists in that section, and had been t...

My participation in the Commune in France, in the year '70, was the result of chance. I arrived at Marseilles at a very critical time in the history of that city. It was the hou...

I have referred already to the antagonism felt toward me in certain English quarters because of my speeches in favor of the Federal American Union in the hour of its danger. Lov...

In '58, when I visited Philadelphia on business of Queen Maria Cristina, of Spain, I observed the network of street-railways in that city, which then, perhaps, had the most perf...

The great project of a connecting railway between the Eastern and the Middle Western States had been in my mind for some years. Queen Maria Cristina's fortune, which was then th...

I sailed from Hongkong on Jardine's opium steamer, Fiery Cross. As the course we took had been gone over by me in the voyage to Hongkong from Singapore, I was not especially int...

When the Englishmen tore up my street-railways in England, I made a speech in which I told them I would build a railway across the Rocky Mountains and the Great American Desert...

In '50 it was decided that I should go to Liverpool to take charge of the house there. I asked Colonel Train if I could not first have a holiday, so that I might see a little of...

I went to school, of course, for this was a part of the serious business of New England life. Our schoolhouse was two and a half miles distant, and the path to it lay across hal...

I have already referred to my purpose of going to Japan to establish a branch business there. This idea came to me in Australia, after Commodore Perry had opened the country to...

My life in Paris seems now like a romance to my memory. I was twenty-seven, and thought I had seen all the world, but discovered how little I knew, compared with others whom I m...

The year '57 was a memorable period in my life in many ways. The great panic of the time swept away my ambitious projects as if they had been so many dreams and visions. My cont...

I have passed a great many days in jail. A jail is a good place to meditate and to plan in, if only one can be patient in such a place. Much of my work was thought out and wroug...

Very much of my work that has aided most in the development of this country was done in the great region of the Northwest, then a wild country, trackless and uninhabited except...

I had hardly got out of the Presidential race before I got into jail again. I passed easily from one kind of life to the other. In fact, the last thing I did in connection with...

Before I get away from my boyhood days, I want to say something about the manner of my rearing in the bosom of old New England Methodism. I was reared in the strictest ways of m...

The voyage from Joppa to Constantinople was a succession of surprises, from Latokea to Lanarca, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Smyrna. At Beyrout we were the guests of a pasha, the leading...

I found myself a part of the cargo--shipped as freight, 2,000 miles, from the tropics to the arctic region, without a friend to take care of me. I was alone. This feeling, howev...

From the Crimea I returned to England and thence to America. Wilson, of the White Star Line, wished to construct the largest clipper ever built in England. It was to be called t...

AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY, SIXTY-SEVEN, AND SIXTY DAYS. 1870, 1890, 1892 331 The tour that Jules Verne used as the basis of his famous story--In '90 I circle the globe in 67 da...

THE SHARE I HAD IN THE FRENCH COMMUNE. 1870 301 In Marseilles I help to organize the "Ligue du Midi" of the Commune or "Red Republic"--Attacked by soldiers and almost shot--Impr...

IN A SHIPPING HOUSE IN BOSTON. 1844-1850 52 A place with my uncle--Progress rapidly made--I sell Emerson a ticket for Liverpool--I engage Rufus Choate and Daniel Webster as our...

ENGLAND AND OUR CIVIL WAR--BLOCKADE RUNNING. 271 Speeches for the Union in London halls--A plan to end the war--Lincoln and Seward--Arrested for interrupting Sumner in Boston--D...

A PARTNER IN THE LIVERPOOL HOUSE. 1850-1852 90 In Scotland Lord John Russell receives me, and I meet Lady Russell--Reform in the shipping business--Money we made--The Duke of We...

MY COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE--RETURN TO LIVERPOOL. 1850-1852 109 How I first met my wife--Engaged to marry her within forty-eight hours--Governors in my charge--Our wedding and the...