gentleman, and anxious, just then, to gratify the univer-
sal Yankee nation, might, for the joke's sake, have got
him admittance to the Queen, who had fairly laid herself
open to his visit, and has received hundreds of our coun-
trymen on infinitely slighter grounds. But I was inex-
orable, being turned to flint by the insufferable proximity
of a fool, and refused to interfere with his business in
any way except to procure him a passage home. I can
see his face of mild, ridiculous despair, at this moment,
and appreciate, better than I could then, how awfully
cruel he must have felt my obduracy to be. For years
12 OUR OLD HOME
and years, the idea of an interview with Queen Victoria
had haunted his poor foolish mind ; and now, when he
really stood on English ground, and the palace-door was
hanging ajar for him, he was expected to turn back, a
penniless and bamboozled simpleton, merely because an
iron-hearted consul refused to lend him thirty shillings
(so low had his demand ultimately sunk) to buy a second-
class ticket on the rail for London !
He visited the Consulate several times afterwards,
subsisting on a pittance that I allowed him in the hope
of gradually starving him back to Connecticut, assailing
me with the old petition at every opportunity, looking
shabbier at every visit, but still thoroughly good-tem-
pered, mildly stubborn, and smiling through his tears,
not without a perception of the ludicrousness of his own
position. Finally, he disappeared altogether, and whither
he had wandered, and whether he ever saw the Queen,
or wasted quite away in the endeavor, I never knew ;
but I remember unfolding the " Times," about that
period, with a daily dread of reading an account of a
ragged Yankee's attempt to steal into Buckingham
Palace, and how he smiled tearfully at his captors and
besought them to introduce him to Her Majesty. I
submit to Mr. Secretary Seward that he ought to make
diplomatic remonstrances to the British Ministry, and
require them to take such order that the Queen shall
not any longer bewilder the wits of our poor compatriots
by responding to their epistles and thanking them for
their photographs.
One circumstance in the foregoing incident I mean
the unhappy storekeeper's notion of establishing his
claim to an English estate was common to a great
many other applications, personal or by letter, with
which I was favored by my countrymen. The cause of
this peculiar insanity lies deep in the Anglo-American
heart. After all these bloody wars and vindictive ani-
mosities, we have still an unspeakable yearning towards
England. When our forefathers left the old home, they
pulled up many of their roots, but trailed along with
them others, which were never snapt asunder by the
CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 13
tug of such a lengthening distance, nor have been torn
out of the original soil by the violence of subsequent
struggles, nor severed by the edge of the sword. Even
so late as these days they remain entangled with our
heart-strings, and might often have influenced our
national cause like the tiller-ropes of a ship, if the rough
gripe of England had been capable of managing so
sensitive a kind of machinery. It has required nothing
less than the boorishness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency,
the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably
blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that
characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a
great nation in our own right, instead of continuing
virtually, if not in name, a province of their small island.
What pains did they take to shake us off, and have ever
since taken to keep us wide apart from them ! It might
seem their folly, but was really their fate, or, rather, the
Providence of God, who has doubtless a work for us to
do, in which the massive materiality of the English
character would have been too ponderous a dead-weight
upon our progress. And, besides, if England had been
wise enough to twine our new vigor round about her
ancient strength, her power would have been too firmly
established ever to yield, in its due season, to the other-
wise immutable law of imperial vicissitude. The earth
might then have beheld the intolerable spectacle of a
sovereignty and institutions, imperfect, but indestructible.
Nationally, there has ceased to be any peril of so
inauspicious and yet outwardly attractive an amalgama-
tion. But as an individual, the American is often con-
scious of the deep-rooted sympathies that belong more
fitly to times gone by, and feels a blind, pathetic tendency
to wander back again, which makes itself evident in such
wild dreams as I have alluded to above, about English
inheritances. A mere coincidence of names, (the Yankee
one, perhaps, having been assumed by legislative per-
mission,) a supposititious pedigree, a silver mug on which
an anciently engraved coat-of-arms has been half scrubbed
out, a seal with an uncertain crest, an old yellow letter or
document in faded ink, the more scantily legible the bet-
I 4 OUR OLD HOME
ter, rubbish of this kind, found in a neglected drawer,
has been potent enough to turn the brain of many an
honest Republican, especially if assisted by an advertise-
ment for lost heirs, cut out of a British newspaper.
There is no estimating or believing, till we come into a
position to know it, what foolery lurks latent in the
breasts of very sensible people. Remembering such
sober extravagances, I should not be at all surprised
to find that I am myself guilty of some unsuspected
absurdity, that may appear to me the most substantial
trait in my character.
I might fill many pages with instances of this diseased
American appetite for English soil. A respectable-look-
ing woman, well advanced in life, of sour aspect, exceed-
ingly homely, but decidedly New Englandish in figure
and manners, came to my office with a great bundle of
documents, at the very first glimpse of which I appre-
hended something terrible. Nor was I mistaken. The
bundle contained evidences of her indubitable claim to
the site on which Castle Street, the Town Hall, the Ex-
change, and all the principal business part of Liverpool,
have long been situated ; and with considerable peremp-
toriness, the good lady signified her expectation that I
should take charge of her suit, and prosecute it to judg-
ment ; not, however, on the equitable condition of receiv-
ing half the value of the property recovered, (which, in
case of complete success, would have made both of us ten
or twenty-fold millionnaires,) but without recompense or
reimbursement of legal expenses, solely as an incident of
my official duty. Another time came two ladies, bearing
a letter of emphatic introduction from his Excellency the
Governor of their native State, who testified in most
satisfactory terms to their social respectability. They
were claimants of a great estate in Cheshire, and
announced themselves as blood-relatives of Queen Vic-
toria, a point, however, which they deemed it expe-
dient to keep in the background until their territorial
rights should be established, apprehending that the Lord
High Chancellor might otherwise be less likely to come
to a fair decision in respect to them, from a probable
CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 15
disinclination to admit new members into the royal kin.
Upon my honor, I imagine that they had an eye to the
possibility of the eventual succession of one or both of
them to the crown of Great Britain through superior-
ity of title over the Brunswick line ; although, being
maiden ladies, like their predecessor Elizabeth, they
could hardly have hoped to establish a lasting dynasty
upon the throne. It proves, I trust, a certain disinter-
estedness on my part, that, encountering them thus in
the dawn of their fortunes, I forbore to put in a plea for
a future dukedom.
Another visitor of the same class was a gentleman of
refined manners, handsome figure, and remarkably intel-
lectual aspect. Like many men of an adventurous cast,
he had so quiet a deportment, and such an apparent dis-
inclination to general sociability, that you would have
fancied him moving always along some peaceful and
secluded walk of life. Yet, literally from his first hour,
he had been tossed upon the surges of a most varied and
tumultuous existence, having been born at sea, of Amer-
ican parentage, but on board of a Spanish vessel, and
spending many of the subsequent years in voyages, trav-
els, and outlandish incidents and vicissitudes, which,
methought, had hardly been paralleled since the days of
Gulliver or De Foe. When his dignified reserve was
overcome, he had the faculty of narrating these adven-
tures with wonderful eloquence, working up his descrip-
tive sketches with such intuitive perception of the
picturesque points that the whole was thrown forward
with a positively illusive effect, like matters of your own
visual experience. In fact, they were so admirably done
that I could never more than half believe them, because
the genuine affairs of life are not apt to transact them-
selves so artistically. Many of his scenes were laid in
the East, and among those seldom visited archipelagoes
of the Indian Ocean, so that there was an Oriental fra-
grance breathing through his talk and an odor of the
Spice Islands still lingering in his garments. He had
much to say of the delightful qualities of the Malay
pirates, who, indeed, carry on a predatory warfare against
16 OUR OLD HOME
the ships of all civilized nations, and cut every Christian
throat among their prisoners ; but (except for deeds of
that character, which are the rule and habit of their life,
and matter of religion and conscience with them,) they
are a gentle-natured people, of primitive innocence and
integrity.
But his best story was about a race of men, (if men
they were,) who seemed so fully to realize Swift's
wicked fable of the Yahoos, that my friend was much
exercised with psychological speculations whether or no
they had any souls. They dwelt in the wilds of Ceylon,
like other savage beasts, hairy, and spotted with tufts of
fur, filthy, shameless, weaponless, (though warlike in
their individual bent,) tool-less, house-less, language-less,
except for a few guttural sounds, hideously dissonant,
whereby they held some rudest kind of communication
among themselves. They lacked both memory and
foresight, and were wholly destitute of government,
social institutions, or law or rulership of any description,
except the immediate tyranny of the strongest ; radically
untamable, moreover, save that the people of the coun-
try managed to subject a few of the less ferocious and
stupid ones to out-door servitude among their other
cattle. They were beastly in almost all their attributes,
and that to such a degree that the observer, losing sight
of any link betwixt them and manhood, could generally
witness their brutalities without greater horror than at
those of some disagreeable quadruped in a menagerie.
And yet, at times, comparing what were the lowest gen-
eral traits in his own race, with what was highest in
these abominable monsters, he found a ghastly simili-
tude that half compelled him to recognize them as
human brethren.
After these Gulliverian researches, my agreeable ac-
quaintance had fallen under the ban of the Dutch gov-
ernment, and had suffered (this, at least, being matter
of fact) nearly two years' imprisonment with confiscation
of a large amount of property, for which Mr. Belmont,
our minister at the Hague, had just made a peremptory
demand of reimbursement and damages. Meanwhile,
CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 17
since arriving in England on his way to the United
States, he had been providentially led to inquire into
the circumstances of his birth on shipboard, and had
discovered that not himself alone, but another baby, had
come into the world during the same voyage of the pro-
lific vessel, and that there were almost irrefragable
reasons for believing that these two children had been
assigned to the wrong mothers. Many reminiscences
of his early days confirmed him in the idea that his
nominal parents were aware of the exchange. The
family to which he felt authorized to attribute his line-
age was that of a nobleman, in the picture-gallery of
whose country-seat (whence, if I mistake not, our ad-
venturous friend had just returned) he had discovered
a portrait bearing a striking resemblance to himself.
As soon as he should have reported the outrageous
action of the Dutch government to President Pierce
and the Secretary of State, and recovered the confis-
cated property, he purposed to return to England and
establish his claim to the nobleman's title and estate.
I had accepted his Oriental fantasies, (which, indeed,
to do him justice, have been recorded by scientific soci-
eties among the genuine phenomena of natural history,)
not as matters of indubitable credence, but as allowable
specimens of an imaginative traveller's vivid coloring
and rich embroidery on the coarse texture and dull
neutral tints of truth. The English romance was
among the latest communications that he intrusted
to my private ear ; and as soon as I heard the first
chapter, so wonderfully akin to what I might have
wrought out of my own head, not unpractised in such
figments, I began to repent having made myself
responsible for the future nobleman's passage home-
ward in the next Collins steamer. Nevertheless, should
his English rent-roll fall a little behindhand, his Dutch
claim for a hundred thousand dollars was certainly in
the hands of our government, and might at least be
valuable to the extent of thirty pounds, which I had
engaged to pay on his behalf. But I have reason to fear
that his Dutch riches turned out to be Dutch gilt or
i8 OUR OLD HOME
fairy gold, and his English country-seat a mere castle in
the air, which I exceedingly regret, for he was a
delightful companion and a very gentlemanly man.
A Consul, in his position of universal responsibility,
the general adviser and helper, sometimes finds himself
compelled to assume the guardianship of personages
who, in their own sphere, are supposed capable of
superintending the highest interests of whole commu-
nities. An elderly Irishman, a naturalized citizen, once
put the desire and expectation of all our penniless vaga-
bonds into a very suitable phrase, by pathetically en-
treating me to be a "father to him " ; and, simple as I
sit scribbling here, I have acted a father's part, not only
by scores of such unthrifty old children as himself, but
by a progeny of far loftier pretensions. It may be well
for persons who are conscious of any radical weakness
in their character, any besetting sin, any unlawful pro-
pensity, any unhallowed impulse, which (while sur-
rounded with the manifold restraints that protect a man
from that treacherous and lifelong enemy, his lower self,
in the circle of society where he is at home) they may
have succeeded in keeping under the lock and key of
strictest propriety, it may be well for them, before
seeking the perilous freedom of a distant land, released
from the watchful eyes of neighborhoods and coteries,
lightened of that wearisome burden, an immaculate
name, and blissfully obscure after years of local prom-
inence, it may be well for such individuals to know
that when they set foot on a foreign shore, the long-
imprisoned Evil, scenting a wild license in the unaccus-
tomed atmosphere, is apt to grow riotous in its iron
cage. It rattles the rusty barriers with gigantic turbu-
lence, and if there be an infirm joint anywhere in the
framework, it breaks madly forth, compressing the
mischief of a lifetime into a little space.
A parcel of letters had been accumulating at the
Consulate for two or three weeks, directed to a certain
Doctor of Divinity, who had left America by a sailing-
packet and was still upon the sea. In due time, the
vessel arrived, and the reverend Doctor paid me a visit.
CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 19
He was a fine-looking middle-aged gentleman, a perfect
model of clerical propriety, scholar-like, yet with the
air of a man of the world rather than a student, though
overspread with the graceful sanctity of a popular
metropolitan divine, a part of whose duty it might be
to exemplify the natural accordance between Christian-
ity and good-breeding. He seemed a little excited, as
an American is apt to be on first arriving in England,
but conversed with intelligence as well as animation,
making himself so agreeable that his visit stood out in
considerable relief from the monotony of my daily
commonplace. As I learned from authentic sources,
he was somewhat distinguished in his own region for
fervor and eloquence in the pulpit, but was now com-
pelled to relinquish it temporarily for the purpose of
renovating his impaired health by an extensive tour in
Europe. Promising to dine with me, he took up his
bundle of letters and went away.
The Doctor, however, failed to make his appearance
at dinner-time, or to apologize the next day for his ab-
sence ; and in the course of a day or two more, I forgot
all about him, concluding that he must have set forth on
his continental travels, the plan of which he had sketched
out at our interview. But, by and by, I received a call
from the master of the vessel in which he had arrived.
He was in some alarm about his passenger, whose lug-
gage remained on shipboard, but of whom nothing had
been heard or seen since the moment of his departure
from the Consulate. We conferred together, the Cap-
tain and I, about the expediency of setting the police
on the traces (if any were to be found) of our vanished
friend; but it struck me that the good Captain was
singularly reticent, and that there was something a little
mysterious in a few points that he hinted at, rather than
expressed ; so that, scrutinizing the affair carefully, I
surmised that the intimacy of life on shipboard might
have taught him more about the reverend gentleman
than, for some reason or other, he deemed it prudent
to reveal. At home, in our native country, I would
have looked to the Doctor's personal safety and left his
20 OUR OLD HOME
reputation to take care of itself, knowing that the good
fame of a thousand saintly clergymen would amply
dazzle out any lamentable spot on a single brother's
character. But in scornful and invidious England, on
the idea that the credit of the sacred office was measur-
ably intrusted to my discretion, I could not endure, for
the sake of American Doctors of Divinity generally,
that this particular Doctor should cut an ignoble figure
in the police reports of the English newspapers, except
at the last necessity. The clerical body, I flatter my-
self, will acknowledge that I acted on their own princi-
ple. Besides, it was now too late ; the mischief and
violence, if any had been impending, were not of a
kind which it requires the better part of a week to per-
petrate ; and to sum up the entire matter, I felt certain,
from a good deal of somewhat similar experience, that,
if the missing Doctor still breathed this vital air, he
would turn up at the Consulate as soon as his money
should be stolen or spent.
Precisely a week after this reverend person's disap-
pearance, there came to my office a tall, middle-aged
gentleman in a blue military surtout, braided at the
seams, but out at elbows, and as shabby as if the wearer
had been bivouacking in it throughout a Crimean cam-
paign. It was buttoned up to the very chin, except
where three or four of the buttons were lost; nor was
there any glimpse of a white shirt-collar illuminating
the rusty black cravat. A grisly moustache was just
beginning to roughen the stranger's upper lip. He
looked disreputable to the last degree, but still had a
ruined air of good society glimmering about him, like
a few specks of polish on a sword-blade that has lain
corroding in a mud-puddle. I took him to be some
American marine officer, of dissipated habits, or per-
haps a cashiered British major, stumbling into the
wrong quarters through the unrectified bewilderment
of last night's debauch. He greeted me, however,
with polite familiarity, as though we had been previ-
ously acquainted ; whereupon I drew coldly back (as
sensible people naturally do, whether from strangers or
CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 21
former friends, when too evidently at odds with for-
tune) and requested to know who my visitor might be,
and what was his business at the Consulate. " Am I
then so changed?" he exclaimed with a vast depth of
tragic intonation ; and after a little blind and bewildered
talk, behold ! the truth flashed upon me. It was the
Doctor of Divinity ! If I had meditated a scene or a
coup de theatre, I could not have contrived a more
effectual one than by this simple and genuine difficulty
of recognition. The poor Divine must have felt that
he had lost his personal identity through the misadven-
tures of one little week. And, to say the truth, he did
look as if, like Job, on account of his especial sanctity,
he had been delivered over to the direst temptations of
Satan, and proving weaker than the man of Uz, the
Arch Enemy had been empowered to drag him through
Tophet, transforming him, in the process, from the most
decorous of metropolitan clergymen into the rowdiest
and dirtiest of disbanded officers. I never fathomed
the mystery of his military costume, but conjectured
that a lurking sense of fitness had induced him to ex-
change his clerical garments for this habit of a sinner ;
nor can I tell precisely into what pitfall, not more of
vice than terrible calamity, he had precipitated himself,
being more than satisfied to know that the outcasts
of society can sink no lower than this poor, desecrated
wretch had sunk.
The opportunity, I presume, does not often happen to
a layman, of administering moral and religious reproof
to a Doctor of Divinity ; but finding the occasion thrust
upon me, and the hereditary Puritan waxing strong in
my breast, I deemed it a matter of conscience not to let
it pass entirely unimproved. The truth is, I was un-
speakably shocked and disgusted. Not, however, that
I was then to learn that clergymen are made of the
same flesh and blood as other people, and perhaps lack
one small safeguard which the rest of us possess, be-
cause they are aware of their own peccability, and
therefore cannot look up to the clerical class for the
proof of the possibility of a pure life on earth, with
22 OUR OLD HOME
such reverential confidence as we are prone to do. But
I remembered the innocent faith of my boyhood, and
the good old silver-headed clergyman, who seemed to me
as much a saint then on earth as he is now in heaven,
and partly for whose sake, through all these darkening
years, I retain a devout, though not intact nor unwaver-
ing respect for the entire fraternity. What a hideous
wrong, therefore, had the backslider inflicted on his
brethren, and still more on me, who much needed what-
ever fragments of broken reverence (broken, not as con-
cerned religion, but its earthly institutions and professors),
it might yet be possible to patch into a sacred image !
Should all pulpits and communion-tables have thence-
forth a stain upon them, and the guilty one go unrebuked
for it? So I spoke to the unhappy man as I never thought
myself warranted in speaking to any other mortal,
hitting him hard, doing my utmost to find out his vulner-
able part, and prick him into the depths of it. And not
without more effect than I had dreamed of, or desired !
No doubt, the novelty of the Doctor's reversed position,
thus standing up to receive such a fulmination as the
clergy have heretofore arrogated the exclusive right of
inflicting, might give additional weight and sting to the
words which I found utterance for. But there was
another reason (which, had I in the least suspected it,
would have closed my lips at once,) for his feeling mor-
bidly sensitive to the cruel rebuke that I administered.
The unfortunate man had come to me, laboring under one
of the consequences of his riotous outbreak, in the shape
of delirium tremens ; he bore a hell within the compass of
his own breast, all the torments of which blazed up with
tenfold inveteracy when I thus took upon myself the
devil's office of stirring up the red-hot embers. His
emotions, as well as the external movement and expres-
sion of them by voice, countenance, and gesture, were
terribly exaggerated by the tremendous vibration of
nerves resulting from the disease. It was the deepest
tragedy I ever witnessed. I know sufficiently, from that
one experience, how a condemned soul would manifest