Three generations

I was pleased that dear Uncle Sam’s letter was wanted for King George’s collection, impressed with the good manners that prompted the two gentlemen to take the trouble to acknowledge it, and cheered by this side light of the way the English “carried on” their peaceful avocations during that year of chaos, 1917.

CHAPTER VI

A Stay at the White House

I was left in the charge of Flossie, who having lately become engaged to David Prescott Hall, elected to stay at home, yielding to Laura the opportunity of going to Europe. Flossie’s task was no easy one, for I bitterly resented being left behind; her devotion was the beginning of a close bond between us.

The next seven months brought strange experiences. I had never been separated from my parents and supposed them indispensable to my very life. For the first few weeks I mourned passionately. Gradually there came a dawning sense of individuality; I found I could live without either parent and get through the days not too uncomfortably. I began to understand my mother’s dictum,

“We come into the world alone, we go out of the world alone; there is nothing to us but ourselves!”

When after seven months’ absence the travelers returned we went down the harbor to meet them. The passage had been a severe one; the red funnels of the Asia were caked with salt from the spray that had constantly dashed over them. I found my father on deck, warming his back against the smokestack, and remember his showing me the hole burnt in his new London overcoat by the heat. When they saw me, my father and mother exchanged a significant glance: they had left me a child, they found me a half-grown girl.

The unpacking of the trunks was attended with breathless interest. There was a pink silk dress made in Paris for Laura, a charming silk of a shade called Bismarck, with crystal trimming, for Julia, and a blue silk for Florence. There was no Paris dress for me. I was still growing rapidly, and outgrew my frocks every few months. In our family silk dresses must last a long time, and it would have been the height of folly to order one for me, but girls of thirteen are not always reasonable.

Laura, the “comforter”, soon consoled me, and also I was too happy to have the dear ones back to brood long over my disappointment.

Two large new trunks contained the spoils of the family’s pilgrimage,—photographs of Greece and Italy, ancient vases from Athens, a bronze lamp from the Roman catacombs. These things set my imagination rioting, were a part of my education, worth more than twenty silk dresses!

I remember something of my elders’ talk of affairs in Europe. They had seen the Paris Exposition of 1867, where William Hunt’s pictures were prominent, and works by Bierstadt, Church, and Kensett. Both parents loved France; my father had been the friend and helper of Lafayette in the Polish Relief Work of 1831; my mother from her childhood had been much in touch with the French. At her father’s house several French exiles were employed, a hairdresser, a teacher, a marquis who came to dress the salad for dinner parties. There was a sort of sorrowful apprehension for the future of France in all the travelers said. I heard of the follies of the beautiful Empress Eugénie, of the political crimes of Louis Napoleon, of the lowering of standards in taste and manners. People said, “Go to the theater, but do not take your daughters!” In writing of this period later my mother says:

“In Bismarck’s mind even then the despoiling of France was pre-determined.”

This was the mating season for my sisters and brother, the serious business of life for the young. That day, when I went down the harbor to meet the returning family, I saw for the first time Michael Anagnostopoulos, the young Greek my father brought from Athens as his secretary. I see now the dark bearded face, the brilliant oriental eyes of Anagnos, so we afterwards called him, as he stood on the deck of the steamer, wrapped in a black and white plaid shawl after the fashion of his country. Pale from the long voyage, the dreadful seasickness, his great eyes dwelt pensively now on the fast approaching shore, now on the face of Julia. There was no one in our circle wise enough to foresee what the next few years were to bring about. Anagnos taught my mother Greek, served my father faithfully, ended by marrying “our eldest”, and becoming the assistant and successor of my father as Director of the Institution for the Blind. While he became an American citizen, he ranked as leader among the Greeks of Boston.

Flossie’s engagement was a boy-and-girl affair. When David Hall was fourteen he declared he would marry Flossie Howe. The news of their engagement was broken to me during the family’s absence. I took it hard, as Flossie now represented home, family, all I held dear. In the shock of discovery, I felt a desperate sense that I had lost my last friend, but as I was very fond of David, I soon made up my mind to accept the new order. As long as he lived he was my stanch friend, one of the people I leaned upon, one who never failed me in any difficult moment.

In the winter of 1868 we were living in our Boylston Place house, Number 19, when the family fire occurred on the coldest night of the year. All the household had gone to bed save Mama, who, just as she was about to put out her light, “thought she smelt smoke.” She roused my father; he soon discovered that this time the house really was on fire. Harry now came in from a dance and ran out in his dress suit, without an overcoat, to give the alarm. Laura and I dressed quickly and came down from our room at the top of the house. There came a violent ringing of the doorbell; Laura ran to answer it. I can see her now flying down the stairs, her long dark hair, a dusky veil, hanging about her. She opened the door to find our neighbors, the five Richards brothers, who, having smelt the smoke, came to give the alarm. They were all fine looking men, Frank the paper miller, George the lawyer, John the soldier, Robert the scientist, and Henry the youngest, a Harvard student in our own Harry’s class.

What follows is confused. I see one of the Richards brothers whirling an ax above his head, smiting asunder the dividing wall; see all of them serviceable and energetic in saving our house and their own from destruction. I remember best the boyish face of Henry the youngest. It is impressed upon my memory that the night he and his brothers put out our fire, a flame was kindled in his heart that has kept it warm and tender from that day to this.

Among the pleasures of this time were frequent journeys with my father to the public institutions which, as Chairman of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, it was his duty to visit. I have slept in almost every poorhouse and insane asylum in the State. Our visits were unannounced. As his days were so busy, we left Boston when work was over, took an afternoon train, arriving at our destination in the early evening. This gave my father the chance to see the institution in its lying down and getting up, a time when shortcomings are more evident than during hours when trustees and visitors may safely be expected. I have the pleasantest recollection of these trips and the institutions visited. Tewkesbury Almshouse was a source of a good deal of worry to my father; we were there often and at the Asylum for the Insane at Taunton. While Papa was inspecting buildings and talking with the inmates, I was left with the matron. I knew every scholar at the School for the Blind, was on familiar terms with all the inmates of the School for Idiots, of which my father was director. He kept me from contact with the inmates of these other institutions, for two reasons, I fancy. First, for their own sakes, he would have shielded them from a child’s frank brutal curiosity; secondly he would avoid my receiving any painful impression from forlorn paupers or tragic lunatics. It was different with the idiots: they were his special charge; that was a family matter. When people who know little of my father ask me to tell them about him, I hesitate and stammer; there is so much to tell, the story of his life and his service to God’s weakest creatures is almost phenomenal! Of all his manifold services to humanity, for me the greatest was his care for the feeble-minded children of New England, a care from which only death released him.

Among certain faded old papers I came lately upon a sheet in my own immature handwriting, kept all these years by Laura; it proved to be the first article I ever wrote for publication. I am quite sure, however, that it never saw the light. The article is an appreciation of a certain English opera company playing in Boston during the season of 1867.

I think it must have been in the year 1871 that I spent a week at the White House during the presidency of General Grant. At this time my father was much in Washington to consult with the President touching the proposed annexation of the Republic of Santo Domingo to the United States. The proposal of annexation had come from the Dominican President, Baez, in the year 1869. Grant favored the plan and appointed a commission to visit the island and report to Congress upon its condition and the feeling of the people about the proposed annexation. The three Commissioners were my father, the Honorable Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, and Andrew D. White, President of Cornell University. My father was the leading spirit of the trio, and it was he who wrote the interesting report of their investigations.

I had accompanied my parents to Washington, and Mrs. Grant kindly invited me to stay at the White House, where I played happily with Nellie Grant, who was about my age. The experience was deeply interesting. Unfortunately I have preserved no notes of this visit and have only my memory to depend upon. What comes back to me was the kindness and simplicity of General Grant, the simple wholesome family life I found at the White House. Nellie was a pretty and charming girl. I have only the pleasantest memories of her. A day at Mt. Vernon was one of the interesting experiences. General Horace Porter was at that time the President’s private secretary; he was very kind in helping to arrange various expeditions which I greatly enjoyed.

My clearest memory of General Grant is of one rainy evening which he passed quietly at home. He sat at a desk smoking a big cigar, and I noticed that he kept continually writing what seemed a short sentence on a series of cards which he placed in a box before him. Mrs. Grant explained to me that whenever he had a spare moment he wrote his name, so that his secretary always had a good supply of autographs to send to people who asked for them. He was very tired that night; his strong, kind, shy face showed lines of deep fatigue; faithful even in little things, he wrote card after card for the relentless autograph fiends.

The honest collector is a useful person, but let all distinguished people, especially in old age, beware of the dishonest one. During my mother’s last years she was systematically “worked” for signed verses of her “Battle Hymn”, which I have since seen offered for sale. When I remember the labor with which she painfully wrote out the verses in the years when her waning strength was so precious, I grow savage against the whole sponging tribe.

Shortly after my father arrived in Washington, Charles Sumner arranged a large dinner party in his honor. A few days before the dinner an invitation came for the same evening to dine at the White House. The letter was brought to my father at Mr. Sumner’s house. I remember my surprise when the great Massachusetts senator said,

“You must go to the White House; I shall have to excuse you. An invitation to dine with the President cannot be declined.”

While my father was working for the Dominicans, my mother was making her appeal to women throughout the world to hold a great International Peace Congress. She wrote an appeal, had it translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and sent it far and wide. Some of the correspondence of this time has been preserved. A letter from William Henry Channing has a fresh interest to-day.

In the year 1871 my three sisters were married and my brother left home; after graduating from Harvard and the Institute of Technology, he went out into the world and began his long service to Science, which from the first called him to her ranks.

He became a student in the steel works at Troy, and here he met his fate. Our cousin, Mary Ward, gave him a letter of introduction to Mr. Willard Gay, a leading banker of Troy. The Gays received him hospitably at their pleasant home over the bank where Mr. Gay was the presiding genius. It soon became evident to him that young Howe and his elder daughter, Fannie, had become interested in each other. Mr. Gay wrote to his kinsman, Doctor Gay of Boston for advice. Doctor Gay answered somewhat in this fashion.

“I don’t know the young man, but I know his father. If Doctor Howe’s son wanted to marry my daughter, I should say ‘yes.’”

Speaking of my brother at this time, Doctor Rossiter Raymond said in a recent address, “His father was Doctor Samuel G. Howe, famous for his service for Greece in her war for independence, from 1824 to 1830, and later for his labors in the instruction of the blind. His mother was Julia Ward Howe, author of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and leader in many reforms. It was a good stock on both sides, making him heir to intellectual keenness and refinement, the capacity for both enthusiasm and perseverance, a passion for the pursuit of knowledge, and a gift of clear and felicitous statement.”

In 1874 Harry Howe and Fannie Gay were married and have lived happily together ever since.[2] Our parents held that the only “prudent” marriage is a love match, and were well satisfied with their children’s choice of life partners. At this time the husband of an unattractive daughter of a rich man said to me:

“Take my advice, Maud, marry for love. You may get something out of it. If you marry for money,—you won’t!”

We all married for love, and we all have got as much happiness out of life as our several natures allowed. The third generation followed the same rule. To-day there is not a criminal, a degenerate, or a slacker among my parent’s descendants; not one who is not straight and sound in wind and limb.

In 1871, when I was left the only bird in the nest, I was seventeen. For several years Florence had relieved Mama of housekeeping duties; these cares now devolved upon me. We kept open house for relatives, friends, and distinguished travelers, few of whom came to Boston without breaking our bread. No one can have as keen a sense of my shortcomings as a housekeeper as I have myself; I did the best I could with the means at my disposal, and however conscious of my defects our guests were, I do not think my dear mother was troubled by them.

My father, for whose sake I learned to make bread, to care for the milk, and make the butter for the table, did his best to help me. While I wanted to be a good daughter, to make my parents happy, mine was a pleasure-loving nature. Mama was indulgent, accepted her youngest as she was. A sentence at this time expressed her attitude:

“Maud, you are frivolous; but your salads are divine.”

My poor father was much troubled by my frivolity. His letters are full of warning lest by late hours and close rooms I should lose the first bloom of youth which to loving parents is apparently so much more precious than to young people themselves. Besides arranging for my lessons in cooking, he had me taught bookkeeping. While I was not altogether successful with double entry, I learned enough about keeping accounts to be of great use to me in later life. He writes to me on August 1, 1871:

A small precious packet of letters in my father’s neat handwriting has somehow survived the endless movings of my wandering life. I choose one to close this rambling chapter, because it shows him so exactly as he was, “A Knight like Bayard, without reproach or fear.”

CHAPTER VII

Santo Domingo

My father was greatly disappointed when Congress, under the whip of Charles Sumner, quashed President Grant’s plan for the annexation of Santo Domingo by refusing to ratify the treaty signed by Grant and the Dominican president, Baez. The friends of annexation, however, still had hopes of bringing the little republic under the eagle’s wing; it was probably in this interest that President Baez invited my father to revisit Santo Domingo in the winter of 1872 and bring his family with him. On the ninth of February, the day of a terrible blizzard, I sailed from New York with my father, mother, and a gay company of girl cousins and friends. Our steamer, the old Tybee, was a small crank tub; the twelve days’ passage was more uncomfortable than any ocean crossing I have ever made. My journal records that on the second day out I had not yet taken off my boots, and that on the fifth I was undressed for the first time since sailing. The captain, a quaint Yankee skipper of the old school, was so touched by my suffering that he sent two sailors to carry me from the “Black Hole of Calcutta”, six feet by eight, where three of us languished, to his own breezy deck cabin. Here I soon began to pick up. My strongest impression of the voyage is of the beauty of the Gulf Stream, crossed in cloudless weather. The intense blue of the sea, the golden gulf weed, the dazzling color of the sky were my first taste of tropical splendors.

“I am sure that water really is blue,” I said to the captain. “That color cannot be merely the sky’s reflection.”

“Here, boy! Fill a bucket over the side and show it to the young lady.”

The water in the bucket close at hand looked like any other, save for a strand of floating gulf weed.

“They do say,” the captain volunteered, “that the yarns about mermaids grew out of some sailor’s mistaking that gulf weed for a girl’s hair.”

Among the passengers were several interesting people; Colonel Fabens of Salem, an idealist, interested like my father in the uplift of the Dominicans and convinced of the future importance to our country of the splendid harbor of Samana Bay; Judge O’Sullivan, a mysterious man, who either was, or assumed to be, very deaf, and yet knew everything that was whispered on the ship; and whose interest in annexation was more practical and not quite so disinterested as Colonel Fabens’ and my father’s. Germany was even then plotting against American influence in the island, and a few years later German intrigue brought about a revolution that sent Baez into exile, and placed a very inferior man in his place. A group of young naval officers on their way to join their ship, the Nantasket, at Puerta Plata, were pleasant additions to the company. One of these, George W. DeLong, later became famous as an Arctic explorer. At this time DeLong was twenty-eight years old, tall, blond, with a firm, underhung jaw, the veiled blue eyes of a dreamer, and a spirited bearing that somehow set him apart from the other young officers.

The twelfth day after leaving New York the Tybee dropped anchor in the harbor of Puerta Plata. Lieutenant DeLong was in the boat that took us ashore. I remember his sympathy with our delight at the picturesqueness of harbor, landing place, and town. Mount Isabella rose steeply from the shore, its lower slopes fringed with fan and coconut palms, the upper reaches dark with the rich foliage of the mahogany, satinwood, mango, and logwood trees. The color of the sea was now like molten emerald, sapphire, and turquoise. In spite of these shifting jewel tints, looking down from the little boat the water was crystal clear. It seemed as if I could reach out my hand and pick up the coral on the yellow sands, fathoms below. The white belly and cruel jaw of a shark appeared below us, and the hand was quickly withdrawn.

Three days later we sailed into the harbor of Santo Domingo, to find midsummer weather, a land breeze scented with the perfume of unknown fruit and flowers. Our captain pointed to the mighty stump of an ancient tree on the bank of the Ozama River.

“The folks here claim Columbus tied his boat to that tree first time he came ashore. He set great store by this island, gave it the name of Espanuela, which, I reckon, means little Spain.”

I remembered my father’s writing me, a year before:

“This is one of the most beautiful islands of the world, ever warm, ever clad in rich foliage, ever abounding in luscious fruits.”

A white handkerchief fluttered between the iron bars of a seaward-looking window, high up in an old gray stone building:

“A welcome from the prison,” the captain murmured. “Poor Peynado, he always salutes the Tybee when she comes and as she goes; he’s shut up for some political business, I’m told.”

“Do many ships touch here?” I asked.

“Only a few coasting craft like the Alice there; you’ll get no news, neither letters nor papers, till I bring them to you six weeks from now; not even a telegram; there’s no cable!”

This gave our adventure a delightful tinge of aloofness. We slept on board that night, and the next morning watched our belongings carried ashore,—trunks, band-boxes, tables, chairs, beds, mosquito nettings, and a grand piano. My father did not love music, but it was part of the family creed that Mama could not exist without a piano. “She shall have music wherever she goes!”

Our arrival had a quasi-official character; we were the guests of the President, who had lent my father one of the presidential palaces for our residence. The palace was built Spanish fashion around a patio. A wide corridor surrounded the court on the second story, from which opened our living rooms. A guard of honor, half a dozen ragged soldiers and their horses, were lodged on the ground floor. I still remember the strong impressions of this, my first day in a foreign country. I can see the picturesque streets of the oldest European city in the new world, for many years the most important place in the Western hemisphere. Its character and language are Spanish, its people of mixed blood are of every shade of complexion, their manners truly Spanish, courtly, grave, and kindly.

We landed on the morning of the twenty-second of February; that evening we celebrated Washington’s Birthday by a dinner at the hotel. There were speeches, red fire, toasts, and a general jollification. The Tybee’s officers and passengers were all present, as well as the few Americans established at Santo Domingo, among whom were a Mr. and Mrs. Shumacher and a couple by the name of Gabb. The men all wore white linen, the women white muslin.

The two months that followed were among the most delightful of my life. We enjoyed a series of calm summer days, only broken by an occasional violent thunder shower in the afternoon. Very quickly the old palace became homelike with flowers, birds, and friendly visitors at every hour of the day and evening. Grave men, like Don Leonardo Delmonto, the land agent, Señor Gauthier, the Secretary of State, Curriel, the Minister of War, who came to consult with Papa; lonely men, exiles from every corner of the world, who came to talk with Mama, and a shoal of girls and boys who came to play and dance with “las muchachas” (the girls)!

Our day usually began with an excursion to the bathing beach. The first trip was made in an antediluvian hack, the only vehicle in the city; after that we rode our little Dominican ponies, Arabians with the paso Castiliano, a sort of delicious canter, the best imaginable gait for a warm climate. The bathing place was a beautiful little basin under a beetling crag; the sands were fine and gold-colored, the water warm as the Lido in August. We might not venture to swim outside this basin on account of sharks. On the way home we halted at a coconut grove, where a tall, barefoot boy swarmed up a palm tree and brought down fresh green coconuts, still cool with the night’s dew. He bored a hole in the rough outer shell with a gimlet; the fresh coconut milk glug-glugged into the tiny calabash I carried at my saddlebow, and I drained a draft that is the nearest thing to nectar I have known.

There were often guests at the eleven o’clock breakfast, where many native dishes were served. We came to like the cassava bread, the rice cooked in coconut milk, the fried plantains, and the orange wine. The cuisine was a combination of Creole and Spanish cookery, much to my liking. The long table was spread in the open corridor with the big columns, between which swung gilded cages with bright plumed birds and porous earthenware jars in which our drinking water was cooled. Ice was a luxury, reserved for great occasions. Every day some of our new friends sent a basket of wonderful strange fruit, sapotes, custard apples, caweelias, endless varieties of bananas; the best of these I have never seen since,—a tiny yellow kind, called the fig banana.

After breakfast came the Spanish lessons; indeed these went on most of the day, for our young friends could speak no other language and we were soon all chattering like magpies. In the evening Papa read Don Quixote aloud, so it was in a truly Spanish atmosphere that I first learned to love the great Don and all his company. At four o’clock, when the sea breeze sprang up, the horses were brought round and the whole party rode out into the country, attended by a large escort. Whatever else our Dominican friends lacked, they had plenty of time to devote to us. There was always at least one Cabinet officer in our group of cavaliers.

Our longest expedition was to the little town of San Cristoval, five hours distant from the capital. We started at four in the morning by bright moonlight and rode through the sleeping town. At the city gate a sentinel challenged:

“Who goes there?”

“Amigos.”

“What is your errand?”

“We escort the convita of American visitors to San Cristoval.”

The sentinel seemed dissatisfied. Just then Señor Curriel, the fiery little Minister of War, rode up and gave the watchword. The sleepy soldier called his two companions from the guardhouse, and the three oddly equipped figures, dressed in seersucker, with palm-leaf hats, stood at attention as we clattered through the gateway and out to the bridle path that led to San Cristoval. The journey was full of small adventures; we were caught in a violent thunder storm and drenched to the skin, my saddle girth broke, my reins gave out and were replaced by a pair made from a clothesline borrowed at an estancia, where we halted for a few minutes. So much stands out clear, in the full limelight of memory; the rest of the trip is dim and shadowy. I remember that San Cristoval was a poor little place, with a miserable apology for a hotel where we ate; that we slept in hammocks in a native bohie, a hut made of palm wood and thatched with palm leaves; that we were enchanted with the beauty of the country, the friendliness of the people, and the glory of the tropical moonlight nights.

During Holy Week we haunted the old gray stone cathedral, where for centuries the body of Columbus had lain beneath the chancel. The ceremonies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday were full of interest, for I had never before been inside a Catholic church.

Shortly after our arrival, the Nantasket came to Santo Domingo, bringing Lieutenant DeLong and the other young officers whose acquaintance we had made on the Tybee. We gave a ball for the officers and the townspeople, the large rooms of the palace serving excellently for the festivities. The American officers danced with the pretty Dominican girls, who wore fireflies in their dark hair for jewels; for ribbons garlands of flowers twined about their waists and shoulders.

The day after the ball I experienced my first earthquake. It was a breathless afternoon, and I was taking the inevitable siesta. As I lay asleep under my mosquito bar, I heard a low rumbling sound, unlike anything I had ever known before. I recognized it as instinctively as the horses screaming in their stalls below. I sprang up and rushed to the open corridor to see the great stone columns shaking like palm trees in a wind. That night I saw visions; the figure of a nun stood for a moment at the foot of my bed, looked at me intently, then vanished. Her place was taken by a young soldier with a mass of blond hair blown back like a plume; he too looked hard at me, then melted from my sight; last I saw the face of a friend lying in her coffin. When the Tybee arrived with mails from home, she brought the news that this friend had died.

We said good-by to Santo Domingo very regretfully. We had fallen under the spell of the Antilles. There was something almost virginal about the island with its primeval forests of precious trees, mahogany, logwood, and many another whose name I have forgotten. The population was of the scantiest; whole tracts of forest land had never known a woodsman’s ax. There were very few foreigners. We had stumbled by chance upon this happy isle; it had no place in travelers’ tales or guidebooks; its silver sands knew no tourists. We had found a bit of Spain transplanted in the fifteenth century to an enchanted isle of the Caribbean Sea. The founder, Bartholomew Columbus, brother of Christopher, died here in 1515. Sixty years later the great English adventurer, Sir Francis Drake, sacked the city, which from that day to this, save for the inevitable revolutions and the perennial squabble with its big, black, half-savage neighbor, Hayti, has known a slumberous existence. The Spanish language has absorbed the dialects of the gentle natives, so dear to Columbus, and the Spanish blood has kept the mixed population from relapsing into the semi-barbarism of Hayti.

When I think of the people I knew there, the kindly Dominicans, the American planters, and business men thrown together in that remote corner of the world, one figure stands out, clear-cut and apart from all the rest,—George DeLong, the arctic explorer. He was a vigorous, ambitious man, full of discontent with the small chance of advancement the navy then offered. Dissatisfied with the slow promotion from rank to rank, he was already casting about for a chance to distinguish himself. The next year brought his opportunity. He obtained permission to join the arctic exploration expedition led by Captain Braine, in 1873, and proved himself so capable that in the year 1879, when James Gordon Bennett fitted out the ill-fated Jeannette for her trip to the arctic, DeLong was given command of the expedition. The cruise of the Jeannette is one of the most thrilling chapters in the history of arctic discovery. The ship sailed from San Francisco for a three years’ voyage, and proceeded to Cape Serdze Kamen in Siberia, whence she steamed northwards until beset by ice. For two years she drifted in the terrible ice pack, always farther and farther north, until she was crushed by the ice, and the party were forced as a forlorn hope to take to their sledges and make a long journey across Siberia. In the last extremity they took refuge in a cave, where DeLong and his fourteen men slowly starved to death. The story of every day’s trial is told in great detail in DeLong’s journals. The men died like heroes, dominated to the last by the courage and spiritual superiority of their leader. The story is a magnificent example of discipline and devotion to duty in the face of the most cruel suffering. When DeLong felt he was dying, with his last remaining strength he threw the precious journal in which he had made his last record over his head far into the interior of the cave, where it was protected, and found by the relief expedition he knew would be sent in search of him. They found him lying with his arm still above his head, his hand pointing to the journal that gave his story to the world and won for him that fame for which he had so hungered!

Before sailing for his first arctic trip DeLong came to see us at our house in South Boston. I still remember his enthusiasm for the adventure. What is the magnet that draws so many high-spirited, courageous men to the doom that still awaits the majority of arctic explorers, in spite of Nansen and Peary? I have talked with DeLong, Shackleton, Peary, and the Englishman, Leigh Smith, of their arctic experiences, and in each case have felt a certain quality they all possessed in common, something remote and stellar that seems to set them apart from their fellows and makes them, perhaps, sensitive to the steady pull of the polar magnet.

Admiral Schley, in describing his expedition for the relief of Greeley, once told me that during the last lap of his voyage, in order to make greater speed, he blew his way through the ice with dynamite. When he found Greeley and his men, there was not twenty-four hours’ life in any of them. If he had not put on that extra spurt of speed, he would have come too late.

“What made you think of using the dynamite?” I said.

The Admiral answered with an inscrutable look. I saw that I had touched the edge of one of those mysteries men do not talk about to a chance acquaintance, even a young lady, at a dinner party.

From Santo Domingo we set sail for Cuba, then a province of Spain, ruled by a despotic Spanish governor, who was cordially hated by the Cubans. All the offices of trust or power were held by Spaniards, who had come to Cuba bent on making their fortunes and caring little for the development of the beautiful island intrusted to their care. The Cubans to whom my father brought letters were mostly planters, farmers, or lawyers. With the exception of a few navy officers, I do not remember having made the acquaintance of a single Spaniard.

I was fortunate in making friends with a famous Cuban belle under whose protection I caught some glimpses of the beau monde of Havana. In the afternoon I drove with her in a volante on the fashionable paseo; in the evening we drove again through the gaily lighted plaza, the center of the city’s social life. The volante would draw up outside one of the chief cafés; here ices were served to us as we sat in the carriage, which was quickly surrounded by a group of young men. A certain handsome officer, named Antonio Sarabria, paid us distant and respectful court in true Spanish fashion. For several afternoons and evenings he followed our carriage in a cab, and when we stopped for ices sent us each a bouquet of gardenias with his compliments. We visited a Spanish warship, the Saragossa, lying in the harbor near the Moro Castle. Though the officers were friendly and hospitable, the visit proved a disappointment, for I had vainly hoped to find Antonio Sarabria on board! The same afternoon we were made welcome on a Prussian man-of-war, where a pompous young German officer did the honors. He spoke English fairly well but had an irritating habit of answering every remark with, “Why, of course they are,” or “Why, of course it is!”

I remember a visit to our fair friend at her own house. She received us in a perfumed boudoir where the toilet apparatus, basin, pitchers, mugs, as well as combs and brushes, were of handsome wrought silver. The Cuban beauties, with their mate skins and languorous eyes, dressed in the latest Paris fashion except on Sundays, when at mass the mantilla took the place of the bonnet. The only religion tolerated by the government was the Roman Catholic. With my friend I visited the cathedral, where for a second time I stood beside a tomb of Columbus; this mausoleum really contained the Great Adventurer’s dust, brought here from Santo Domingo in the year 1796. In Havana I saw my first convent, where the nuns showed me a crêche, and explained the working of the cradle, which at night was turned outward into the street to receive the little foundlings committed to their care.

My father meanwhile was making a thorough study of the work of the newly formed Sociedad Economica, whose object was the improvement of public education and popular industry. I remember his saying that not a tenth part, even of the children of free parents, received any education whatever. Current literature can hardly be said to have existed in Cuba at this time. There were a few daily and weekly papers, rigidly censured, and as far as we saw, little other reading matter.

We made several expeditions from the capital, visiting Matanzas, where we stayed at the Golden Lion, a pleasant hotel, and were shown the sights by Mr. Hall, the American Consul. The visit to the great caves whose entrance lies three hundred feet below the earth’s surface made a deep impression upon me. The stalactites hanging from the roof of the cavern, the stalagmites rising from the floor to meet them, were of the color and texture of yellow alabaster. I dreamed so often of this cavern that it is now inextricably confused with my childish ideas of Aladdin’s Cave. At Matanzas we saw a large plantation worked by Chinese coolies whose condition, little better than slaves, roused my father’s indignation. Of an expedition to Toledo Marinao I remember little save the visit to the sugar factory. The slender record of my journal says: