The Old Homestead | Page 4

myself to circumstances, and with so
much success, that, though from first to last I hated the very sight of the
little room, I should yet have felt a singular kind of reluctance in
changing it for a better.
Hither, in the course of my incumbency, came a great variety of visitors,
principally Americans, but including almost every other nationality on

earth, especially the distressed and downfallen ones like those of
Poland and Hungary. Italian bandits (for so they looked), proscribed
conspirators from Old Spain, Spanish-Americans, Cubans who
processed to have stood by Lopez and narrowly escaped his fate,
scarred French soldiers of the Second Republic,--in a word, all
sufferers, or pretended ones, in the cause of Liberty, all people
homeless in the widest sense, those who never had a country or had lost
it, those whom their native land had impatiently flung off for planning
a better system of things than they were born to,--a multitude of these
and, doubtless, an equal number of jail-birds, outwardly of the same
feather, sought the American Consulate, in hopes of at least a bit of
bread, and, perhaps, to beg a passage to the blessed shores of Freedom.
In most cases there was nothing, and in any case distressingly little, to
be done for them; neither was I of a proselyting disposition, nor desired
to make my Consulate a nucleus for the vagrant discontents of other
lands. And yet it was a proud thought, a forcible appeal to the
sympathies of an American, that these unfortunates claimed the
privileges of citizenship in our Republic on the strength of the very
same noble misdemeanors that had rendered them outlaws to their
native despotisms. So I gave them what small help I could. Methinks
the true patriots and martyr-spirits of the whole world should have been
conscious of a pang near the heart, when a deadly blow was aimed at
the vitality of a country which they have felt to be their own in the last
resort.
As for my countrymen, I grew better acquainted with many of our
national characteristics during those four years than in all my preceding
life. Whether brought more strikingly out by the contrast with English
manners, or that my Yankee friends assumed an extra peculiarity from
a sense of defiant patriotism, so it was that their tones, sentiments, and
behavior, even their figures and cast of countenance, all seemed
chiselled in sharper angles than ever I had imagined them to be at home.
It impressed me with an odd idea of having somehow lost the property
of my own person, when I occasionally heard one of them speaking of
me as "my Consul"! They often came to the Consulate in parties of half
a dozen or more, on no business whatever, but merely to subject their
public servant to a rigid examination, and see how he was getting on
with his duties. These interviews were rather formidable, being

characterized by a certain stiffness which I felt to be sufficiently
irksome at the moment, though it looks laughable enough in the
retrospect. It is my firm belief that these fellow-citizens, possessing a
native tendency to organization, generally halted outside of the door to
elect a speaker, chairman, or moderator, and thus approached me with
all the formalities of a deputation from the American people. After
salutations on both sides,-- abrupt, awful, and severe on their part, and
deprecatory on mine,--and the national ceremony of shaking hands
being duly gone through with, the interview proceeded by a series of
calm and well-considered questions or remarks from the spokesman (no
other of the guests vouchsafing to utter a word), and diplomatic
responses from the Consul, who sometimes found the investigation a
little more searching than he liked. I flatter myself, however, that, by
much practice, I attained considerable skill in this kind of intercourse,
the art of which lies in passing off commonplaces for new and valuable
truths, and talking trash and emptiness in such a way that a pretty acute
auditor might mistake it for something solid. If there be any better
method of dealing with such junctures,--when talk is to be created out
of nothing, and within the scope of several minds at once, so that you
cannot apply yourself to your interlocutor's individuality,--I have not
learned it.
Sitting, as it were, in the gateway between the Old World and the New,
where the steamers and packets landed the greater part of our
wandering countrymen, and received them again when their
wanderings were done, I saw that no people on earth have such
vagabond habits as ourselves. The Continental races never travel at all
if they can help it; nor does an Englishman ever think of stirring abroad,
unless he has the money to spare, or proposes to himself some definite