The Old Homestead | Page 7

the Queen was as strong in him as ever; and it was marvellous the
pertinacity with which he clung to it amid raggedness and starvation,
and the earnestness of his supplication that I would supply him with
funds for a suitable appearance at Windsor Castle.
I never had so satisfactory a perception of a complete booby before in
my life; and it caused me to feel kindly towards him, and yet impatient
and exasperated on behalf of common-sense, which could not possibly
tolerate that such an unimaginable donkey should exist. I laid his
absurdity before him in the very plainest terms, but without either
exciting his anger or shaking his resolution. "O my dear man," quoth he,
with good-natured, placid, simple, and tearful stubbornness, "if you
could but enter into my feelings and see the matter from beginning to
end as I see it!" To confess the truth, I have since felt that I was
hard-hearted to the poor simpleton, and that there was more weight in
his remonstrance than I chose to be sensible of, at the time; for, like
many men who have been in the habit of making playthings or tools of
their imagination and sensibility, I was too rigidly tenacious of what
was reasonable in the affairs of real life. And even absurdity has its
rights, when, as in this case, it has absorbed a human being's entire
nature and purposes. I ought to have transmitted him to Mr. Buchanan,

in London, who, being a good-natured old gentleman, and anxious, just
then, to gratify the universal 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 countrymen on infinitely
slighter grounds. But I was inexorable, 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 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 brick, 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-tempered,
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 animosities, 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 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