ed with former wars were
suggested to my thoughts by these historic spots. I was heartily
glad when at length in cheerful Brussels I was beyond danger. On the
fateful day when the Second Empire went down at Sedan, I was on the
field of Waterloo where half a century before the First Empire had
perished. The news of the morning made it plain that on that day the
great _debacle_ was to culminate. We listened all day for cannon
thunder; under certain conditions of the atmosphere the sound of heavy
guns may reverberate as far perhaps, as from Sedan to Waterloo. That
day, however, there was no ominous grumble from the eastward, the sky
was cloudless, the flowers bloomed about the Chateau d'Hougomont, and
the birds twittered in peace at the point before La Haie-Sainte to
which the First Napoleon advanced in the evening and where for the
last time he heard the shout then so long familiar but forever after
unheard, "Vive l'Empereur!" Humiliation now after half a century had
overwhelmed in turn his unhappy successor.

CHAPTER VI

AMERICAN HISTORIANS

As a Harvard undergraduate I roomed for a time in Hollis 8, a room
occupied in turn by William H. Prescott and James Schouler,
and perhaps I may attribute to some contagion caught as a
_transmittendum_ in that apartment, an itch for writing history
which has brought some trouble to me and to the rather limited circle
of readers whom I have reached. I remember debating, as a boy, whether
the more desirable fame fell to the hero in a conflict or to the
scribe who told the story. Whose place would one rather have? That of
Timoleon and Nicias or of Plutarch and Thucydides their celebrants?
But the celebrants, no doubt, seemed to their contemporaries very
insignificant figures compared to the champions whose fame they
perpetuated. The historians of America are a goodly company, scarcely
less worthy than the champions whose deeds they have chronicled. With
most men who, during the last seventy-five years, have written history
in America, I have had contact, sometimes a mere glimpse, sometimes
intimacy. Washington Irving and Prescott I never saw, though as to the
latter I have just been making him responsible to some extent for my
own little proclivity, Parkman, I only saw sitting with his handsome
Grecian face relieved against a dignified background as he sat on the
stage among the Corporation of Harvard University. Motley I have
only seen as he stood with iron-grey curls over