he Bank of
England, made at the invitation of one of its officers whom I had known
and entertained in America. Another of the functionaries of the bank
volunteered his services as a cicerone. He showed us among other things
the treasure recently received from the Chinese government, in payment
of a war indemnity. It was all in little blocks, parallelograms and
horseshoes of gold and silver. An ingenious little machine was also
shown us for the detection of light weight sovereigns. We paid for his
attention by listening to many uncivil pleasantries regarding the
financial condition of our own country. I still remember the insolent
sneer with which this gentleman said, "By the bye, have you sold the
Bank of the United States yet?" He was presumably ignorant of the real
history of the bank, which had long ceased to be a government
institution, President Jackson having annulled its charter and removed
the government deposits.

I mention these incidents because they were the only exceptions to the
uniform kindness with which we were generally received, and to the
homage paid to my husband as one of the most illustrious of modern
philanthropists.

Berlin would have been the next important stop in our journey but for an
impediment which we had hardly anticipated. In the days of the French
revolution of 1830, the Poles had made one of their oft-repeated
struggles to regain national independence. General Lafayette was much
interested in this movement, and at his request Dr. Howe undertook to
convey to some of the Polish chiefs funds sent for their aid by parties
in the United States. He succeeded in accomplishing this errand, but was
arrested on the very night of his arrival in Berlin, and was only
released by the intervention of our government, after a tedious
imprisonment _au secret_. He was then sent with a military escort to the
confines of Prussia with the warning to return no more.

Thirteen years had elapsed since these events took place. Dr. Howe had
meantime acquired a world-wide reputation as a philanthropist. The Poles
had long been subdued, and Europe seemed to be free from all
revolutionary threatenings. Through the intervention of Chevalier
Bunsen, who was then Prussian ambassador at the Court of St. James, Dr.
Howe applied for permission to revisit the kingdom of Prussia, but this
was refused him. Some years after this time, Dr. Howe received from the
Prussian government a gold medal in acknowledgment of his se