dingly clever wife. Through the favor she enjoyed at court he
received from Pierce and Buchanan unimportant diplomatic appointments.
During their sojourns in Washington their home was a kind of political
and literary headquarters. Mrs. Eames had established a salon--the first
attempt of the kind made there; and it was altogether a success. Her
Sundays evenings were notable, indeed. Whoever was worth seeing, if in
town, might usually be found there. Charles Sumner led the procession.
He was a most imposing person. Both handsome and distinguished
in appearance, he possessed in an eminent degree the Harvard
pragmatism--or, shall I say, affectation?--and seemed never happy except
on exhibition. He had made a profitable political and personal issue of
the Preston Brooks attack. Brooks was an exceeding light weight, but he
did for Sumner more than Sumner could ever have done for himself.

In the Charles Eames days Sumner was exceedingly disagreeable to me.
Many people, indeed, thought him so. Many years later, in the Greeley
campaign of 1872, Schurz brought us together--they had become as very
brothers in the Senate--and I found him the reverse of my boyish ill
conceptions.

He was a great old man. He was a delightful old man, every inch a
statesman, much of a scholar, and something of a hero. I grew in time to
be actually fond of him, passed with him entire afternoons and evenings
in his library, mourned sincerely when he died, and went with Schurz to
Boston, on the occasion when that great German-American delivered the
memorial address in honor of the dead Abolitionist.

Of all the public men of that period Carl Schurz most captivated me.
When we first came into personal relations, at the Liberal Convention,
which assembled at Cincinnati and nominated Greeley and Brown as a
presidential ticket, he was just turned forty-three; I, two and thirty.
The closest intimacy followed. Our tastes were much alike. Both of us
had been educated in music. He played the piano with intelligence and
feeling--especially Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of us ever
having quite reached the "high jinks" of Wagner.

To me his oratory was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten
thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six. His style
was simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument
now and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of
not too eloquent rhetoric.

He was q