and he lived and died in the belief that some day he would be invited
to play it!
And this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young
Englishmen to our village such ages and ages ago! What noble
horseshoes this man might have made, but for those Englishmen;
and what an inadequate Roman soldier he DID make!
A day or two after we reached St. Louis, I was walking along Fourth
Street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me,
then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow,
and finally said with deep asperity–
‘Look here, HAVE YOU GOT THAT DRINK YET?’
A maniac, I judged, at first. But all in a flash I recognized him.
I made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me,
and answered as sweetly and winningly as ever I knew how–
‘Been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place
where they keep it. Come in and help.’
He softened, and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was agreeable.
He said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all his affairs
aside and turned out, resolved to find me or die; and make me answer
that question satisfactorily, or kill me; though the most of his late
asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise.
This meeting brought back to me the St. Louis riots of about
thirty years ago. I spent a week there, at that time,
in a boarding-house, and had this young fellow for a neighbor
across the hall. We saw some of the fightings and killings;
and by and by we went one night to an armory where two
hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go
forth against the rioters, under command of a military man.
We drilled till about ten o’clock at night; then news came
that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town,
and were sweeping everything before them. Our column moved at once.
It was a very hot night, and my musket was very heavy.
We marched and marched; and the nearer we approached the seat
of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got. I was behind
my friend; so, finally, I asked him to hold my musket while I
dropped out and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home.
I was not feeling any solicitude about him of course,
because I knew he was so well armed, now, that he could take
care of himself without any trouble. If I had had any doubts
about that, I would have borrowed another musket for him.
I left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this
grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers
the other day in St. Louis, and felt moved to seek me out,
I should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing uncertainty
as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not.
I ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; I know that.
And I would have inquired, if I had had the muskets; but, in the
circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations
than I was.
One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis,
the ‘Globe-Democrat’ came out with a couple of pages of Sunday
statistics, whereby it appeared that 119,448 St. Louis people
attended the morning and evening church services the day before,
and 23,102 children attended Sunday-school. Thus 142,550 persons,
out of the city’s total of 400,000 population, respected the day
religious-wise. I found these statistics, in a condensed form,
in a telegram of the Associated Press, and preserved them.
They made it apparent that St. Louis was in a higher state
of grace than she could have claimed to be in my time.
But now that I canvass the figures narrowly, I suspect
that the telegraph mutilated them. It cannot be that there
are more than 150,000 Catholics in the town; the other 250,000
must be classified as Protestants. Out of these 250,000,
according to this questionable telegram, only 26,362 attended