“Without waiting for my answer, she seized the pole and soon drew up the dripping bucket, which she placed upon the curb.  ’I will get you a glass,’ she then said, and darted into the house—­reappearing presently with a tumbler in one hand and a plate of crisp tea-cakes in the other.  She stood beside me while I drank, and then extended the plate with a gesture more inviting than any words would have been.  I had had enough of cake for one day; but I took one, nevertheless, and put a second in my pocket, at her kind persuasion.

“This was the first of many kindnesses which I have experienced from strangers all over the wide world; and there are few, if any, which I shall remember longer.

“At sunset I had walked about twenty-two miles, and had taken to the railroad track by way of change, when I came upon a freight train, which had stopped on account of some slight accident.

“‘Where are you going?’ inquired the engineer.

“‘To Amboy.’

“‘Take you there for a quarter!’

“It was too tempting; so I climbed upon the tender and rested my weary legs, while the pines and drifted sands flew by us an hour or more—­ and I had crossed New Jersey!”

This little description may be taken as a type of the way in which he traveled and the way in which he described his travels—­a way that almost immediately made him famous, and caused the public to call for volume after volume from his pen.

CHAPTER VI

TWO YEARS IN EUROPE FOR FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS

A journey to Europe was not the common thing in those days that it has since become, and no American had then thought of tramping over historic scenes with little or no money.  So this journey, projected and carried out by Bayard Taylor, was really an original and daring undertaking.  It was all the more remarkable from the fact that the people of the community where he had been born and brought up had scarcely ever gone farther from their homesteads than Philadelphia.

In New York he visited all the editors with an introduction from Nathaniel P. Willis; but none of them gave him any encouragement, except Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the Tribune.  Here is Bayard Taylor’s own description of the interview:  “When I first called upon this gentleman, whose friendship it is now my pride to claim, he addressed me with that honest bluntness which is habitual to him:  ’I am sick of descriptive letters, and will have no more of them.  But I should like some sketches of German life and society, after you have been there and know something about it.  If the letters are good, you shall be paid for them, but don’t write until you know something.’  This I faithfully promised, and kept my promise so well that I am afraid the eighteen letters which I afterward sent from Germany, and which were published in the Tribune, were dull in proportion as they were wise.”