I suggested to him a trip to Europe to forget his sorrows, to recuperate his spirits.  He liked the idea.  But first he had to return to the Senate.  There he spoke of Cuba and its annexation, almost in the same words he had used when talking to me that midnight on the roof of the hotel in Havana.  Bitterly he denounced the Clayton-Bulwer treaty.  Audaciously he excoriated England.  Almost immediately he was off to visit England, but not to see Queen Victoria, although invited to her presence.  He went to Russia, saw the Czar.  He visited the Crimea and Syria.  From New Orleans I followed his travels.  I had taken Dorothy there to escape the Chicago winter.

CHAPTER XLVI

New Orleans had grown to be a city of 170,000 people.  Its commerce was enormous.  It was the great entrepot of the continent’s sugar and cotton industries.

Day by day I stood on the wharves, watching the steamers unload and load, gazing over the busy mass of humanity back of which was labor, black and white, slave and free!  The great Mississippi, broad and foul, waking from its sleep in the lowlands above, gathering speed here, feeling the call of the sea, begins to move with increased life.  Across from the city are lowlands, sugar refineries, smoke stacks.  The negroes call to each other, laugh with spontaneous, childlike humor.  The wharf officers, the brokers, pass with intense faces.  It is hot.  Sweat drips from black faces and from white.  Whips crack.  Mules trot and stumble over the loose and resounding boards.  Heavy wheels rumble.  And the life of gambling, drinking, pleasure, crawls about the French quarter, along Canal Street, on Royal Street.  The bell in the Cathedral rings.  I catch the whiff of flowers.  Gulls fly over the muddy water.

I think of Douglas far away in Russia, of all my life in its early days, now growing so misty.  I am more than thirty-seven; and sometimes I feel weary.  I grieve for Dorothy.  She has wound herself with tenderness around my heart.  But less and less can she share life with me.

I go to the Place d’Armes to see the equestrian statue of Jackson which has been erected here since my last visit.  It is now called Jackson Square.  The St. Louis Cathedral has been largely rebuilt.  I wander through the Cabildo again, visit the old cemeteries, read the names of the dead.  The scent of strange blossoms affects me poignantly.  I stroll through the parks, and I visit the life in the French quarter.

Dorothy can drive with me at times, but not for long.  Our boy distresses her; and a governess keeps him away much of the time.  There are memories all about me.  La Fayette has been here.  He was in this very Cabildo.  The old hero of New Orleans, who blessed Dorothy and me, walked these streets.  Now he is long gone.  Clay is gone, Webster, Calhoun.  The country is at a pause.  Hawthorne’s friend is President.  And Douglas is in St. Petersburg, riding a horse grotesquely, and bringing his western ways into the very presence of the Czar.