and a brilliance of language that was little short
of marvellous. So naturally it was a little disappointing
at first to find that these people just went on talking
to one another and didn’t listen to Uncle William
at all, or merely looked at him in an inquisitive
sort of way and whispered remarks to one another.
But presently, I don’t just know how, Uncle
began to get the attention of the table and one after
the other the people stopped talking to listen to him.
I was very glad of this because Uncle was talking about
America and I was sure that it would interest them,
as what he said was very much the same as the wonderful
speech that he made to the American residents of Berlin
at the time when the first exchange professor was sent
over to the University. I remember that all the
Americans who heard it said that Uncle told them things
about their own country that they had never known,
or even suspected, before. So I was glad when
I heard Uncle explaining to these people the wonderful
possibilities of their country. He talked of
the great plains of Connecticut and the huge seaports
of Pittsburg and Colorado Springs, and the tobacco
forests of Idaho till one could just see it all.
He said that the Mississippi, which is a great river
here as large as the Weser, should be dammed back
and held while a war of extermination was carried
on against the Indians on the other side of it with
a view to Christianizing them. The people listened,
their faces flushed with eating and with the close
air. Here and there some of them laughed or nudged
one another and said, “Get on to this, will
you?” But I remember that when Uncle William
made this speech in Berlin the Turkish ambassador
said after it that he now knew so much about America
that he wanted to die, and that the Shah of Persia
wrote a letter to Uncle, all in his own writing, except
the longest words, and said that he had ordered Uncle’s
speech on America to be printed and read aloud by all
the schoolmasters in Persia under penalty of decapitation.
Nearly all of them read it.
Wednesday
This morning we had a great disappointment. It
had been pretty well arranged on board the ship that
Uncle would take over the presidency of Harvard University.
Uncle Henry and Cousin Ferdinand and Cousin Willie
had all consented to it, and we looked upon it as
done. Now it seems there is a mistake. First
of all Harvard University is not in New York, as we
had always thought in Germany that it was. I
remember that when Uncle Henry came home from his
great tour in America, in which he studied American
institutions so profoundly, and made his report he
said that Harvard University was in New York.
Uncle had this information filed away in our Secret
Service Department.
But it seems that it is somewhere else. The University
here is called Columbia, so Uncle decided that he would
be president of that. In the old days all the
great men of learning used to assure Uncle that if
fate had not made him an emperor he would have been
better fitted than any living man to be the head of
a great university. Uncle admitted this himself,
though he resented being compared only to the living
ones.