Page:The Amateur Emigrant-The Silverado Squatters.djvu/13

Rh an understanding and sympathy that always won their confidence. "We're in the same boat," he would say, "earning our bread by amusing the public." "I always divide with a brother artist," he would remark, as he emptied his pockets into their hands. His acquaintance with such people, and his knowledge of the lives they led, gave him an almost morbid sense of the pitiless cruelty of modern civilization. It was only his strong intelligence and common sense that kept him from the ranks of the anarchists. He came to America with exaggerated views of the meaning of democracy, believing that there he would find the ideal social as well as political life. In the beginning he encountered many rude shocks, but he soon readjusted his point of view, though he never ceased regretting that this great country should have been lost to England. The name of George the Third was hardly to be spoken in his presence. "Had it not been for that idiot," he would cry, "we should now be one nation." Of New York, at this time, he saw very little, but on a later visit grew to love it as he would not have thought possible when he first arrived in America. A particularly attractive spot to him was Washington Square, where he spent many hours sitting on the benches under the trees enjoying the frank conversation of the children who used the park as a playground. On one