Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/381

 balanced in the other, with astonishing skill, a bowl of coffee without spilling a drop, and screamed at us to the utmost of his power to make us understand the surprising intelligence that the weather was still bad and we could not expect to have any cooking done. We had therefore to be satisfied with what he then offered us. Thirty years later, when I was Secretary of the Interior in the government of the United States, I visited, during the presidential campaign of 1880, the town of Rondout on the Hudson, where I had to deliver a speech. After the meeting I crossed the river on a ferryboat in order to take the railroad train to New York at the station of Rhinebeck opposite. In the dusk of the evening a man approached me on the ferryboat and spoke to me in German. “Excuse me,” he said, “that I address you. I should like to know whether you recognize me.”

I regretted not being able to do so.

“Do you not remember,” he asked, “the mate on the ‘Little Anna,’ Captain Niemann, on which you and Professor Kinkel, in November, 1850, sailed from Rostock to England?”

“What!” I exclaimed, “do I remember the mate who every morning stood in the cabin with his bowl of coffee and executed such wonderful dances? Yes.”

“And you always made such funny remarks about it which set me laughing, if I could understand them in the terrible noise. That mate was I.”

I was much rejoiced, and we shook hands vigorously. I asked how he was doing and he replied, “Very well, indeed.”

I invited him to visit me in Washington, which he promised to do. I should have been glad to continue the conversation longer, but in the meantime we had reached the eastern bank of the Hudson. My railroad train stood ready and in a few minutes I was on the way to New York. The mate did not