Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/400

 a general favorite. He had at that time plunged deep into the socialistic poetry of that period, in which he saw a promising symptom of a new mental and moral revival of the human race. Some French poems of that kind he translated with extraordinary skill into sonorous German verse, which he read to us at our social meetings to our great delight. He was also a generous listener, and although very deaf, professed great interest in our musical performances, giving his sometimes startling judgment in a thundering voice. We all loved him for his high enthusiasms, his ardent sympathies, the frank honesty of his nature and the robust ingenuousness with which he promulgated his occasionally very eccentric opinions of men and things. At times his oddities afforded us much amusement, which he good-naturedly shared, frequently laughing loudest with childlike astonishment at the queer exhibitions he had made of himself. He might well have served as the original to many caricatures of the “absent-minded professor,” who is a favorite subject of funny pictures in German periodicals.

Now and then he was seen on the street smoking a long German student's pipe, as he had done in Bonn. In Paris the passersby would stand still with amazement when they beheld so unaccustomed an apparition, and soon he was known in the Latin Quarter as “l'homme à la longue pipe.” One day he came into my room with a hairbrush under his arm, and when I asked him, “Strodtmann, what are you carrying there?” he looked at the thing at first with great surprise, and then laughed boisterously and said, with his loud voice, “Why, this is my hairbrush. I thought it was a book from which I wished to read to you.” Another time when he visited me I noticed that his face bore the expression of extraordinary seriousness, if not trouble. “I have only one pair of boots,” he said; “one of the boots is still pretty good, but the other, you see”—and here he