Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/175

 all over the Northern country. This he knew, and he thoroughly relished it. All sorts of societies and public organizations had made him their honorary member, and he appeared among them as often as he could. Whenever he entered a theater, which he did very often, the orchestra would strike up “Marching through Georgia,” and the whole audience would rise and clap their hands, sometimes even sing the tune, and his rugged face fairly glowed and beamed with pleasure. Every social circle greeted him as a most welcome guest, and at receptions, and evening parties, and other gatherings, the “pretty girls” would come up and kiss him—and how he did enjoy all this!

As he grew older his mind lost little if anything of its original vivacity. His conversation bubbled with quaint conceits, and odd expressions poured forth in the utmost abundance with great freedom. There could be no more entertaining dinner companion. While he lived in New York he sometimes dined with me and I with him; but he was most interesting when he came uninvited and unexpected, “just to make a call,” which he did now and then in the evening after dinner. Then he usually seemed to have something on his mind that he wanted to talk about. So I remember him one evening after nine o'clock suddenly bursting into my drawing-room, when, after having saluted my family, he at once precipitated himself upon the subject then uppermost in his thoughts. “Do you know,” he said, “that ancient myth of Jason and the ‘golden fleece’ is no mere myth at all. It is history. You know those old Greeks were great pirates and filibusters. They heard somehow that in a foreign country not very far away there were rivers or creeks carrying gold sand, and that the natives managed to get that gold sand by putting sheepskins with the wool on into the rivers or creeks, in which the gold sand