Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/343

 After having spent Christmas with my family in Wiesbaden I went to Berlin. I wrote a note to Lothar Bucher, whom I had last seen sixteen years before as a fellow refugee in London, and whom I wished very much to meet again. Bucher answered promptly that he would indeed be glad to see me again, but would I not like to make the acquaintance of “the Minister” (Bismarck), who had expressed a wish to have a talk with me? I replied, of course, that I should be happy, etc., whereupon I received within an hour an invitation from Count Bismarck himself (he was then only a count) to visit him at eight o'clock that same evening at the Chancellor's palace on the Wilhelmstrasse. Promptly at the appointed hour I was announced to him and he received me at the door of a room of moderate size, the table and some of the furniture of which were covered with books and papers, evidently his working cabinet. There I beheld the great man whose name was filling the world—tall, erect and broad-shouldered, and on those Atlas shoulders that massive head which everybody knows from pictures—the whole figure making the impression of something colossal—then at the age of 53 in the fullness of physical and mental vigor. He was dressed in a general's undress uniform, unbuttoned. His features, which evidently could look very stern when he wished, were lighted up with a friendly smile. He stretched out his hand, which gave mine a vigorous grasp. “Glad you have come,” he said in a voice which appeared rather high-keyed, issuing from so huge a form, but of pleasing timbre. “I think I must have seen you before,” was his first remark while we were still standing up facing one another. “It was sometime in the early fifties on a railway train from Frankfurt to Berlin. There was a young man sitting opposite to me who, from some picture of you which I had seen in a pictorial paper, I thought