Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/104

 satisfaction of all. And when a traveling company of players honored the town with a visit, a stage was quickly improvised in the same hall, and everybody came to enjoy the spectacles which nobody was disposed to criticise unnecessarily, although some of us remembered that we had seen better things.

I had built a modest but pretty comfortable cottage on a little farm which I had bought in the outskirts of the town. My wife, being the kindest and loveliest of hostesses, made our house a sort of social center for the large circle of our relatives living near and a number of persons of agreeable conversation whom we had gathered around us. We were also sometimes visited by friends from the East. Thus we never lacked company, even during the hard Wisconsin winter; and aside from lively talks about politics, and philosophy, and the various news of the day, and personal affairs, we had social dinners and suppers, very informal and simple ones, to be sure, as well as evening parties with music, and sometimes with charades and living pictures. Even a masked ball was once ventured upon which was long remembered as a great success. While the dresses were not gorgeous, some of them were intentionally comical, and others no less comical by the seriousness of their ambition. The company enjoyed themselves so intensely that the dawn of day came unawares upon them, and, there having been a heavy snow-fall during the night, we had to carry the maskers back to their homes in installments on our big farm wagon, much to the amused astonishment of the townspeople who meanwhile had got out of their beds and saw the strange apparitions of knights, Turks, monks, harlequins, odalisks, shepherdesses, etc., pass by shivering in the morning frost.

Life in the small Western town naturally lacked a great many of the enjoyments which, in the older and larger cities,