Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/183

  and denounced him as an assassin, a hypocrite and false pretender, a cruel tyrant, and a downright pirate. He was industriously pursuing his inquiries concerning that infamous person, and he was going to expose the fraud in a book which he hoped to publish before long. This impeachment of the character and career of Columbus was indeed not entirely new to me, but I had never heard it argued with such warmth of feeling, such honesty of wrath. As I traveled day after day with Judge Goodrich and slept with him in the same rooms of the primitive country taverns of Minnesota, and sometimes in the same bed, and as our intimacy grew, I liked him more and more for the rectitude of his principles, the ingenuousness and generous breadth of his sympathies, and the wide reach as well as the occasional quaintness of his mental activities. He appeared to me as a representative of American sturdiness of manhood and of the peculiar American intellectual ambition developed under the rough conditions of primitive life in a new country. Some of his oddities amused me greatly. When he shaved himself he always sat down on the edge of the bed, rested his elbows on his knees, and then plied the razor without any looking-glass before him. I asked him whether this was not a dangerous method of performing that delicate function; but he assured me solemnly that it was the only way of shaving that made him feel sure that he would not cut his throat.

His oratory, too, was somewhat singular. We agreed to alternate in the order of proceedings in addressing audiences; Judge Goodrich was to speak first at one meeting and I at the next, so that we listened to one another a great deal. His speeches always had a sound, sober, and strong body of argument, enlivened by some robust anecdotes after the fashion of the stump, but he regularly closed with an elaborate peroration