Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/23

 scarcely any hopelessly poor here. It is generally thought here that nobody need be poor.”

In the changing course of time I have often remembered this conversation.

It was not easy to find a place of rest for our first night in the New World. We had heard of the Astor House as the best hostelry in New York. But the Astor House was full to overflowing, and so our carriage had laboriously to work its way from hotel to hotel, through the confusion of omnibuses and drays and other vehicles, up the thundering Broadway. But in none of them did we find a vacant room until finally we reached Fourteenth Street, where the Union Square Hotel, which has subsequently been turned into a theater and then into a hotel again, called the Morton House, offered to us a hospitable abode—a very plainly furnished room, but sufficient for our needs.

The recollection of our first dinner at the Union Square Hotel is still vivid in my mind. It was a table d'hôte, if I remember rightly, at five o'clock in the afternoon. Dinner-time was announced by the fierce beating of a gong, an instrument which I heard for the first time on that occasion. The guests then filed into a large, bare dining-room with one long row of tables. Some fifteen or twenty negroes, clad in white jackets, white aprons, and white cotton gloves, stood ready to conduct the guests to their seats, which they did with broad smiles and curiously elaborate bows and foot scrapings. A portly colored head-waiter in a dress coat and white necktie, whose manners were strikingly grand and patronizing, directed their movements. When the guests were seated, the head-waiter struck a loud bell; then the negroes rapidly filed out and soon reappeared carrying large soup tureens covered with bright silver covers. They planted themselves along the table at certain