Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/318

  notwithstanding my revolutionary antecedents; and as I was by far the youngest member, the baby of the guild, some of the oldest veterans among them good-naturedly volunteered to take me patronizingly under their wings. The most benevolent among them was the minister of one of the smaller European States who had been in Madrid twenty-five or thirty years, and had grown gray in the service. He invited me with the warmest urgency to visit him in his bachelor quarters, where we then might have a quiet talk about things of interest to me.

I gladly responded, thinking that his long experience at the Spanish Court must have given him a deep insight into the elements at work in Spanish politics, and that I might learn from him something valuable. But after having plied him with questions to the best of my ability, I concluded that he never had bestowed any study on such things, and could not give me any information of value about them. What he did reveal to me with an air of mysterious importance was the contents of a finely-chiseled silver box, which formed the principal ornament on the table of his drawing-room. This box he unlocked carefully with a beautiful little silver key, and then took from it the decorations he had at various times received from kings and emperors. Holding them up one by one, and making them glitter in the light, he told me the story of each cross and star, how it had been bestowed upon him, and what distinction it conferred. When this subject was exhausted, he initiated me into the current gossip of the diplomatic corps, and in the “chronique scandaleuse” of the Spanish Court for thirty years back. This was my first distinctly professional lesson in practical diplomacy.

Here I struck the type of the small diplomat, whose delight is the social tittle-tattle, who, having no affairs of real