Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/69

 expansion over the Territories. With all the fine enthusiasm of his noble nature he greeted the anti-slavery movement, then rising all over the North, as the dawn of a new era, and we pledged ourselves mutually to meet on the field in a common endeavor if that great cause should ever call for our aid.

I was invited to stay for the midday dinner, which I did. It was a very plain but good farmer's meal. Mrs. Hecker, who had cooked it, also helped in serving it. Two rather rough-looking men in shirt-sleeves, the farm-hands, sat with us at the table. This, as Hecker informed me, was the rule of the house. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” said he. But this fraternity did not prevent him from giving one of the farm-hands, who had in some way displeased him, after dinner, in my presence, a “dressing down” with a fluency, vigor, and richness of language which I should hardly have thought possible, had I not heard it.

From Hecker's farm I went to Chicago, and I shall never forget the first night I passed in that city. I arrived there by a belated train about an hour after midnight. An omnibus took me to the Tremont Hotel, where I was informed that every room in the house was occupied. The clerk directed me to another house, and I started out, valise in hand. The omnibus was gone and no hack to be had, and I walked to two or three other hostelries with the same result. Trying to follow the directions I had last received, I somehow lost my way, and overcome with fatigue I sat down on a curbstone, hoping that a policeman or some other philanthropic person would come that way.

Chicago had at that time sidewalks made of wooden planks, under which, it appeared, rats in incalculable numbers had made their nests. Troops of them I saw moving about in the gaslight. As I was sitting still, they playfully scampered