Page:Visit of the Hon. Carl Schurz to Boston, March 1881.pdf/80

Rh dinner hour pressed, the organist somewhat rudely removed Handel from the seat, and said, “You don't know how to do it; listen to me: I can play them out.” Now, Mr. President, you have picked me out, with a great deal of judgment, to “play them out.”

The sight of our guest tonight makes me feel like an old man; because it suggests one of those events of years and years ago which mark the perspective of life,—just as some fine and great trees in an avenue exaggerate its length. It was in the year 1848 that I found myself, a long-legged Yankee boy, in the city of Frankfort-on-the-Main, where the then celebrated German Assembly, or Diet as it was called, was holding its session. Political questions had come to a head; and the very day I arrived, there was a rising. At midnight a considerable mob attacked the hotel where we were, with the laudable purpose of drawing forth an obnoxious deputy, to make an example of him. And this they might have succeeded in doing, had it not been for an enormous Englishman, who at that moment was sleeping in an upper chamber. I am not aware that this large Englishman had any precise notions on abstract politics; but he strongly objected to being waked out of a comfortable sleep by any body of men, whether Republicans or Legitimists. He descended in extreme wrath, six steps at a time; appeared on the ground floor, literally stripped for action, and fell upon the mob like a pile-driver, just as they were breaking through the porte cochère.