But it all appears very fantastic in the retrospect, that Teutonic period of my self-culture, and I am not sure that one fact of it is more fantastic than another. Such was my zeal for everything German that I once lunched at one of the German beer-saloons which rather abounded in Columbus, on Swiss cheese with French mustard spread over it and a tall glass of lager beer, then much valued as a possible transition from the use of the strong waters more habitual with Americans than now; but it made me very sick, and I was obliged to forego it as an expression of my love for German poetry. To a little earlier period must have belonged the incident of my going to see "_Die Räuber_" of Schiller, which I endured with iron resolution from the beginning to the end. It was given, I believe, by amateurs, and I tried my best to imagine that I understood it as it went on, but probably I did not, though I would have been loath to own the fact to any of the few German families who then formed my whole acquaintance with society. I never afterward met them at American houses; the cleavage between the two races in everything but politics was absolute; though the Germans were largely anti-slavery, and this formed common ground for them and natives of like thinking who did not know them socially.
In those first winters my knowledge of American society was confined to the generalized hospitality of the large evening receptions which some of the leading citizens used to give the two Houses of the legislature, including the correspondents and reporters attached to them. I cannot say just how or when I began to divine that these occasions were not of the first fashion, though the hosts and hostesses might have been so. There were great suppers, mainly of oysters, to which our distance from the sea lent distinction, and ice-cream, and sometimes, if I may trust a faint reverberation from the past as of blown corks, champagne. There was also dancing, and when some large, old-fashioned house was not large enough, a wooden pavilion was improvised over the garden to give the waltzes and quadrilles verge enough. I recall my share in the suppers, if not in the dancing, but my deficiency was far more than made up by the excess of a friend, who must then have been hard upon sixty years of age, yet was of a charming gaiety and an unimpaired youthfulness. He stood up in every quadrille, and he danced to the end of the evening, with a demure smile on his comely, smooth-shaven, rosy face, and a light, mocking self-consciousness in his kind eyes, as if he would agree as to any incongruity the spectator might find in his performance. He was one of the clerks of the House, an old politician, and the editor of a leading Cleveland newspaper, which he chose to leave for the pleasures of the capital. From his experience of the system which he was part of he whimsically professed to believe that as great legislative wisdom could be assembled by knocking down every other man in a crowd and dragging him into the House or Senate as by the actual method of nomination and election. At times he would support the theory of a benevolent despotism, and advocate the establishment of what he called a one-man power as the ideal form of government. I owed him much in the discharge of duties which my finding the most important in the world must have amused him, and when he went back to his newspaper he left me to write the legislative letters for it.