Read 1876 for Free Online

pencils, shoelaces. “Lost my arm at Chickamauga, sir.” And the dented tin cup is thrust accusingly in one’s face. Italians play hurdy-gurdies; shivering monkeys dance in the terrible cold. Homeless ragged children huddle together in doorways.
    I boarded a horsecar. Although the fare is five cents, I did not have any small change in my pocket—only fragments of remarkably filthy paper, some worth ten cents, twenty-five cents, or even a dollar. In my purse I carry a few half eagles: gold coins worth ten dollars apiece (to be used sparingly!). I have not yet obtained a twenty-dollar double eagle, my beautifully apt simile for this morning’s sun. But then, if the New York sun does not resemble United States currency, this whole great country is not El Dorado but a fraud.
    The horsecar swayed and rattled down Fifth Avenue. At the car’s center a small potbellied stove gave off insufficient heat, arid mephitic fumes. On the floor was straw as insulation. My fellow passengers were mostly men, mostly bearded, mostly potbellied like the stove. In fact, saving the desperate poor, everyone in New York is overweight: it seems to be the style. Yet when I was young (I must stop this sort of Nestorizing to myself and save it for the lecture platform and the press), the American was lean, lanky, often a bit stooped with leathery skin—and, of course, beardless. Some new race has obviously replaced the Yankees: a plump, voluptuous people, expanding gorgeously beneath their golden sun.
    On the omnibus everyone was reading a newspaper. That means that the newspaper business, my business, is good. The headline reported the escape from prison of Boss Tweed.
    I got off at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, cursing my age, for I move awkwardly. Like my countrymen, I, too, am fat, but at least have the excuse of advanced age and French cuisine.
    I walked down Sixteenth Street between rows of identical brownstone houses. Irish maids swept stairs; menservants (some Negro) took in garbage pails; the knife-and-scissors-sharpener man moved jingling from house to house. Wisps of white smoke began to appear from the chimneys as this most respectable street slowly awakened.
    I found William Cullen Bryant in his study, wearing a faded dressing gown and exercising with dumbbells. He did not stop, nor, I fear, did he recognize me until the maid announced my name.
    “Schuyler! How good of you to come. Sit right down. I shan’t be a moment.”
    So I sat in the dark study (the only light from two small coals burning in the grate) and watched Bryant do his exercises. He is as tall and spare as I remember, but his appearance has been entirely transformed by a vast beard that now circles his face like a mandala or magical bush ready at a moment’s notice to ignite, to emit the voice of God, but then I have always thought Bryant’s voice must sound not unlike that of the Deity on one of the Creator’s rare unagitated days.
    “You must exercise each morning, Schuyler ...”
    “I think about exercise almost every day.”
    “The blood must flow—flow!” Then dumbbells were put away, and Bryant excused himself. Through several shut doors, I heard the sound of him splashing about in water and knew the water was arctic cold.
    In no time at all, Bryant returned, fully clothed and the picture of, as the British say, rude health. Together we descended to the drafty downstairs dining room furnished with depressingly “sincere” Eastlake furniture.
    We breakfasted alone. Bryant’s wife died ten years ago and “my daughter Julia is out of the city. So I am a bachelor.”
    The maid served us hominy with milk, brown bread and butter. I waited for tea, for coffee—in vain.
    Bryant was greatly affected by Tweed’s escape from prison. “Of course he paid his gaolers. They’re all alike, you know.” Who “they” were he did not specify, but I assume that he meant the lower orders, the Democrats, the Irish, the enemies of the Republican