Read 1876 for Free Online Page B

the street.
    “What sort of corn does he find in December?” I asked as we turned into Fifth Avenue.
    “From Florida. The railroads, Schuyler, the railroads! They have changed everything. For the good, for the bad.” He took my arm. “Do come and see our new quarters. We moved last summer to the corner of Fulton and the Broadway—a ten-story building—a terrible expense, frankly, but convenient. Also, the presses are hidden away at the bottom, and we even have a perpendicular railway which I refuse to set foot in. One must always walk! Walk, climb, walk, climb.”
    Touching his hat to those who recognized him, Bryant walked briskly south toward Washington Square Park. As best I could, I kept up with him. Each morning Bryant walks the three miles from his house to the Evening Post .Like a fool, I agreed to accompany him.
    Now, several hours later, as I sit in the parlour of this hotel suite, waiting to take tea with John Bigelow, there is a thunderstorm in my ears whilst my fingernails have exchanged their usual healthy pink for a most disagreeable mauve tint.
    I am drinking rum and tea, and hope not to die before teatime.
    Assuming that I survive my gallop down Broadway with Bryant, I did do the right thing, for not only is he an editor to whom I am beholden but he knows more about the politics of the city than anyone outside prison, saving Mr. Tweed.
    On every corner newspaper posters proclaim the true story of Tweed’s escape from the Ludlow Street jail. Apparently, the Boss was allowed each day to go for a drive with two keepers. Yesterday, after a tour of the northern end of the island, he was allowed to pay a call on his wife in their mansion at Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue.
    Just now my hack driver pointed out to me this sinister palace—brownstone again!—built with stolen money. In the course of yesterday’s visit, Tweed went upstairs, and vanished. Obviously, he is a great rogue, but popular—at least amongst the lower orders, whom he gave, from time to time, small commissions, as it were, on the vast sums of money that he and his ring were stealing from the public at large.
    During our walk Bryant showed me the new Court House. “I calculate that the money Tweed and his people stole while building that temple to Mammon could have paid off the national debt.”
    “But how did it happen?” I was genuinely curious. Most of the city’s officials have always been moderately corrupt, as the younger Gallatin assured Governor Tilden; but it is not usual for the same group to remain in power year after year stealing millions in full view of the public.
    But I was not to be instructed, for just then we were ambushed in City Hall Park by what at first looked to be an enormous green umbrella with no one attached to it. But then the umbrella was raised and its attachment became visible, to my astonishment and to Bryant’s dismay.
    The man introduced himself to us, in a piercing voice: “Citizen Train, Mr. Bryant! Your nemesis! Yours, too, sir.” He gave me a courtly bow; and I noted that he was wearing a sort of French military greatcoat crossed with a broad scarlet sash.
    Citizen Train indeed! The story of George Francis Train is well known to us at Paris. A New Englander, he became a millionaire in his youth from shipping. Later he helped to found the Union Pacific railroad; to finance that project, he created the infamous holding company known as Cr é dit Mobilier which set about in the most systematic way to bribe most of the Congress, including General Grant’s first vice president, Schuyler Colefax.
    Happily for Mr. Train, he had gone mad before all these bribes were given seven—eight?—years ago. Forced out of the Union Pacific, he went to Ireland and tried to expel the English, who put him in jail for a time. Train then moved on to France in 1870, and became a Communard; he helped organize those horrors that took so many lives—as I have described at length elsewhere.
    Why am I writing