Chapter IX

I was not only again at congenial work, but I was in the place that I loved best in the world, though as well as I can now visualize the town which had so great charm for me then I can find little beauty in it. High Street was the only street of commerce except for a few shops that had strayed down from it into Town Street, and the buildings which housed the commerce were not impressive, and certainly not beautiful. A few hotels, three or four, broke the line of stores; there was the famous restaurant of Ambos, and some Jewish clothiers; but above all, besides a music and picture store, there was an excellent bookstore, where I supplied myself from a good stock of German books, with Heine and Schiller and Uhland, and where one could find all the new publications. The streets of dwellings stretched from High Street to the right, over a practically interminable plain, and shorter streets on the left dropped to the banks of the Scioto where a lower level emulated the inoffensive unpicturesqueness of the other plain. A dusty bridge crossed the river, where in the slack-water ordinarily drowsed a flock of canal-boats which came and went on the Ohio Canal. Some old-fashioned, dignified dwellings stood at the northern end of High Street, with the country close beyond, but the houses which I chiefly knew were on those other streets. I cannot say now whether they added to the beauty of the avenues or not; I suppose that oftenest they did not embellish them architecturally, though they were set in wide grounds among pleasant lawns and gardens. The young caller knew best their parlors in winter and their porches in summer; there was little or no lunching or dining for any one except as a guest of pot-luck; and the provisioning was mainly, if not wholly, from the great public market. Greengrocers' and butchers' shops there were none, but that public market was of a sumptuous variety and abundance, as I can testify from a visit paid it with a householding friend who drove to it in his carriage, terribly long before breakfast, and provisioned himself among the other fathers and the mothers who thronged the place with their market-baskets. This was years after my last years in Columbus, when I was a passing guest; while I lived there I was citizen of a world that knew no such household cares or joys.

On my return from my travels, though I was so glad to be again in Columbus, I no longer gave myself up to society with such abandon as before. I kept mostly to those two houses where I was most intimate, and in my greater devotion to literature I omitted to make the calls which were necessary to keep one in society even in a place so unexacting as our capital. Somewhat to my surprise, somewhat more to my pain, I found that society knew how to make reprisals for such neglect; I heard of parties which I was not asked to, and though I might not have gone to them, I suffered from not being asked. Only in one case did I regret my loss very keenly, and that was at a house where Lincoln's young private secretaries, Hay and Nicolay, passing through to Washington before the inauguration, had asked for me. They knew of me as the author of "The Pilot's Story" and my other poems in the _Atlantic Monthly_, as well as that campaign life of Lincoln which I should not have prided myself on so much; but I had been justly ignored by the hostess in her invitations, and they asked in vain. I fully shared after the fact any disappointment they may have felt, but I doubt if I was afterward more constant in my social duties; I was intending more and more to devote myself to poetry, and with a hand freer than ever, if that were possible, in the newspaper, I was again feeling the charm of journalism, and was giving to it the nights which I used to give to calls and parties.

I did not go back to live in the College, but with Price I took a room and furnished it; we went together for our meals to the different restaurants, a sort of life more conformable to my notion of the life of the literary freelance in New York. But let not the reader suppose from this large way of speaking that there were many restaurants in Columbus, or much choice in them. The best, the only really good one, was that of Ambos in High Street, where, as I have said before, we silvern youth resorted sometimes for the midnight oyster, which in handsome half-dozens was brought us on chafing-dishes, to be stewed over spirit-lamps and flavored according to our taste with milk and butter. We cooked them for ourselves, but our rejected, or protested, Clive Newcome was the most skilled in an oyster stew, and we all emulated him as we sat at the marble table in one of the booths at the side of the room. In hot weather a claret punch sometimes crowned the night with a fearful joy, and there was something more than bacchanalian in having it brought with pieces of ice clucking in a pitcher borne by the mystical Antoine from the bar where he had mixed it: that Antoine whom we romanced as of strange experiences and recondite qualities, because he was of such impregnable silence, in his white apron, with his face white above it, damp with a perennial perspiration, which even in the hottest weather did not quite gather into drops. We each attempted stories of him, and somewhere yet I have among my manuscripts of that time a very affected study done in the spirit and manner of the last author I had been reading.

I suppose he was not really of any intrinsic interest, but if he had been of the greatest I could not have afforded, even on my increased salary, to resort to Ambos's for frequent observation of him. Ambos's was the luxury of high occasions, and Price and I went rather for our daily fare to the place of an Americanized German near our office, where the cooking was very good, and the food without stint in every variety, but where the management was of such an easy kind that the rats could sometimes be seen clambering over the wall of the storeroom beyond where we sat. There was not then the present feeling against those animals, which were respected as useful scavengers, and we were rather amused than revolted by them, being really still boys with boys' love of bizarre and ugly things. Once we had for our guest in that place the unique genius destined to so great fame as Artemus Ward; he shared our interest in the rats, and we joked away the time at a lunch of riotous abundance; I should say superabundance if we had found it too much. For a while also we ate at the house of a lady who set a table faultless to our taste, but imagined that the right way to eat pie was with a knife, and never gave a fork with it. Here for a while we had the company of the young _Cincinnati Gazette_ correspondent, Whitelaw Reid, joyful like ourselves under the cloud gathering over our happy world. One day, after the cloud had passed away in the thunder and lightning of the four years' Civil War, he came radiant to my little house at Cambridge with a piece of news which I found it as difficult to realize for fact in my sympathy with him as he could have wished. "Just think! Horace Greeley has asked me to be managing editor of the _Tribune_, and he offers me six thousand dollars a year!" A great many years afterward we met in a train coming from Boston to New York, when he brought the talk round to the Spanish War, and, for whatever reason, to his part in the Treaty of Paris and the purchase of the Philippines. "_I_ did that," he said. But I could not congratulate him upon this as I did upon his coming to the editorship of the _Tribune_, being of a different mind about the acquisition of the Philippines.