58 WALL STREET AND THE WILDS 



"Not Sumter, but Moultrie, has fallen!" pan- 

 demonium broke loose. Hats and handkerchiefs 

 were tossed in air, canes and umbrellas waved, 

 and strangers embraced, while cheers were 

 mingled with sobs. While the spell was upon 

 me that night I wrote of the event with boyish 

 abandon, and the unbidden tears often fill my 

 eyes as I think of an evening in my own home a 

 decade later, when Henry Ward Beecher, while 

 running over my scrap books came upon the effu- 

 sion and read it with his arm around me. 



At this later time my steamship office was at 

 5 Bowling Green, and occasionally it happened 

 that word was brought to me: 



"Mr. Beecher is in his buggy, outside." 



Little it mattered who was with me, or how im- 

 portant the business, directors' meeting or other- 

 wise, in another minute I was seated beside my 

 friend, the hero of my imagination since first I 

 met him at the home of his famous sister, Harriet 

 Beecher Stowe, in Andover. For an hour he 

 would drive through the streets of lower New 

 York, where then there was little of traffic to in- 



