STEAMSHIPS AND SUBSIDIES 207 



Letters were read from many who were unable 

 to be with ns ; of notable interest, as I remember 

 them, were those of John Hay and Whitelaw 

 Reid. Tom Nast put the blame of his dereliction 

 on Harper Bros, in a telegram which I received 

 at the dock as we were about to leave. He added 

 that I had better take it out of S. S. Conant, who, 

 with his wife, was to be with us. Conant avoided 

 criticism by pleading that he was the bearer of 

 excuses from Bayard Taylor, including a poem 

 dedicated to his would-be shipmates, a companion 

 piece to his Bedouin love song. Frank Church 

 declared that Taylor was a friend of his and de- 

 nounced the poem as worthless and a fraud, prob- 

 ably written by Conant himself, and he appealed 

 to William Cullen Bryant to support that view. 

 Bryant decided that it was clearly a forgery, it 

 being much better than the Bedouin song, though 

 he doubted if Conant could have written it. 



The night of the 29th made a dent in my mem- 

 ory which will stay there while life lasts. The sea 

 was calm and I think the moon was full. No 

 ship was in sight and the only sound was the 



