ssible
to inform himself privately whether the Prussian government had any
objection to my visiting Germany for a few weeks, and to let me have
his answer at Bremerhaven upon the arrival there of the steamer on
which I had taken passage. My intention was, in case the answer were
unfavorable, to sail at once from Bremen to England and to meet my
family there. Mr. Bancroft very kindly complied with my request, and
assured me in his letter which I found at Bremerhaven that the
Prussian government not only had no objection to my visiting Germany,
but that I should be welcome.

After having spent Christmas with my family in Wiesbaden, I went to
Berlin. I wrote a note to Lothar Bucher, whom I had last seen sixteen
years before as a fellow refugee in London, and whom I wished very
much to meet again. Bucher answered promptly that he would be glad
indeed to see me again, and asked if I would not like to make the
acquaintance of "the Minister" (Bismarck), who had expressed a wish to
have a talk with me. I replied, of course, that I should be happy,
etc., whereupon I received within an hour an invitation from Count
Bismarck himself (he was then only a count) to visit him at eight
o'clock that same evening at the Chancellor's palace on the
Wilhelmstrasse. Promptly at the appointed hour I was announced to him,
and he received me at the door of a room of moderate size, the table
and some of the furniture of which were covered with books and
papers,--evidently his working cabinet. There I beheld the great man
whose name was filling the world--tall, erect, and broad-shouldered,
and on those Atlas shoulders that massive head which everybody knows
from pictures--the whole figure making the impression of something
colossal--then at the age of fifty-three, in the fulness of physical
and mental vigor.

He was dressed in a General's undress uniform, unbuttoned. His
features, which evidently could look very stern when he wished, were
lighted up with a friendly smile. He stretched out his hand and gave
me a vigorous grasp. "Glad you have come," he said, in a voice which
appeared rather high-keyed, issuing from so huge a form, but of
pleasing timbre.

"I think I must have seen you before," was his first remark, while we
were still standing up facing one another. "It was some time in the
early fifties on a railway train from Frankfort to Berlin. There was a
young man sitting opposite me who, from some picture of you which I
had seen in a p