him, for that was the last occasion on which we met. I learned
that when Carlyle, who was then engaged in the preparation of those
seven tremendous volumes of _The Life of Frederick the Great_, made an
excursion into Germany for the purpose of getting a view of his hero's
battlefields, Dawson was one of his travelling companions--the other was
a German gentleman who, according to my old chiefs account, did a
great deal of what he Called the underground work on which Carlyle's
monumental edifice was reared. The trio, if I remember rightly, rested
at Munich and the historian expressed a wish to find some quiet place
in which he could assort his notes and at the same time enjoy a day or
two's repose. Dawson and his companion set themselves to work and found
a charming little farmhouse within easy distance of the city. "And
between ourselves," said he, "we weren't sorry to be left for a little
while to our own devices; we were like a pair of schoolboys broken
loose. We went to the theatre and afterwards dropped in to listen to the
music in the Beer Garden and altogether we made rather a late night of
it. We were breakfasting in the open air at our hotel the next morning
about eleven o'clock when suddenly I spied Carlyle with his coat
tails flying and his old felt hat rammed on angrily anyhow. He was
gesticulating wildly with his walking-stick and began to talk whilst he
was twenty yards away. 'Ca' ye that a quiet place?' he shouted, 'ca' ye
that a quiet place? At three o'clock they damned cocks began to crow,
and a hour later they damned oxen began to low and every dog was barking
for a mile around; and that,' he said, casting both hands to heaven as
if he were appealing for a judgment on some heart-breaking iniquity,
'and that's your notion of a quiet place!' The culprits looked guiltily
at each other, but for the life of them they could not refrain from
smiling; the smile became a laugh in spite of effort, and Carlyle, after
one withering glance at the pair of them and one frenzied exclamation of
'Ma Goad!' dropped suddenly into a chair and laughed uproariously."

When Emerson was in England, Carlyle and Dawson were his companions on
his visit to Salisbury Plain. They went to Stonehenge together and on
that day Carlyle was in one of his saddest and most pessimistic moods.
Life was not worth living--the whole world was rotten and wrong--and
he wondered, like the old monk in Longfellow's _Golden Legend_, why God
didn't lose