ar, his associations indifferent. He was
drinking too much. In his public utterances he was more emphatic, more
caustic of tongue. If the loss of the nomination had disappointed him,
the death of Mrs. Douglas had overwhelmed him. He was not interested in
his Illinois Central. He was doing nothing with his large tract of land
three miles south of Madison Street. He was very well off. But he had
no heart to enjoy his prosperity. He was doing nothing about founding
his university. He was a giant sorely smitten, ready to rouse from
irritability into fury against his enemies. He was in a poor way to
master his own spirit and future.

I suggested to him a trip to Europe to forget his sorrows, to recuperate
his spirits. He liked the idea. But first he had to return to the
Senate. There he spoke of Cuba and its annexation, almost in the same
words he had used when talking to me that midnight on the roof of the
hotel in Havana. Bitterly he denounced the Clayton-Bulwer treaty.
Audaciously he excoriated England. Almost immediately he was off to
visit England, but not to see Queen Victoria, although invited to her
presence. He went to Russia, saw the Czar. He visited the Crimea and
Syria. From New Orleans I followed his travels. I had taken Dorothy
there to escape the Chicago winter.

CHAPTER XLVI

New Orleans had grown to be a city of 170,000 people. Its commerce was
enormous. It was the great entrepot of the continent's sugar and cotton
industries.

Day by day I stood on the wharves, watching the steamers unload and
load, gazing over the busy mass of humanity back of which was labor,
black and white, slave and free! The great Mississippi, broad and foul,
waking from its sleep in the lowlands above, gathering speed here,
feeling the call of the sea, begins to move with increased life. Across
from the city are lowlands, sugar refineries, smoke stacks. The negroes
call to each other, laugh with spontaneous, childlike humor. The wharf
officers, the brokers, pass with intense faces. It is hot. Sweat drips
from black faces and from white. Whips crack. Mules trot and stumble
over the loose and resounding boards. Heavy wheels rumble. And the life
of gambling, drinking, pleasure, crawls about the French quarter, along
Canal Street, on Royal Street. The bell in the Cathedral rings. I catch
the whiff of flowers. Gulls fly over the muddy water.

I think of Douglas far away in Russia, of all my life in its early days,
now growin