The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

ion of Hungary, set all America in a flame of shallow enthusiasm, and I went to hear his appeals.

whom the English language was native. Before making his discourse in any town, he took the pains to find out something of the local history, and thus touched the patriotism of his audience in the parish bounds, and the past glories of America were revived in terms of a new and strange flattery. We were like the Athenians after hearing t

s. At Washington he came into contact with the statesmanship and the demagogy of the republic, and, while the former gave him a magnificent reception, the latter quietly and undemonstratively quenched his hopes. The South had no sympathy with Hungarian or any other liberty, and we felt the chill fall on Kossuth and his eloquence. But, for the politicians, there was something to be made out of him and the naturalized vote

nt in, I found him in a state of nauseated irritation, and he broke out, saying, "Mr. Stillman, if your country does not get rid of these politicians it will be ruined in fifty years." He had just received a Democratic committee, which had formally promised him, in return for the influence he might exert in favor of their candidate, two ships of war ready for service, and a sum of money, th

unclaimed by any power, but on which, he told me, the flag of the United States had been hoisted some years before by one of our cruisers; evidently as a joke on the part of some of our sailors. I was to visit it and report on its fitness for his purpose; but negotiations dragged, or there was some hitch, nothing was concluded until Kossuth's departure for Europe became necessary, and Pulzsky, his alt

negotiations with the Americans, and it was finally decided that I should go to Milan and carry the proclamations which Kossuth was to issue to the Hungarian soldiers of the Italian garrison there, ordering them, in case of any revolt, not to fire on insurgent Italians. This was in prevision of the insurrection which Mazzini had determined for the spring of 1853, and with regard to which there were grave dissensions between the two chiefs. Kossuth was not ready for the Hungarian rising,

he Danube. Having received information that Szemere, who was then opposed to Kossuth, was about to disclose their hiding-place to the Austrian government, Kossuth determined to remove them, and organized an expedition to this end, of which I was to become the apparent head. The description of the hiding-place was written in a most complicated cipher dispatch, the key to which was contained in a stanza of a song known to Kossuth's correspondent in Pesth. Each letter in the dispatch was represented by a fraction, of which the numerator was the number of the letter in one of the lines of the song, and the denominator the number of the line. This dispatch was then written in four parts; the first, fifth, ninth, etc., letters being put in the first part; the second, sixth,

ory I was to write to Kossuth all the political information I could collect, the messages being conveyed in a cryptograph in which the form of the letter was to be that of a correspondence between lovers. The words composing the message were to be written on spaces left in a mask of which each had a copy, and the spaces between the words then filled up so that the letter would carry some meaning when read as a whole. Love

he ancestral estate of the Le Hardys included part of the field of Waterloo, and we visited it in company with M. Le Hardy, who pointed out the trenches made by the heavy artillery of Napoleon still distinguishable on the surface of the fields in spite of the subsequent ploughings. I suppose that his familiarity with the fields from his boyhood gives authority to his assurance that the depressions we saw were the effect of the ploughing of the guns in the wet, soft earth, and did not exist in the na

nn in whose drinking-room still burned a light, and in which I found a night's lodging. Such a primitive state of civilization was to me, fresh from Paris and Brussels, romantic. At Berlin I made the acquaintance of Varnhagen von Ense, through a letter of introduction from Frau Schmidt, my republican refugee friend of London. He treated me with great consideration, and promised me a winter of brilliant social life if I would sta

ppose to keep up my courage in the perilous business he was sending me on. One of his agents had been sent on a round tour with instructions for certain officers or soldiers, and, having been detected in communication with the barracks and arrested, a memorandum book was found on him in which, amongst many addresses of persons to whom he had no mission, those to which he was directed were interspersed. All were arrested, among them the Vienna agent, who, ignorant of the reason of his arrest, suspecting treachery, and fearing the disclosures that might be extorted from

s, and the lover of one of his daughters, as a messenger from Kossuth! If my hair did not rise on end, I am certain that at no crisis of my life could it ever have done so. During my ten days' stay in Vienna and the four weeks I afterward passed in Pesth, I never lost a nervous apprehension of the consequences of this singular imprudence, for I was in the enemy's country, on business the slightest suspicion of which meant an obsc

the mission I was on, and made me see very clearly that Kossuth overrated his influence on the Hungarians after the débacle, for which he was largely responsible. But it never occurred to me that it was possible to withdraw or do less than obey my instructions. I reported to Kossuth that the on

y, this time angrily delivered. Utterly at a loss what to do, I wrote at once to Kossuth that the person wanted was not at the address indicated. Instead of writing to him to find me and giving him my address, Kossuth only reiterated through the post the former instructions. I repeated the denial, and then waited. In conversation with the hotel people I inquired as fully as was possible without exciting suspicion, about persons of liberal tendencies and such as I conceived that I might make use of, and studied the position as best I could. Pending this study I was summoned to the police headquarters to give an account of myself. This I did in a manner which must have been satisfactory, as they found that I knew little German and was a very stupid and un

ty report the fact, and my arrest would follow. In my ignorance of the fact that the city was under martial law, and that without a pass no one could be in the streets after 8 P.M., I had waited till 9 to be screened by the darkness, and then, walking down the river on the dike, I slipped down to the water's edge by the path, and gently tossed the boots into the rapid current. Seeing the dangerous articles float away into the dark, I turned to go up the dike to the road running along the top of it, when, to my dismay, I heard a se

p. I was not really frightened, but I cannot deny that I felt very nervous, as he came up, and, in an inquisitorial tone, asked, "What are you doing here?" I replied in German which was certainly comical and not a little shaky, for it was a fragmentary remembrance of the German read in my early college course, and never since revived, that "I was doing nothing-that I was a strangers" (ich bin ein Fremden), and had come out to see the effects on the river, pointing to the glimmering lights; but, fortunately, my German was so funny that he burst out laugh

eply to two urgent letters describing the position I was in, and being unable to give any reason for a longer stay, or to find the people I was sent to, I determined to go back to London and start again with fuller oral instructions and a better understanding of the difficulties. I went to Orzovensky and frankly told him my errand, and asked him if I might leave the dispatches in some place known to him, so that he could indicate t

o the good doctor in anything but the faintest whisper, and my tongue clattered in my mouth, as dry as a stick, in an instant. I threw the dispatches in the sink and took the next train for Vienna, undisturbed by the train running off the track in the night, in the greater anxiety of my position, and, after making at the station of Vienna only a hasty lunch on a boiled sausage and a roll, continued my journey by express until I was out of the Austrian dominions, and stopped to sleep at Frankfort. My panic was

and to his not having then informed his correspondent that I was on the ground expecting to see him, and that he must look out for me. But he only exclaimed, with a tone of regret, "Three months lost!" yet there was, probably, a reciprocal disapproval of our methods of carrying on a conspiracy; for, while he was most gravely disappointed at getting no res

t I ought to have sought out the friends at the Tiger café, where they were in the habit of meeting publicly, though he knew that the city was swarming with spies, and that the state of siege existed (and of this, even, he did not warn me), and that my chief difficulty was to avoid being brought into contact with suspected Hungarians; nor did he recollect that he had given precise instructions to avoid anything which might lead any one to suppose that I was more than an objectless traveler. I was most reasonably disguste

sed to abandon his impracticable ideals; and I heard from actual participants that there was great dissatisfaction amongst the officers with his assumption of dignity, out of place, and of command, for which he was incompetent. The fact was that he could not distinguish between the practicable and the impracticable, and though not so visionary as Mazzini, he believed that his power of arousing the wild enthusiasm of the Honveds and masses of Hungarians, due to his marvelous eloquence, was enough to carry on war with, and he would not see that, from the moment that Russia intervened, it was only a question of time when and how the insurrection should end. Then his treatment of the Slavonic element of the population was fatal to the movement. The Serbs only asked to be admi

the Hungarian soldiers, as had been ordered, refused to fire on the insurgents and had been decimated and sent to Croatia. More than thirty years after, I went to see Kossuth at Turin, and introduced myself as the young man who went to Hungary for him to carry off the crown jewels. He burst out with an impetuous denial of the existence of the expedition. "But," said I, "I have your letters writt