to Europe, Asia, and Africa” thundering after his name in one awful blast!  I had carefully prepared myself to take rather a back seat in that ship because of the uncommonly select material that would alone be permitted to pass through the camel’s eye of that committee on credentials; I had schooled myself to expect an imposing array of military and naval heroes and to have to set that back seat still further back in consequence of it maybe; but I state frankly that I was all unprepared for this crusher.

I fell under that titular avalanche a torn and blighted thing.  I said that if that potentate must go over in our ship, why, I supposed he must —­but that to my thinking, when the United States considered it necessary to send a dignitary of that tonnage across the ocean, it would be in better taste, and safer, to take him apart and cart him over in sections in several ships.

Ah, if I had only known then that he was only a common mortal, and that his mission had nothing more overpowering about it than the collecting of seeds and uncommon yams and extraordinary cabbages and peculiar bullfrogs for that poor, useless, innocent, mildewed old fossil the Smithsonian Institute, I would have felt so much relieved.

During that memorable month I basked in the happiness of being for once in my life drifting with the tide of a great popular movement.  Everybody was going to Europe—­I, too, was going to Europe.  Everybody was going to the famous Paris Exposition—­I, too, was going to the Paris Exposition.  The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the various ports of the country at the rate of four or five thousand a week in the aggregate.  If I met a dozen individuals during that month who were not going to Europe shortly, I have no distinct remembrance of it now.  I walked about the city a good deal with a young Mr. Blucher, who was booked for the excursion.  He was confiding, good-natured, unsophisticated, companionable; but he was not a man to set the river on fire.  He had the most extraordinary notions about this European exodus and came at last to consider the whole nation as packing up for emigration to France.  We stepped into a store on Broadway one day, where he bought a handkerchief, and when the man could not make change, Mr. B. said: 

“Never mind, I’ll hand it to you in Paris.”

“But I am not going to Paris.”

“How is—­what did I understand you to say?”

“I said I am not going to Paris.”

“Not going to Paris!  Not g——­ well, then, where in the nation are you going to?”

“Nowhere at all.”

“Not anywhere whatsoever?—­not any place on earth but this?”

“Not any place at all but just this—­stay here all summer.”

My comrade took his purchase and walked out of the store without a word —­walked out with an injured look upon his countenance.  Up the street apiece he broke silence and said impressively:  “It was a lie—­that is my opinion of it!”