 
March 24, 1875.?--?Received a welcome and gossipy letter from Mrs. General Sherman. It reads:
I find this in my diary. On returning from Italy, we went over to “Wangensbach” by Kussnacht, on Lake Zurich, to live for a Summer or two. Wangensbach is an old chateau, or half castle-place, built by the Knights of St. John in the long, long ago. The walls are three feet thick, in places more, and there are all sorts of vaulted wine cellars and mysterious, walled-in places, under the building. The view from the windows and terrace, of blue lake and snowy mountains, is superb in the extreme. The chateau is now owned by Conrad Meyer, the Swiss poet and novelist. It is six miles to my office in the city, and I walk in and out daily, though I could go on the pretty steamers for a sixpence. Here, on a May day, “Baby HÉlÈne” came into the world, to gladden eight sweet years for us. Wangensbach.?--?Page 106. Spite of Joaquin Miller’s prognostications at Rome about plays, I was foolish enough to go ahead, and write a melodrama in blank verse. Schultz-Beuthen, a friend of Liszt and follower of Wagner, wrote delightful music for its songs. I went up to Mannheim, and attended the plays in the old theater where Schiller was once a director, and where some of his best plays were brought out. Miller wrote me about this little play of mine as follows:
My libretto and the music had pleased Minnie Hauk, the singer, and she herself thought of using it, but the objection to the Wagner kind of music came up. Her husband, Count Wartegg, wrote me from Paris: “The libretto is very interesting, so original, and so well written that its success is assured.” Minnie Hauk.?--?Page 107. Minnie Hauk was just now at the height of her fame. In Scotland and England she was very popular. At Edinburg the college students one night, at the close of the opera, unhitched the horses from her carriage and pulled her to the hotel themselves. I knew her quite well in Switzerland. In fact, her secret marriage with Count Wartegg had taken place in my office, and I had been a part of the little adventure. She was a wife for years before the public found it out. Her husband had an historic old castle over in the mountains of the Tyrol. In the meantime I had prepared another little play, and Miss Kate Field had given them both to Genevieve Ward, who sent me this about them:
The second drama was not offered to the managers at all, and the two plays were laid away forever. While on the Rhine I also visited Speyer, “The City of Dead Kings.” In one crypt seven German monarchs lie side by side. Next to Westminster Abbey in London, and the Capuchin Church in Vienna, no one spot can show so much royal dust, and nowhere on earth can one feel so much the fleeting littleness of man as in these three places. ***** I had spent much time in preparing my book, called “Switzerland and the Swiss.” Now when I asked permission of our State Department to print it they promptly telegraphed me a refusal. A Consul, not long before, had published a book on Turkey that was not liked by some of the satraps of the Sultan. So a veto was put on all books by Consuls. My book was then printed anonymously, but received most favorable comment. “Whoever the author is,” said the “Zurcher Zeitung,” the principal Swiss journal, “he has shown more thorough knowledge of the Swiss people than The London papers have much to say now about the mixed condition of party affairs in America. Yesterday I had a letter from General Sherman bearing on the same subject. It also tells me he is writing a history of his life. It also gives his views of negroes voting.
After a while the book appeared, and again the General wrote about it.
January, 1875.?--?I went to London to see about my play. Stopped at 10 Duchess Street. General Schenck was our Minister then, and he and Colonel John W. Forney gave me letters to theatrical people. Mr. Geo. W. Smalley was also polite to me. It was a nice American dinner-party I participated in at Mr. Smalley’s home, and while there was a little air of stiffness in the white-gloved, side-whiskered waiters, it was a hospitable, jolly occasion. Among the guests were Kate Field, Col. Forney, Secretary McCullough, and some English literary people. Kate Field was wide awake, and she, and Col. Forney, one of the best talkers and best informed men I ever knew, kept things lively till midnight. Col. Forney was one of the handsomest men I ever met, and was loyally faithful to friends. One of my letters was to Dion Boucicault, the actor, In this Winter of 1874–5 he was the most popular actor in London, and Joe Jefferson was playing there too, as was Henry Irving. At Drury Lane theater, there was nothing but standing room, day or night, when Boucicault was on the boards. His wife was playing with him. Several times I stood up among a crowd of Londoners whose hands were too pressed in to clap, but they made it up in crying or laughing. It was melodrama in perfection. All the immense crowd felt themselves actual participants in the play. What a bag full of money the English-American must have lugged home this winter. One evening a note came for me to call on him at his house, at 9 o’clock next morning. It was foggy and almost dark on the streets when I rang the door bell. I was shown into a drawing room dimly lighted, where, sitting in the half dark, by a low open fire, was a man I could have taken for William Shakespeare. The lofty brow, the intellectual face, the partly bald head, looked like no other. He did not see me as I entered, nor did he turn around, but went on looking into the fireplace. I looked at him a moment sitting there, and then said good morning. “Ah,” he said, looking up as calmly as if his whole attitude had been affected. “Good morning, take a seat. I read your play, it is melodrama, it is no account; that is, as it stands, you know. You had best hire a good stage man to go over it for you. You haven’t studied the stage, that’s clear, and that is what is the matter of our countrymen, Mr. ---- He talked much of himself, and related some of his methods of making plays play. But the real secret, he could not translate for me further than to say, “The way to write a play, is to write a play.” I could not help thinking, as I sat there listening to the voice by the firelight, of the time when Boucicault had to sell a play for from $200 to $300, and of that later time when a play with his name to it brought him almost $50,000. I took his advice as to my melodrama and had a playwright go through it with pencil and shears. When I got home to Zurich a telegram asked that I forward the music at once. A London theater had accepted my play. Shortly the theatrical hard times set in; my theater closed doors, and that was the last of “Pocahontas,” a melodrama. Thomas’ orchestra took some of the music later, and played it with success at the Philadelphia Centennial. One morning when in London, I was invited to breakfast with Minnie Walton, the actress. She was at the “Hay-market,” playing with Byron, I think. She was noted then as the most beautiful actress in London. At the appointed hour I was at her house, but she was still in bed. I entertained myself in the drawing room for half an hour with her two pretty children. Then she herself came in, and I certainly saw a brilliantly beautiful woman. Her features were smooth and perfect, her complexion very fair, and her manners most captivating. She wore a white morning dress with network bodice that outlined a form as beautiful as her face. She had no wonderful reputation as an actress, but her beauty attracted many Londoners to the theater. Everywhere in the shop windows, one saw pictures of “The pretty Minnie Walton.” She had a power in London, all November, 1875.?--?Upon my return from London, we went back into town for the winter. House rent has doubled here in four years. We now pay 2,500 francs for a centrally located apartment of seven rooms. Everything has grown dearer. The pension where we used to live for four francs a day now charges seven and eight and nine francs. Zurich too is becoming a fine, modern, commercial city. The railway station is almost the finest in the world, and big, granite business blocks are building, that would do credit to New York or London. Where the city moat and a graveyard used to be, is now one of the finest short streets in Europe. Almost the only house on this street, left of the olden time, is the “Ringmauer,” the home of our friend, Prof. Fick. Its front is an absolute wall of ivy, from the pavement to the gables. The whole front wall of the house is a part of the ancient city wall itself, built possibly by the Romans. The rooms are low, and the windows used to be ironed like a prison. Near by, still stands one of the old wall towers. Inside this ivy-covered old domicile, we have spent many happy hours. Many a time, over the walnuts and the wine, with the genial Professor and his family, we have sat far into the night and conjured up the people who were wining and dining here in this same room, may be a thousand years ago. Fick, a brother-in-law of Frankland, the English scientist, was a distinguished law professor in the University. He originated the Swiss railroad law, and knew more of American affairs than any German I met abroad. In late years, he suffered horribly with rheumatism, and he had a queer habit, when severe attacks came on, of sitting down and comparing the severity of each attack with one in some previous month. He kept his watch lying open Spite of my sympathy for his suffering, I could at times hardly refrain from smiling, on hearing him exclaim: “Ah! that was a whacker, that catch was?--?must write that down. Let me see?--?lasted two minutes, pulse 80; this day, last year, minute and a half, pulse 100.” So for an hour he would sit, his feet wrapped in flannel, and his mind occupied in measuring and timing his pains. “What do you do that for, Professor?” I asked him once. “My God!” he replied, “it helps busy my mind. I would die without this watch and diary.” In the afternoon the attack would cease, and in the evening the students would see the loved Professor delivering his lecture as smilingly as if he had never had a pain in his life. December, 1875.?--?Through Fick, Kinkel, Scherr and others of our friends among the University professors, we had free entrÉe to lectures when we pleased; could come or go. Scherr’s on France, and Kinkel’s on art, we heard throughout, as also Henne’s on Swiss history. There were numbers of American students too in the Polytechnic and University, so that our relations with teachers and taught were very friendly. The American students were always at our home on all American holidays, when the Consulate and our apartment were opened up together and decorated with our national colors. Speeches were made, toasts drunk, and a general good American time had. We ourselves greatly enjoyed these reunions on a foreign soil, and the students and American residents gave many proofs that they enjoyed them too. I recall how just before one Christmas, Mrs. Kelley, wife of Congressman Kelley, of Philadelphia, who was then living in Zurich, asked me to go with her to help select a picture for an American friend. I felt honored that she What was my surprise, on Christmas evening, to see her head the American party to our house, with this picture and a speech to the Consul. The treasured gift hangs in my Iowa home, but the kind words of that Christmas evening are stored away in the depths of our hearts. It was the sign, not the gift itself, that gratified us most. Most of us mortals are so constituted that to have the esteem of our fellow beings gives us a most comfortable feeling here, anyway, whatever it may do for us hereafter. December 7.?--?Last night Prof. Kinkel invited me to attend a Students’ Commers or festival. There must have been a thousand students present in the big skating rink. They sat at long tables; the corps students in high boots, and wearing their corps caps, badges and ribbons. In front of every one stood a mighty schooner of beer. All smoked, and the narcotic cloud was so dense I could scarcely see to the stage. There were decorations everywhere, and a band of music in the gallery. There were sentinels outside at the door, and whenever a particularly popular professor was about to enter, signals were waved along the tables and to the band. Then, as he walked blushing through the aisles to the stage, pandemonium itself was let loose in the way of clanging glasses, band playing, pounding tables, hurrahing and singing, until the conquering hero was seated on the platform. It was a great time for the professors. Lunge, the chemist; Kinkel, the poet; Hermann, the physiologist; Scherr, the historian; Meyer, the chemist; Klebs, the bacteriologist, and other men with names that sound all over Europe, were literally carried to the stage on the wings of noise, smoke, music and lager beer. These great Zurich professors are the men whom Hepworth Dixon calls the “Dukes of the Republic.” They Students near me got away with a dozen and more schooners of Munich’s best. I don’t know where it went to, but they have been known to drink twenty glasses at a sitting. For myself, to keep up appearances I did away with three glasses and a half, and absorbed smoke enough, without touching a cigar, to give me the headache for a week. Here, as at the German Universities, the corps students fought duels. The most self-important young man in the city is the one with the little red corps cap, the big top boots, the ribbon across his breast, and the fresh patch of muslin on his nose, showing a recent engagement. If the duelist has attended still other universities, he will probably have a half a dozen welts and scars across his face. He may not know much about text-books, but these unseemly welts on the face are signs of great honor; and as the man of danger struts down the street with a big-mouthed bull-dog in tow, he is a spectacle to behold. His greatest happiness in life is to have some passer-by turn and gaze on him. And this was what Bismarck was doing at twenty; this, and shooting off pistols in his bedroom! These University warriors are not so dangerous as their slit-up noses indicate. I have known of fifty duels in the past few years and not a soul, save one, was badly hurt. He did get really killed. The offenses for which the students bleed and die are all petty, fanciful, and even provoked. Sometimes corps members are simply compelled by their different societies to go out and seek a fight and try their mettle. Ill feeling or enmity, I have noticed, has not of necessity anything to do with student dueling. ***** November 20.?--?Had this from General Sherman:
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