During the long, dark night of Lafayette's imprisonment he had dreamed of America as the land of dawn and hope, and planned to make a new home there, but when release came this had not seemed best. Madame Lafayette's health had been too frail, and La Grange, with its neglected acres, was too obviously awaiting a master. "Besides, we lack the first dollar to buy a farm. That, in addition to many other considerations, should prevent your tormenting yourself about it," he told Adrienne. One of these considerations was the beloved old aunt at Chavaniac, who lived to the age of ninety-two and never ceased to be the object of his special care. Also his young people, with their marriages and budding families, were too dear to permit him willingly to put three thousand miles of ocean between them and himself.

But he had never lost touch with his adopted country. At the time he declined Napoleon's offer to make him minister to the United States he wrote a correspondent that he had by no means given up the hope of visiting it again as a private citizen; though, he added, humorously, he fancied that if he landed in America in anything except a military uniform he would feel as embarrassed and as much out of place as a savage in knee-breeches. After Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States, foreseeing he could not profitably keep it, Jefferson sounded Lafayette about coming to be governor of the newly acquired territory. That offer, too, he had seen fit to refuse; but his friends called him "the American enthusiast."

Time went by until almost fifty years had passed since the "Bostonians" took their stand against the British king. To celebrate the semi-centennial, America decided to raise a monument to the heroes of Bunker Hill. Lafayette was asked to lay the corner-stone at the ceremonies which were to take place on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle. It became the pleasant duty of President James Monroe, who had served as a subaltern in the battle where Lafayette received his American wound, to send him the official invitation of Congress and to place a government frigate at his disposal for the trip. A turn of French elections in 1824 had left him temporarily "a statesman out of a job," without even the duty of representing his district in the Chamber of Deputies. There was really no reason why he should not accept and every reason why he might at last gratify his desire to see America and American friends again.

He sailed on July 12, 1824, not, however, upon the United States frigate, but on the Cadmus, a regular packet-boat, preferring, he said, to come as a private individual. His son accompanied him, as did Col. A. Lavasseur, who acted as his secretary. These, with his faithful valet, Bastien, made up his entire retinue, though he might easily have had a regiment of followers, so many were the applications of enthusiastic young men who seemed to look upon this as some new sort of military expedition. On the Cadmus he asked fellow-travelers about American hotels and the cost of travel by stage and steamboat, and M. Lavasseur made careful note of the answers. He had no idea of the reception that awaited him. When the Cadmus sailed into New York harbor and he saw every boat gay with bunting and realized that every man, woman, and child to whom coming was possible had come out to meet him, he was completely overcome. "It will burst!" he cried, pressing his hands to his heart, while tears rolled down his cheeks.

Whether he wished or no, he found himself the nation's guest. The country not only stopped its work and its play to give him greeting; it stopped its politics—and beyond that Americans cannot go. It was a campaign summer, but men forgot for a time whether they were for Adams or Crawford, Clay or Jackson. Election Day was three months off, politics could wait; but nobody could wait to see this man who had come to them out of the past from the days of the Revolution, whose memory was their country's most glorious heritage. They gave him salutes and dinners and receptions. They elected him to all manner of societies. Mills and factories closed and the employees surged forth to shout themselves hoarse as they jostled mayors and judges in the welcome. Dignified professors found themselves battling in a crowd of their own students to get near his carriage. Our whole hard-headed, practical nation burst into what it fondly believed to be poetry in honor of his coming. Even the inmates of New York's Debtors' Prison sent forth such an effusion of many stanzas. If these were not real poems, the authors never suspected it. There was truth in them, at any rate. "Again the hero comes to tread the sacred soil for which he bled" was the theme upon which they endlessly embroidered. Occasionally the law sidestepped in his honor. A deputy sheriff in New England pinned upon his door this remarkable "Notice. Arrests in civil suits postponed to-day, sacred to Freedom and Freedom's Friend."

Lafayette arrived in August and remained until September of the following year, and during that time managed, to tread an astonishing amount of our sacred soil, considering that he came before the day of railroads. The country he had helped to create had tripled in population, and, instead of being merely a narrow strip along the Atlantic, now stretched westward a thousand miles. He visited all the states and all the principal towns. It was not only in towns that he was welcomed. At the loneliest crossroads a musket-shot or a bugle-call brought people magically together. The sick were carried out on mattresses and wrung his hand and thanked God. Babies were named for him. One bore through life the whole name Welcome Lafayette. Miles of babies already named were held up for him to see—and perhaps to kiss. Old soldiers stretched out hands almost as feeble as those of babies in efforts to detain him and fight their battles o'er. With these he was very tender. Small boys drew "Lafayette fish" out of the brooks on summer days, and when he came to their neighborhood ran untold distances to get sight of him. Often he helped them to points of vantage from which they could see something more than forests of grown-up backs and legs during the ceremonies which took place before court-houses and state-houses. Here little girls, very much washed and curled, presented him with useless bouquets and lisped those artless odes of welcome. Sometimes they tried to crown him with laurel, a calamity he averted with a deft hand. Back of the little girls usually stood a phalanx of larger maidens in white, carrying banners, who were supposed to represent the states of the Union; and back of the maidens was sometimes a wonderful triumphal arch built of scantling and covered with painted muslin, the first achievement of its kind in local history.

The country was really deeply moved by Lafayette's visit. It meant to honor him to the full, but it saw no reason to hide the fact that it had done something for him as well. "The Nation's Guest. France gave him birth; America gave him Immortality," was a statement that kept everybody, nations and individuals alike, in their proper places. In short, the welcome America gave Lafayette was hearty and sincere. Whether it appeared as brilliant to the guest of honor, accustomed from youth to pageants at Versailles, as it did to his hosts we may doubt. It was occasionally hard for M. Lavasseur to appear impressed and not frankly astonished at the things he saw. Lafayette enjoyed it all thoroughly. The difficult rÔle fell to his son George, who had neither the interest of novelty nor of personal triumph to sustain him. He already knew American ways, and it was equally impossible for him to join in the ovation or to acknowledge greetings not meant for himself. He made himself useful by taking possession of the countless invitations showered upon his father and arranging an itinerary to embrace as many of them as possible.

MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE IN 1824
From a painting by William Birch

MADAME DE LAFAYETTE
After a miniature in the possession of the family

To those who have been wont to think of this American triumphal progress of Lafayette's as steady and slow, stopping only for demonstrations of welcome and rarely if ever doubling on its tracks, it is a relief to learn that Lafayette did occasionally rest. He made Washington, the capital of the country, his headquarters, and set out from there on longer or shorter journeys. The town had not existed, indeed had scarcely been dreamed of, for a decade after his first visit. What he thought of the straggling place, with its muddy, stump-infested avenues, we shall never know. He had abundant imagination—which was one reason the town existed; for without imagination he would never have crossed the ocean to fight for American liberty. Among the people he saw about him in Washington during the official ceremonies were many old friends and many younger faces mysteriously like them. To that striking sentence in Henry Clay's address of welcome in the House of Representatives, "General, you find yourself here in the midst of posterity," he could answer, with truth and gallantry, "No, Mr. Speaker, posterity has not yet begun for me, for I find in these sons of my old friends the same political ideals and, I may add, the same warm sentiments toward myself that I have already had the happiness to enjoy in their fathers."

His great friend Washington had gone to his rest; but there were memories of Washington at every turn. He made a visit to Mount Vernon and spent a long hour at his friend's tomb. He entered Yorktown following Washington's old campaign tent, a relic which was carried ahead of the Lafayette processions in that part of the country, in a spirit almost as reverent as that the Hebrews felt toward the Ark of the Covenant. At Yorktown the ceremonies were held near the Rock Redoubt which Lafayette's command had so gallantly taken. Zachary Taylor, who was to gain fame as a general himself and to be President of the United States, presented a laurel wreath, which Lafayette turned from a compliment to himself to a tribute to his men. "You know, sir," he said, "that in this business of storming redoubts with unloaded arms and fixed bayonets, the merit of the deed lies in the soldiers who execute it," and he accepted the crown "in the name of the light infantry—those we have lost as well as those who survive."

Farther south, at Camden, he laid the corner-stone of a monument to his friend De Kalb; and at Savannah performed the same labor of love for one erected in honor of Nathanael Greene and of Pulaski. At Charleston, also, he met Achille Marat, come from his home in Florida to talk with Lafayette about his father, who met his death at the hands of Charlotte Corday during the French Revolution. There were many meetings in America to remind him of his life abroad. Francis Huger joined him for a large part of his journey; he saw Dubois Martin, now a jaunty old gentleman of eighty-three. It was he who had bought La Victoire for Lafayette's runaway journey. In New Jersey he dined with Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, who was living there quietly with his daughter and son-in-law.

Both on the Western frontier and at the nation's capital he met Indian chiefs with garments more brilliant and manners quite as dignified as kings ever possessed. In a time of freshet in the West he became the guest of an Indian named Big Warrior and spent the night in his savage home. On another night he came near accepting unwillingly the hospitality of the Ohio River, for the steamboat upon which he was traveling caught fire, after the manner of river boats of that era, and "burned a hole in the night" and disappeared. He lost many of his belongings in consequence, including his hat, but not his serenity or even a fraction of his health, though the accident occurred in the pouring rain.

Everywhere, particularly in the West, he came to towns and counties bearing his own name. In the East he revisited with his son spots made memorable in the Revolution. On the Hudson he rose early to point out to George the place where AndrÉ had been taken and the house to which he and Washington had come so soon after Arnold's precipitate flight. At West Point he reviewed the cadets, slim and straight and young, while General Scott and General Brown, both tall, handsome men, looking very smart indeed in their plumes and dress uniforms, stood beside their visitor, who was almost as tall and military in his bearing and quite as noticeable for the neatness and plainness of his civilian dress.

Lafayette was broader of shoulder and distinctly heavier than he had been forty years before. Even in his youth he had not been handsome, though he possessed for Americans the magnetism his son so sadly lacked. His once fair complexion had turned brown and his once reddish hair had turned gray, but that was a secret concealed under a chestnut wig. He carried a cane and walked with a slight limp, which Americans attributed enthusiastically to his wound in their service, but which was really caused by that fall upon the ice in 1803. Despite his checkered fortunes his sixty-eight years had passed lightly over his head. Perhaps he did not altogether relish being addressed as Venerable Sir by mayors and town officials, any more than he liked to have laurel wreaths pulling his wig awry, but he knew that both were meant in exquisite politeness.

And, true Frenchman that he was, he never allowed himself to be outdone in politeness. Everywhere incidents occurred, trivial enough, but very charming in spirit, that have been treasured in memory and handed down to this day. In New London two rival congregations besought him to come to their churches and listen to their pastors. He pleased them both. He led blind old ladies gallantly through the minuet. He held tiny girls in his arms and, kissing them, said they reminded him of his own little Virginia. He chatted delightfully with young men who accompanied him as governors' aides in turn through the different states; and if he extracted local information from these talks to use it again slyly, with telling effect, in reply to the very next address of welcome, that was a joke between themselves which they enjoyed hugely. "He spoke the English language well, but slower than a native American," one of these young aides tells us. He was seldom at a loss for a graceful speech, though this was a gift that came to him late in life. And his memory for faces seldom played him false. When William Magaw, who had been surgeon of the old First Pennsylvania, visited him and challenged him for recognition, Lafayette replied that he did not remember his name, but that he knew very well what he had done for him—he had dressed his wound after the battle of the Brandywine!

The processions and celebrations in Lafayette's honor culminated in the ceremony for which he had crossed the Atlantic, the laying of the corner-stone at Bunker Hill. Pious people had said hopefully that the Lord could not let it rain on such a day; and their faith was justified, for the weather was perfect. We are told that on the 17th of June "everything that had wheels and everything that had legs" moved in the direction of the monument. Accounts tell of endless organizations and of "miles of spectators," until there seemed to be not room for another person to sit or stand. The same chaplain who had lifted up his young voice in prayer in the darkness on Cambridge Common before the men marched off to battle was there in the sunlight to raise his old hands in blessing. Daniel Webster, who had not been born when the battle was fought, was there to make the oration. He could move his hearers as no other American has been able to do, playing upon their emotions as upon an instrument, and never was his skill greater than upon that day. He set the key of feeling in the words, "Venerable men," addressed to the forty survivors of the battle, a gray-haired group, sitting together in the afternoon light. Lafayette had met this little company in a quiet room before the ceremonies began and had greeted each as if he were in truth a personal friend. After his part in the ceremony was over he elected to sit with them instead of in the place prepared for him. "I belong there," he said, and there he sat, his chestnut wig shining in the gray company.

While Webster's eloquence worked its spell, and pride and joy and pain even to the point of tears swept over the thousands of upturned faces as cloud shadows sweep across a meadow, Lafayette must have remembered another scene, a still greater assembly, even more tense with feeling, in which he had been a central figure: that fÊte of the Federation on the Champs de Mars. Surely no other man in history has been allowed to feel himself so intimately a part of two nations in their moments of patriotic exaltation.