All parties were
mixed up and jumbled together in a sort of tidal slack-water. The
Government resembled Adams himself in the matter of education.
All that had gone before was useless, and some of it was worse.
CHAPTER XVII
PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)
THE first effect of this leap into the unknown was a fit of low
spirits new to the young man's education; due in part to the
overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn, almost
unendurable for its strain on one who had toned his life down to
the November grays and browns of northern Europe. Life could not
go on so beautiful and so sad. Luckily, no one else felt it or
knew it. He bore it as well as he could, and when he picked
himself up, winter had come, and he was settled in bachelor's
quarters, as modest as those of a clerk in the Departments, far
out on G Street, towards Georgetown, where an old Finn named
Dohna, who had come out with the Russian Minister Stoeckel long
before, had bought or built a new house. Congress had met. Two or
three months remained to the old administration, but all interest
centred in the new one. The town began to swarm with
office-seekers, among whom a young writer was lost. He drifted
among them, unnoticed, glad to learn his work under cover of the
confusion. He never aspired to become a regular reporter; he knew
he should fail in trying a career so ambitious and energetic; but
he picked up friends on the press -- Nordhoff, Murat Halstead,
Henry Watterson, Sam Bowles -- all reformers, and all mixed and
jumbled together in a tidal wave of expectation, waiting for
General Grant to give orders.
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