One's
fortunes, or one's friends' fortunes, were again in flood.
This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found one's self
the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with family
jars better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown. No
wrinkled Tannhauser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a wrinkled
Venus to show him that he was no longer at home, and that even
penitence was a sort of impertinence. He slipped away to Paris,
and set up a household at St. Germain where he taught and learned
French history for nieces who swarmed under the venerable cedars
of the Pavillon d'Angouleme, and rode about the green
forest-alleys of St. Germain and Marly. From time to time Hay
wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred to break the
summer-peace of the stranded Tannhauser, who slowly began to feel
at home in France as in other countries he had thought more
homelike. At length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris
because he could go nowhere else, and lingered there till the
Hays came by, in January, 1898; and Mrs. Hay, who had been a
stanch and strong ally for twenty years, bade him go with them to
Egypt.
Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see
Hay, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw and
what they said had as little to do with education as possible,
until one evening, as they were looking at the sun set across the
Nile from Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to
announce the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor.
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