My grandfather, however, did not go with his regiment to the West. He had been transferred to the Commissary Department, and he remained with the Army of the Potomac until the close of the war, and it was on some detail connected with his duties in that department that, in 1865, he went into Washington and had the interview with President Lincoln I so much liked to hear him tell about. It was not in the course of his military duty that he went to see the Commander-in-Chief; whatever those duties were they were quickly discharged at the War Department, so that, in the hours of freedom remaining to him before he went back to the front, he did what everyone likes to do in Washington,—he went to see the President. But he went in no military capacity; he went rather in that political capacity he so much preferred to the military, and he went as to the chief he had so long known and loved and followed.
It would be his old friend Chase who presented him to the President, but their conversation was soon interrupted by the entrance of an aide who announced the arrival in the White House grounds of an Indiana regiment passing through Washington, which, as seems to have been the case with most regiments passing through the Capital, demanded a speech from the President. And Lincoln complied, and as he arose to go out he asked my grandfather to accompany him, and they continued their talk on the way. But when they stood in the White House portico, and the regiment beheld the President and saluted him with its lifted cheer, the aide stepped to my grandfather’s side, and much to his chagrin—for he had been held by the President while he finished a story—told him that it would be necessary for him to drop a few paces to the rear. It was a little contretemps that embarrassed my grandfather, but Lincoln, with his fine and delicate perceptions, divined the whole situation, and met it with that kindness which was so great a part of the humor and humanness in him, by saying:
“You see, Mr. Brand, they might not know which was the President.”
It was not long after that he was at Appomattox and the first to issue rations to the hungry Confederates who had just surrendered, and no act of his life gave him quite as much satisfaction as to have been the first to pour his whole supply of hardtack into the blankets of those whom still and always he remembered as of his own blood. And that done, after they had ridden into Richmond, he was relieved and was soon back in Washington calling on Chase again. Chase asked him what he could do for him, and my grandfather said there was but one thing in the world he wanted: namely, to go home; and a request so simple was granted with that alacrity with which politicians grant requests that, in their scope, fall so short of what might have been expected. But it was not long until Chase’s influence was requested in a more substantial matter, and in 1870 my grandfather, with his wife and two younger daughters, was on his way across the Atlantic to Nuremberg, where President Grant had appointed him consul.
It was not, of course, until after his return from the foreign experience that my conscious acquaintance with him began. But when they returned and opened the old house, and filled it with the spoil of their European travel,—some wonderful mahogany furniture and Dresden china, and other objects of far more delight to us children,—he and I began a friendship which lasted until his death, and was marred by no misunderstanding, except, perhaps, as to the number of hours his saddle-horse should be ridden on the gallop, and the German he wished me to read to him out of the little black-bound volumes of Schiller and Goethe, which for years were his companions. He held, no doubt with some show of reason on his side, that if he could master the language after he was sixty, I might learn at least to read it before I was sixteen. The task had its discouragements, not lightened, even in after years, when I read in their famous and delightful correspondence Carlyle’s advice to Emerson to possess himself of the German language; it could be done, wrote Carlyle, in six weeks! But, like Emerson, I was afflicted with the postponement and debility of the blond constitution, and I observed that, except in great moments of unappreciated sacrifice, my grandfather preferred to read his German himself rather than to listen to my renditions.
I have spoken of the house as the old house, and I do that as viewing it from the point of disadvantage of the years that have gone since it grew out of that haze and mist and darkness of early recollections into a place that was ablaze with light at evening and full of the constant wonder and delight of the company of a large family. It was, indeed, an old house then, with a high-gabled roof at one wing, that made an attic which we called, with a sense of its mystery, the “dark room,”—a room, however, not so dark that I could not see to read the old bound volumes of a newspaper an uncle had once edited;—one could lie under the little gable windows and pore over the immense quartos, or more than quartos, and exercise the imagination by reading of some long dead event, and, with a great effort, project one’s self back to that time, and pretend to read with none other than its contemporary impressions.
The cellar of the house was not so interesting, though it was mysterious, and far more terrifying. There was a vast fireplace in the cellar, in which, as Jane, the old colored woman who was sometimes a cook and sometimes a nurse, once solemnly told my cousin and me, the devil dwelt, so that I visited it only once, and there so plainly saw the ugly horns of that dark deity that we fled upstairs and into the sunlight again. It may have been that the crane and the andirons of the old fireplace helped out the impression, though after the original suggestion little was required to strengthen it, and we never went down there again, except to lure a younger cousin as far as the door to shudder in the awful pleasure of witnessing her fear.
This gabled wing had been the original house, and additions had been built to it in two directions, with a wide hall, somewhat after the southern fashion in which so many houses in that part of Ohio were built in those days.
It seems larger in the retrospect than it is in the reality, and I am not endowing it with the spaciousness of a mansion; it was, in fact, a modest dwelling of a dozen rooms, with an atmosphere that was imparted to it by the furniture that had been brought back from Europe, and the personality that filled it.
My grandfather conducted his establishment on a scale of prodigality that had a certain patriarchal air; he had a large family, and he loved to have them all about him, and in the evenings they gathered there at the piano they had bought in Berlin, and when the candles in their curious brass sconces had been lighted, there was music, for the whole family possessed some of that talent which, as President Eliot rightly declares in his lecture on “The Happy Life,” contributes so much real pleasure. My grandfather did not himself sing; or, at least, he sang rarely, and then only one or two Scotch songs, but when he could be induced to do this, the event took on the festal air of a celebration.
His two younger daughters had been educated in music in Germany, and there was something more of music in the house than the mere classic portraits of Mozart and Beethoven which hung on the wall near the painting of the old castle at Nuremberg. They played duets, and once, at least, at a recital given in the town, we achieved the distinction of a number played on two pianos by my mother and her three sisters.
The May festivals in “the City,” as we called Cincinnati in those days, were a part of existence, and my first excursion into the larger world was when my father took me to Cincinnati to hear Theodore Thomas’s Orchestra, which proved to be an excursion not only into a larger world, but eventually into a larger life,—that life of music, that life of a love of all the arts, which provides a consolation that would be complete could I but express myself in any one of them. I did, indeed, attempt some expression of the joys of that experience, for with more pretension than I could dare to-day, I wrote a composition, or paper, on Music which was printed in a child’s publication, and won for me a little prize. It was twenty-two years before I was able again to have any writing of mine accepted and published by a magazine.