Indeed, I can think of a dozen
now that did. I see before me, as though it were yesterday, the
desolate Wooster Street attic, with wind and rain sweeping through
the bare room in which lay dying a French nobleman of proud and
ancient name, the last of his house. He was one of my early triumphs.
New York is a queer town. The grist of every hopper in the world
comes to it. I shall not soon forget the gloomy tenement in Clinton
Street where that day a poor shoemaker had shot himself. His name,
Struensee, had brought me over. I knew there could not be such
another. That was where my Danish birth stood me in good stead. I
knew the story of Christian VII.'s masterful minister; of his fall
and trial on the charge of supplanting his master in the affections
of the young and beautiful Queen, sister of George III. Very old
men told yet, when I was a boy, of that dark day when the proud
head fell under the executioner's axe in the castle square--dark
for the people whose champion Struensee had tried to be. My mother
was born and reared in the castle at Elsinore where the unhappy
Queen, disgraced and an outcast, wrote on the window-pane of her
prison cell: "Lord, keep me innocent; make others great.
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