General Tom Thumb and Mrs. Tom Thumb had one child, who died of inflammation of the brain two and a half years after her birth. The General and his wife, together with the other dwarfs, visited Queen Victoria, Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie, Pius IX, Victor Emmanuel and William I, of Germany. When they toured England in 1865, the tax assessors estimated the receipts at between ten and twenty thousand pounds a year. In 1872 they made a tour of the world with Commodore Nutt and Minnie Warren, visiting Australia, China and Japan, as well as the principal European countries. When they arrived in Japan, General Tom Thumb and Sylvester Bleecker, who managed the tour and wrote a book about it, visited one of the famous mixed bathing pools, where men and women bathe together without the formality of clothes. “Mr. Bleecker,” said General Tom Thumb, “if we tell this to the folks at home, they will not believe us; but it is _so_! Men and women bathing together with not a rag upon them, and they don’t mind it a bit! Write and let P. T. [Barnum] know what we have seen. If he had that place, just as it is--men, women and children, all in the United States, it would be the biggest show he ever had.” When he was young, according to Barnum, General Tom Thumb was miserly, and he spent no penny that could be avoided. In later life he spent thousands of dollars on yachts, horses and precious stones. Before leaving for Europe he asked Barnum to sell his sailing yacht and buy him a steam yacht for thirty or forty thousand dollars. In his letter he explained that when he was not using it, his crew could use it to tug vessels in and out of Bridgeport harbor, and thus pay their own wages and eventually the entire cost of the yacht. His tastes ran along conventional American lines: after he was eighteen years old the General smoked cigars regularly, and a few years later he became a third-degree Mason. General Tom Thumb’s dimensions made very little inward difference to his character. He was very much a man of the world as soon as he was old enough to think. It was his body that he sold to the public, and it was his body that he always comforted; it is doubtful if he had much of a soul. Between him and the Bridgeport business man there were no essential differences, if we disregard for the moment the all important difference in size. And it was this similarity to the normal business man, the seemingly incongruous fact that in spite of his size he thought and acted like any one else, that made his appeal as a curiosity so great. His dumpy, portly figure, straight wisps of beard, thin, irregular mustache, and sharp, stern eyes, give the impression of a wistful caricature of the American man of business. And when he died at the age of forty-five, on July 15, 1883, he was buried with the ritual of the Free and Accepted Masons.