At another time I managed to take him as far as City Hall; it was some holiday, and the papers had announced that President Hayes and his secretary of state, William Evarts, would be at City Hall at noon, and they were there. Bilharz and I stood in a huge crowd, but we had a good view of the President and of his secretary of state, and we heard every word of their short speeches. They were dressed just like everybody else, but their remarkable physiognomies and their scholarly words convinced me that they belonged to the exalted position into which the vote of the people had placed them. The New York Sun was a bitter opponent of President Hayes and published his picture on the editorial page of every one of its issues. In this picture the letters spelling “fraud” were represented as branded across the expansive brow of the President. But as I looked at him standing in front of City Hall and beheld the light which was reflected from his smooth and honest brow I knew that the New York Sun was wrong, and I vowed never to read it again until that picture disappeared from its editorial pages. Bilharz did not understand my admiration of the scene which we had witnessed: the democratic simplicity of the highest officials in the great United States and the very informal reception given to them in the great metropolis, New York, was all due, according to him, to a lack of artistic taste on the part of vulgar democracy. I thought of the multicolored uniforms loaded with shining decorations, of the plumed hats and long sabres, and of the numerous glaring flags with imperial eagles displayed on such occasions in the Austrian Empire, and I told Bilharz that if that monkey business was all due to a profusion of artistic taste, then give me the simplicity of vulgar democracy. Bilharz shrugged his shoulders and pitied me, and I pitied him for having to pass, as he assured me often, the rest of his days in this--to him--the most uninteresting part of the valley of tears, das Thraenenthal, as he called this terrestrial globe. Such were the many differences of mental attitude which widened the gap between Bilharz and myself. He clung to the notions which were handed down to the Old World from generations long departed; I, following Jim’s suggestion, was trying to pick up wherever I could new ideas in the New World. Much learning hath made him mad, thought I, whenever I analyzed the strange ideas which Bilharz had of the United States of America. I came to the conclusion that his term of apprenticeship as greenhorn would never end. It is a national calamity that the vast majority of our immigrants never see the end of their apprenticeship as greenhorns.